This is rather amazing. – to the point that I figure I should share it with you: I am now a pound lighter than I was when Elaine and I took off on our cruise 13-days ago.
The numbers? I put on 7-pounds during the cruise. No, I wasn’t particularly proud of it, but lately I have been eating on a regular diet of two meals a day, within 8-hours of each other because of a lot of research I’ve been reading on apple cider vinegar.
One upshot of the reading was to find out that modern dietary ideas – like multiple meals per day – are not really how humans grew up in the wild. Instead, people apparently used to walk around, looking for food, hunting and foraging, until they found something.
Then they ate to their hearts content….and moved on,
There’s a rhythm, apparently, to how this works.
When ancient ancestors had a meal, it often raised the blood sugar. The blood sugar converted to fat, the fat was stored. No mysteries to that.
But according to the data I’ve been reading (before going on the cruise), when the body is not given additional food (remember the wandering off part?) the first calories consumed were the easy-to-get-to sugars.
Once those were gobbled up, the stored fats were eaten next by the cells. And, at the tail end of that, the next to go were the heaviest of the fats – the kind that tend to accumulate around the belly in old men like you-know-who.
The idea comes into focus that eating kicks off this sequence of blood sugars increasing, fat storage, sugar burning, and finally fat burning. Which is why people have different “breath” throughout the day. Good breath mostly after eating but once the body moves into hard fat conversion, there’s likely some ketosis.
The part of ketosis that matters, when comes to eating habits, is this bit on the mechanics of ketosis from Wikipedia:
“During the usual overnight fast the body’s metabolism naturally switches into ketosis, and will switch back to glycolysis after a carbohydrate-rich meal. Longer-term ketosis may result from fasting or staying on a low-carbohydrate diet, and deliberately induced ketosis serves as a medical intervention for intractable epilepsy.[6] In glycolysis higher levels of insulin promote storage of body fat and block release of fat from adipose tissues, while in ketosis fat reserves are readily released and consumed.[5][7] For this reason ketosis is sometimes referred to as the body’s “fat burning” mode”
What I’ve gotten back into is waiting until Elaine gets up and cooks breakfast, instead of cooking my own.
Her schedule, and mine are offset a good bit: I’m up at 4 AM writing. She rolls out sometime between 7 AM and 8 AM…and gets hungry around 8:30 so that’s when food appears.
What this means is that instead of “breaking the fast” of overnight – which is where the word breakfast comes from – I’m adding about 4 1/2 hours to my fat burning time daily by eating when she gets up.
Then, I eat my second meal of the day by 4 PM, which means being up and about 3-4 hours after eating, which helps resolve lots of old-people problems like acid reflux.
But none of this should lose 9-pounds in less than a week.
What Else was Going On?
Therein lies the tale…
For some reason, part of my “home chemistry experiments with my body” had not yet gotten to the bottle of apple cider vinegar pills that were coming up on my personal testing. Now I’m into it.
Long-term readers will recall the idea here: Make up a notebook for yourself and then systematically go through what works well for you as you test every vitamin and supplement you can get your hands on. There is quite often something in the way of a supplement (or mineral) that when taken will change how you feel.
For example, when I want to learn at an accelerated rate, I will take Source Naturals Huperzine A, 200mcg, 120 Tablets. The effect of taking one of these bad boys is that within an hour, there’s a marked improvement in mental acuity.
Taken with a baby aspirin and a small something to eat, it is my “before flying” routine. Since flying an airplane is a somewhat complex task where you need to have all your faculties, I figure anything that can bump up short-term IQ a bit is worth doing. So a half cup of coffee, food with lots of protein, and a Huperzine A – plus a baby aspirin – I’m good to fly.
By the way, the baby aspirin is not to keep away pain or prevent heart attack. Although, sure, it may do these things. The real reason to take the aspirin is that it increases the body’s uptake of oxygen.
I can actually tell the difference on the treat mill, too, as well as mental acuity on long flights where we’re up at 7,500 feet, or higher. (We have oxygen, too, but don’t always carry it unless flight at 9,500 and higher is planned. Requirements roll in (going from poor memory, 12,500 feet) for supplemental oxygen, but another long discussion…not this morning.)
So there was this bottle of apple cider vinegar pills (similar to High Potency Apple Cider Vinegar 625 mg 180 Caps by Swanson Ultra) in my test queue and I began the four week trial period on those.
WOW!
I was shocked. 9-pounds gone! I doubt the rate of weight loss will continue as high, but to even lose 3-pounds a week would be phenomenal. Hell, a pound a week would be fine.
There were a number of dietary changes between the cruise ship weight and this morning’s.
On the cruise ship we ate three squares a day. Breakfast, lunch, and fabulous (bringing tears to your eyes and triglycerides or your cardiologist’s) dinners.
Restaurant food is generally much higher in sodium (salt), than we’re used to eating around here. We are using ,Morton – Lite Salt Mixture that contains half the sodium of regular salt, with the balance of saltiness coming from potassium chloride…and since potassium is good for body chemistry….
Shipboard we had alcohol before and with din-din. A cocktail (or two) and wine (or sake) with meals.
And I ate breakfasts.
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