Our Longevity Diet

It has been several months since my last post here, but I’ve just been putting it off. Every time I look at my last post, about Isabel quitting the fast due to pregnancy, I just don’t feel much like talking about it. The sad facts are that she lost that pregnancy after only three months. Needless to say, we have been devastated by the loss. I won’t go into the cause of the problem, other than to say it is unrelated to diet.

The good news, for those of you interested in intermittent fasting, is that when she got back into the fasting - feasting schedule, she effortlessly lost the weight she had gained during the interim. In fact, she is now steadily weighing in around 60 kilos, while I’m down to 93.

This pattern of daily eating-fasting-eating-fasting has become so second nature to us that we rarely think about it. It has no effect on our activity intensity or scheduling. Rainy season has just ended here, and we have been spending an hour each evening, after the heat of day wanes, pulling weeds from the back yard. The ground is so hard when dry that it is impossible to get the weeds out, so we have to water a section before we can weed it. Pulling those long roots out is still hard work, but we need the exercise. It makes no difference to us if it a fasting evening or had been a fasting morning.

Likewise, the cool hours of morning are devoted to cleaning, raking and other physical activity that we do not want to do during the heat of day. But it makes no difference if we are working on full stomachs or empty — our energy level is constant, and higher than it was before starting on this fasting schedule.

So for those of you have been wondering, yes we are alive and well, and continue to follow our fasting lifestyle with wonderful results. We are approaching 20 months on this intermittent fasting schedule now, and see no reason to change anything. It is easy. We feel healthier. We lost weight, and more importantly, are no longer creeping upward on the scale, as we had in earlier years.

I’ll try to post more frequently now that we’ve gotten through all that.

Although I only posted about our switch to the classic version of the Fast-5 diet yesterday, we have been on that schedule since Tuesday, so this is our fourth day, and we just can’t hack it. Isabel and discussed it, and this diet just leaves us too weak — we can’t do our work, or follow our normal exercise routine.

I don’t think it is the diet itself that is so hard, but the timing in the usual version is terrible. You go to bed before you are really hungry, and then have all day of the hard part of the fast during waking hours. So as of today we are moving our eating window forward several hours. From now onward, as long as we are following a 19/5 type fast, the eating time will be from 2:00 PM to 7:00 PM. This accomplishes two things — first, it allows us to eat at our accustomed time of 2:00 PM for our main meal of the day. Secondly, it moves the end of the fast, the hardest part, to just five hours in the morning and early afternoon. We go to sleep about 1:00 AM, so we only have six hours of fasting at that point, which means we won’t be too hungry and can get to sleep easily, but still have ‘used up’ a good portion of the total fasting time.

We will see how this adjustment goes. I don’t think it should make any difference to the weight-loss potential of this diet, though to be sure I would have liked to continue on the previous schedule for a full week — doing so would have ruined our weekend, and just isn’t worth it. For now we plan to continue with the 19/5 schedule for the rest of this week, and then one full week more — if we can — before we decide if we want to stay on 19/5 for a while or return to 23/25 that we undertook originally.

In either case, when we are satisfied with our weight we will probably go back to the 23/25 schedule, since I suspect the less frequent, but slightly longer fasts are probably more beneficial to health. In the next few posts I’ll review some more of the scientific research, and see what conclusions we can draw from that information.

Well, things did not exactly go as planned on our first long-distance trip while fasting. We didn’t get a lot of sleep the night before because we wanted to leave very early in the morning. Of course when we got to Chapala we had just missed the 7:00 AM bus, so we had to wait 45 minutes for the next one. From there it is an hour ride into Guadalajara, where the bus stops at what is known as the old bus station.

Most large Mexican cities have two bus stations, one for in-state travel, and one for inter-state. That is the case with Guadalajara. Of course they are located at as much distance from one another as possible, because having them side by side would be too convenient for travelers. From the old bus station we took a city bus to the (what else?) new bus station — another full hour, crawling across the city and stopping almost every block for passengers.

In the new bus station we only had to wait about half an hour for the next bus to Colima, which left at 10:30 AM. That bus takes half an hour just to cross Guadalajara, so about 11:00 AM we were leaving the city — we got up at 5:00 AM for an early start! The city of Colima is about four hours from Guadalajara by bus, but before we got there Isabel began to feel sick to her stomach. We were supposed to break our fast about the time we got to Colima, but by then she felt too ill to eat anything other than a small bread roll. I had a big sandwich and was feeling fine.

From the city of Colima we took another bus to Tecoman, almost an hour further toward the coast. There we got a hotel room and, since Isabel hadn’t eaten much of anything at Colima, we went to a restaurant for her to get a meal. I had some french fries and a beer while she ate a normal sized meal. I had hoped that would solve her stomach problem, but it wasn’t lack of food that was bothering her, as she continued to feel poorly that night and into the next day.

Our schedule called for resuming the fast the next day, but since we were going to our cottage in Cerro de Ortega that day, we had lots of work to do, and Isabel was still feeling ill. So we decided to abandon the fast for a day or two, until she felt better. We resumed our fasting schedule Sunday, when we made the trip back without stopping for food, and ate when we got home. Isabel was feeling fine again by then, and endured the same grueling trip in reverse without problem, so we assume she just had one of the short-term ‘bugs’ we all get from time to time. If she were at home and could rest, I would not consider that enough to stop the fast — indeed fasting might help cure the bug problem faster, but since we had lots of work (cleaning, moving furniture, we even planted a couple coconut palm trees) the combination of sickness and physical activity was too much to support on an empty stomach. I could have continued fasting, but it would be awkward since we were eating in restaurants. Also Isabel felt she would be ‘cheating’ if she ate when I fasted. In the end we only skipped one and one-half fast periods, but that (and the great seafood in Colima), was enough that I gained back half a kilo. Isabel continued to lose weight, since she was eating lightly because of her upset stomach.

The experience left Isabel with the opinion that fasting is just too difficult under the strain of travel. I suspect it would have been OK had she not gotten ill and if we were going for a restful vacation instead of working on refurbishing the cottage. It was more the combination of strains, rather than travel alone, that caused us to break the fast for a few days. I must admit that habit, too, plays a large part, as we are accustomed to ’splurging’ on our trips to Colima, where the shrimp cocktails, ceviche, and various other seafood dishes beckon us to the beach-front restaurants.