So I have been remiss in doing monthly updates because I took up a new hobby (which ate up a lot of my time), and to be honest, my alternate day fasting the past two months was quite haphazard for the following reasons:

• Spent 5-days in November staying with family friends during a trip, where I ate myself silly.
• I was by myself for 2-weeks at the end of the year when my family went abroad, and I used that time to indulge myself foodwise. Copious amounts of chocolate were consumed…
• Year-end holiday season get-togethers.
• Am planning to do a 2-week water fast at the beginning of the new year, so I figure it will be okay to put on a bit of weight beforehand.
• I had already taken my annual health checkup, so I felt like my self-imposed duty to perform alternate day fasting fastidiously (for the sake of science) could be relaxed.

Furthermore, I took a break from my fitness regime the past two months, too, when I got caught up with my new hobby, so that aspect of my health took a dive, too. I have lost much of the muscle mass that I had put on. Truly a case of “use it or lose it”.

So the only good news from all of this is that after being pretty lackadaisical about things for a couple of months, my weight ended up at around 65kg, which used to be my “best” weight before I started alternate day fasting. So, in other words, what used to be my “best” weight was now my “worst” weight for the year, which, in other words, is a definite step in the right direction.

The last two months have proven that I am still only human and that there is more room for improvement with my health and diet. That’s what new years are for, right?

I should be getting my health checkup results later this month, which will help tell if anything changed measurably in my bloodwork, in addition to all the actual benefits I have witnessed. I will put up a post regarding that when I have some time. And I am still planning on doing a 2-week fast sometime relatively soon. Just trying to figure out exactly when would be best.

Many people wonder if it is okay to exercise while alternate day fasting. I personally have had no issues whatsoever. I regularly bike 50km or walk 10km on a fasting day. I don’t feel any difference in strength or speed.

More importantly, I have a set routine of bodyweight exercises that I cycle through on a weekly basis in order to ensure that I don’t lose muscle mass as I lose weight. I perform my bodyweight exercises regardless of whether or not it is a fasting day. Basically, I focus on one exercise every other day. So I do one day of pushups, one day of pull-ups, one day of dips,  and one day of abs. Within each exercise group, I try and do different types of variations to work out as many muscles as possible. So for example, for pushups, I do standard, wide, military, elevated, and staggered. During the day, whenever I feel like it, I will whip out a set of one type or another until exhaustion. Over the course of the day, I end up completing at least one set of each variation and sometimes two, depending on whether or not I am home all day or out most of the day.

Using this routine for the past four months, I have seen consistent gains in every exercise group. Even though my numbers are going up, though, it’s hard to actually say that I am getting stronger as the exercises are getting easier as my weight steadily goes down each month. At the minimum, though, I believe that I am not getting weaker. And the fact that I can now perform 70 consecutive pushups and 15 chin-ups at age 46 is by anybody’s book an indication of an above average fitness level. Furthermore, as these numbers are the best that I have achieved in my entire life, I think it fair to say that alternate day fasting is proving to be beneficial from a fitness standpoint.

Diet is an important factor in maintaining muscle mass. On my feeding days, I make it a point to consume a fair amount of protein. My breakfast is a huge salad, usually with fish, or sometimes chicken. Then over the course of the day, I try and eat chicken and beef or pork, in addition to other less protein dense foods such as bread or nuts or tofu.  I’m not fanatical about it. I don’t count calories or grams of protein. I just make a conscious effort to eat nutritionally well on my feeding days because my body only has half the opportunity to get the proper nutrients. Right now my focus is seeing how far I can progress in terms of muscle development using purely natural protein sources so I don’t take any protein supplements. I want to try and keep my eating habits as normal as possible so that I can live anywhere, shop locally, and live healthily.

Hopefully, this should help allay any fears that anyone has that alternate day fasting will be detrimental to their fitness level unless of course you are an elite athlete, in which case your experience may be different. Having said that, I do feel that it is important to stress that regular muscle training in some shape or form should be performed in order to maintain muscle mass. Otherwise, you will not only lose weight, but you will also lose muscle mass, and losing too much muscle mass will prove detrimental to your health.

Maintaining your muscle mass as you age should be one of your key fitness goals. The exercise routine I have described above takes very little time; at most 30 minutes a day, spread out into five-minute blocks at any time of the day. By splitting it up into small chunks over the course of the day, it doesn’t even feel like exercise. The amount of time you will save every other day by not eating should be more than enough to fit in some good solid exercise. No matter how you cut it, there really is no good excuse not to exercise your muscles if you do alternate day fasting.

All my life, my weight has cycled up and down by 10kg, usually in a single year. Whenever I get above a certain threshold weight, unlike it appears most people, I start feeling quite serious negative side effects to my health that spurs me to start exercising more to lose the weight. I really do find it quite astonishing that people can be 20, 30, 40kg overweight, and not die. Once in my life when I was 30 years old, I was 15kg overweight, the most overweight that I’ve ever been. One day I was lying down on the sofa, and I suddenly started feeling chest pains radiating throughout my upper torso. It felt like electricity was flowing through my body and lasted for seemingly forever, but in reality probably only 30 seconds. While it was happening, though, it didn’t feel like it was going to stop, and the experience scared me to death. In retrospect, it was a blessing because it made me realize instantly that I needed to get back into better shape or I was likely to fall seriously ill.

This incident was what spurred me for the first time in my life to seriously make an effort to lose weight, and on my first attempt, over the course of many months, I actually managed to lose 15kg. Unfortunately, this was also the beginning of my seemingly neverending cycle of gaining and losing weight. Now, though, I always started the process of losing weight when I got 10kg overweight.

My main method of losing weight has always been bicycling; many, many hours and kilometers of cycling. If I cycle about 300km a week and watch what I eat, I can consistently lose 2kg a month. However, if I only cycle 200km a week and eat normally, I won’t lose any weight. And if I cycle 200km a week and eat more than I should, which would happen fairly regularly as I love food, I would gain weight. It takes me at least 15 hours of cycling a week to get up to 300km. Obviously, this is a huge investment in time and energy that I’ve come to realize as I’ve gotten older is not practical for me to continue into retirement.

Given that I genuinely feel unhealthy when I’m overweight, I started investigating other options to maintain my weight, and one idea proffered by a friend was the 5:2 fast diet, which he had been following for the past three years with apparently good results. I had seen the BBC video by Michael Mosley regarding this method a few years back. Basically, you eat five days a week and fast for two. It had piqued my interest, not just the weight management aspect of it, but also its claims to improve health, but I had never seriously entertained trying it myself. Given my present interest in finding an alternative way to maintain my weight, though, and my friend’s recommendation, I rewatched the video and started researching in earnest the various ways of fasting to lose weight.

During this research phase, I discovered from reading various forums that although many people were having great success, many people were also having problems losing weight using the 5:2 fast diet. Some other methods mentioned were 4:3 (4 days feeding and 3 days fasting) and alternate day fasting. Several people had commented that they had had good results with these alternate methods. After about a month of reading everything I could find on the Internet regarding fasting, I finally decided to try alternate day fasting. I figured that if I found it too hard, I could always switch to one of the easier methods, but logically it seemed that it would be the fastest results producer.

So basically, I started alternate day fasting with the intention of losing weight. Having spent a month researching fasting, though, I suppose I was hoping that it would also improve my overall health, but I didn’t go in with any concrete expectations. The results, however, have been unexpected and amazing.