TT Thursday – Weight Loss Challenge Week 14 and winning $151.40 using intermittent fasting to lose weight

TT Thursday – Weight Loss Challenge Week 14 and winning $151.40 using intermittent fasting to lose weight

Yay!  I won $151.40 on my 6% weight loss change.

I dropped from 252.1 pounds to 237 to win this challenge (I’m less now but that was that challenge goal).

Well, I did pay HealthyWage $20 for 3 months = $60 for the Slimming & Winning Jackpot Challenge.  You have a choice to be paid by check ($7 charge) or through Paypal. I chose Paypal who subtracted another $4.69 for their service netting me a total of $86.71 because I lost 6% of my weight (15.1 pounds) along with 216 participants who succeeded at 6%.  The weight and age among participants varied a lot.  Total participants was 452 paying a total of $20,610 into the pot. And yes, that means more than half did not make their goal weight.

How does HealthyWage make their money?  In the 6% challenges, they take 25% off the top of the pot with the caveat that if everyone loses 6%, everyone gets their money back. You are guaranteed your money back if you meet your goal.  So with 452 paying $60, the total paid in was $27,120 of which HealthyWage received $6,510.  The rest of the money was divided between the participants who met their 6% weight loss goal.  It didn’t matter if you lost more, all successful people had the same share in the pot.

Before you say it’s not fair they get 25%, ask yourself this when you pay the gym your monthly fee and you successfully meet your weight goal or your fitness goal, do you get paid?  Do you even get your money back?  Nope.

I’m not saying money should be your main motivator for losing weight, becoming fitter, becoming healthier, or eating healthier.  But honestly, it’s nice to get a little pat on my back for a job well done.  And not wanting to lose my $60 meant that when I looked at that chocolate bar in the store, I bought the cherry tomatoes instead.  They taste sweet too.

(BTW: all the HealthyWage links are affiliate links.  There are HW friend’s links on the bottom of the post.  I also explain the difference between affiliate and friend’s links down there.)

Didn’t I say I would win $768?

Yeah, That’s the big lose 65 pounds by December 4th HealthyWager weight loss challenge.  (Notice the r? That’s the name of the big challenge) I am betting $30 a month for 6 months I will lose 65 pounds.  If I win, I receive $765.  The 6% weight loss challenges are more like side bets and only last 3months.  They also have increase your steps by 25% challenges as well.   You can do up to a total of 10 bets.  So I’ve already started my second 6% challenge.

So where am I at that?  Well, we all know I plateaued when I went to California for vacation for two weeks.  The fact is plateaus are a normal part of losing weight and getting fit.  Muscles weigh more than fat.  I’m not converting a lot to muscle but I am getting fitter.  In California, I was in the mountains and I walked a lot.  I continue to walk by taking the bus which is half a mile from my house plus whatever distances walked to my destinations.

HealthyWage helps you by telling you where you would be at if you lost the same amount everyday.  You actually want to get ahead of that so that if you hit a  plateau near the finish line, it won’t kill your chances of taking home the loot.  When I got home from California, I was 8.1 pounds behind the curve.

I lost 3.1 pounds this week.  Yay!

I now weigh  221.7.  I’ve lost more than 30 pounds since I started at 252.1 so I almost halfway to the 65 pounds mark. I am still 5.3 pounds behind the curve but I am catching up.  Still I am happy anytime I lose more than one pound or two a week as that’s been my average generally.

After I had finished my first 6% challenge, I started a second one.  At this point, I’m almost done with it.  I expect next week to tell you I’ve met the goal of 219.7pounds even though I can’t weigh in until October 26th.

So I’ve gone on and on about myself and my weight loss.  Sorry about that.  I’m just so puffed I won something.  Does a happy dance!

Okay,  gets serious.  Now what let’s look for some info to help you on your own journey whether it’s eating healthier or getting fit.

Intermittent Fasting

How did I lose 30 pounds?  Well for one thing, I started engaging in a popular trend these days : Intermittent Fasting.  I also cut carbs, sugar, salt and fats (my favorite food groups!) What intermittent fasting did for me was ironically curbed my hunger.  By not eating all day until dinner, I learned a lot of times when I thought I was hungry, I was actually thirsty.  Drinking something curbed the hunger because I wasn’t hungry.  I learned thirst is more of a mouth feel thing.  When your mouth feels hungry, drink water.  When you’re hungry, your stomach will grumble.  If your stomach isn’t complaining, you’re not hungry.  People who are diabetic, have blood sugar problems or other physical issues shouldn’t do intermittent fasting and may have other symptoms that signal they need to eat.  Talk to your doctor to see if it is safe for you to do intermittent fasting.

There are a couple ways to do intermittent fasting.  There is the days method and the daily window method.

Day method : One or two days a week eat only 750-1000 calories, all other days eat normally

In AARP’s 5 Key Ways to Lose Weight After 50, they talk about the days method under the header “Occasional Fasting”.  You eat normally everyday except for one or two days a week, you only eat 750-1000 calories.  AARP reported that a university showed that people who did this, lost a few pounds, their blood pressure went down, and cancer risk marker went down.

AARP explained in their article:

“When you gain weight, the nerves in your hypothalamus that conduct signals from your fat cells to the rest of your brain become damaged,” says Louis Aronne, M.D., director of the Center for Weight Management and Metabolic Clinical Research at Weill Cornell Medical College. “As a result, your brain doesn’t realize that you’re full, so it keeps signaling you to eat.”

But when you take a day to not eat very much, he says, “you’re reducing stress on your hypothalamic nerves, so it gives them time to recuperate.” That day of rest for your nerves could be especially important for older people, he says, because of the damage that oxidative stress can further do to your weight-regulating system.

Window method : Eat whatever you want (within reason) but only during a specific window

William Cole at mbg health quoted an impressive array of research showing that intermittent fasting health benefits included : lowers cancer risk, lowers heart disease risk, improves autoimmune system, lowers insulin resistence, increases metabolism, improved hormonal response to hunger fat storage, and a lot more.

One of the nice thing about Cole’s articles is that he breaks down fasting windows based on beginner, intermittent and advance including an example day of food plans.  He suggest a beginner intermittent starts out with an 8am to 6pm window.  They can eat normally within that window but no food outside the window to give them a 14-hour fasting period. For the beginner, he suggests a green smoothie breakfast and gives a recipe.  He sets out lunch, dinner with an intriguing snack recipe that I want to try.  One thing I noticed, no carbs.  There is no sugar or salt except what’s naturally in the vegetables and meat. There’s a little fat : cooking oil, hamburger and avocado as well as coconut cream and coconut oil in the snack.

For the intermediate faster, the window is shorter.  They can only eat between noon and 6pm.  There is also the modified 2-day plan where you eat “clean” for 5 days and then for two days eat 700 calories.  The high-intermediate has the eating window shortening again to 2pm-5pm.  For the advance faster, the plan is to eat every other day and no food every other day but you can drink water, herbal tea and moderate amounts of coffee and tea.

I really liked Cole’s philosophy.  In another article, he says:

In functional medicine we know the truth: that weight gain is a symptom, not the cause of health problems. We have to get healthy to lose weight, not lose weight to get healthy. Weight-loss resistance is a sign that something is going on underneath the surface, and that can rarely be solved in the long-term by just another fad diet. We need to ditch dieting and get healthy first, then we’ll reach our goal weight and look great, without all the effort.

I know I’m focused on losing weight but because of that I am changing how I eat, shifting from frozen foods, canned, chocolates, ice cream and ramen to vegetables.  I was always more of a pasta or noodle eater than a meat eater so my meat intake hasn’t changed — I eat meat when I eat out but not often at home.  The biggest difference is I eat more vegetables — you have to when you cut carbs, sugars, salts and fats because there’s not much left after that. As I eat more vegetables, I feel more energetic.  As I feel more energetic, I walk and move more.  Because I eat more vegetables and move more, I lose weight.  Because i lose weight, my knees and back feel better.  Because my knees and back feel better, I move more. And we’re back to losing more weight.  It’s like a spiraling domino effect.

It’s not about getting thin.  I don’t really care about that.  I don’t want to be Twiggy. It’s about becoming healthier.  I feel better and that’s more important to me than how I may look to other people.  Of course, the money helps too, grins


HealthyWage Disclosure: I generally sign up as an affiliate for things whenever I can.  I am signed up as a HealthyWage affiliate.  If you join through the links above, I’ll get a commission.  However, they also have a friends link, if you join up by clicking this friends link, it adds a $40 to your HealthyWager award if you complete your goal and $40 to my HealthyWager award if I complete my goal.  We don’t get the $40 if we fail.  The $40 is for HealthyWager challenges only and not the other ones like the 6% individual challenge or the team challenge. The HealthyWage affiliate link doesn’t matter if anyone succeeds but there is no benefit for the friend, just for the affiliate no matter what kind of challenge they join. I think joining through the friends link also lets you view your friend on the dashboard: you’ll see their name and what % they’ve lost so far but not the actual weight.  That’s private unless you make it public.

References:

We are participating in Claire Justine’s Welcome to the Weekend Blog Hop, open theme.

5 Key Ways to Lose Weight After 50
by Hallie Levine, AARP, May 9, 2018

Intermittent Fasting Is Confusing: Here’s Exactly When To Eat
By William Cole, D.C., IFMCP Functional Medicine Practitioner
MindBodyGreen : mbg health, May 31, 2018

Research referenced in Cole’s article: (his links led to NCBI database for the most part.  The NCBI gave links to the actual article. Those are the links I have put in below, so the links are not the same as in his article.  Because I did that, I found a few of the articles I could only access the abstract which I expect will be true for others as well so I stated where only the abstract was found. I wanted an easy way to see the titles of the articles in case I wanted to read them later). Ordered from most recent.

Is Leptin Resistance Making You Exhausted & Causing Your Weight Gain? Here’s What To Do
By William Cole, D.C., IFMCP Functional Medicine Practitioner
MindBodyGreen : mbg health, April 3, 2017

A Diet Mimicking Fasting Promotes Regeneration and Reduces Autoimmunity and Multiple Sclerosis Symptoms.
Choi IY, Piccio L, Childress P, Bollman B, Ghosh A, Brandhorst S, Suarez J, Michalsen A, Cross AH, Morgan TE, Wei M, Paul F, Bock M, Longo VD.
Cell Reports, Volume 15, ISSUE 10, P2136-2146, June 07, 2016

Frequency and Circadian Timing of Eating May Influence Biomarkers of Inflammation and Insulin Resistance Associated with Breast Cancer Risk
by Catherine R. Marinac, Dorothy D. Sears, Loki Natarajan, Linda C. Gallo, Caitlin I. Breen, and Ruth E. Patterson
PLoS One, v.10(8); 2015, PMC4549297

Role of Intermittent Fasting on Improving Health and Reducing Diseases (abstract only)
Salah Mesalhy Aly, Ph.D.
International Journal of Health Sciences, v.8(3); 2014 Jul

Time-restricted feeding and risk of metabolic disease: a review of human and animal studies. (abstract only)
Rothschild J, Hoddy KK, Jambazian P, and Varady KA.
Nutrition Reviews. 2014 May;72(5):308-18. doi: 10.1111/nure.12104. Epub 2014 Apr 16.

The effect of intermittent energy and carbohydrate restriction v. daily energy restriction on weight loss and metabolic disease risk markers in overweight women. (abstract only)
Harvie M, Wright C, Pegington M, McMullan D, Mitchell E, Martin B, Cutler RG, Evans G, Whiteside S, Maudsley S, Camandola S, Wang R, Carlson OD, Egan JM, Mattson MP, Howell A.
British Journal of Nutrition. 2013 Oct;110(8):1534-47.

Intermittent fasting: the next big weight loss fad
Roger Collier, CMAJ May 14, 2013 185 (8) E321-E322

Fasting-induced hypoleptinemia expands functional regulatory T cells in systemic lupus erythematosus
Yaoyang Liu, Yiyun Yu, Giuseppe Matarese, and Antonio La Cava
Journal of Immunology, March 1, 2012, 188 (5) 2070-2073

Alternate day calorie restriction improves clinical findings and reduces markers of oxidative stress and inflammation in overweight adults with moderate asthma. (abstract only)
Johnson JB1, Summer W, Cutler RG, Martin B, Hyun DH, Dixit VD, Pearson M, Nassar M, Telljohann R, Maudsley S, Carlson O, John S, Laub DR, Mattson MP.
Free Radical Biology and Medicine. 2007 Mar 1;42(5):665-74. Epub 2006 Dec 14.

Caloric restriction and intermittent fasting: Two potential diets for successful brain aging (abstract only)
Bronwen Martin, Mark P. Mattson, and Stuart Maudsleya
Ageing Research Reviews. 2006 Aug; 5(3): 332–353.

Effects of fasting therapy on irritable bowel syndrome. (abstract only)
Kanazawa M, Fukudo S.
International Journal of Behavioral Medicine, September 2006, Volume 13, Issue 3, pp 214–220

 

28 Replies to “TT Thursday – Weight Loss Challenge Week 14 and winning $151.40 using intermittent fasting to lose weight”

  1. Awesome blog! I really enjoyed reading this. I’ve been planning on doing intermittent fasting too but I’m afraid I might fail. Thanks for sharing this!

  2. Well done,you have done great. I find it so hard to lose weight as I get older 🙁 I really could do with dropping a few lbs too.

    Thanks for sharing last week with us at The Weekend Blog Hop #Weekendbloghop

    1. Thank you! I am a tad puffed about losing another 15. I’m a little worried though. I’m visiting California for a couple days so I’m hoping when I get home, ntohing has changed! Visiting, vacations and parties are hard.

    1. Thank you! Yeah, the money paid for my lovely breakfast with the kahlua mocha mousse dessert, lol. (of course I still have quite a bit leftover) Two steps forward and one mousse back but it was worth it!

    1. thank you! I appreciate your reading it. I confess I think people end up having so many blogs to read that they skim through most so I appreciate it very much when you take the time to read and comment.

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