Hi Allie – yes, please do kick of the next weekly challenge and we will keep it alive while you are ‘off-grid’.

On the loose skin subject, I lost 3st in all, with little spare skin in evidence. Like you Allie, I have some spare around the upper arms, but it’s not too unsightly. Also have a little around the upper, inner thighs, but surprisingly almost nothing other than a little creping across the abdomen. All in all, a small negative when measured against being over weight and unhealthy.

DONE, Sunny! I’m posting the new challenge right now 🙂

Hi Wendleg,
I did go through a stage of bingo wings, but it tightened up again, and at present I don’t have any loose skin.
I agree that fasts of 36 hours plus sound daunting. – I managed one a couple of weeks ago and then a stressful time drew my focus away from tight controls on eating.
I was reading some background articles yesterday which highlighted the implications of Insulin Resistance that occurs after years of being overweight. Our insulin levels are made up of two elements, the background level which is present even when fasting and the level Insulin rises to in response to eating. – Some people who are obese have a higher background level than the norm, and their insulin levels rise 4 times more and stay higher longer than someone who is slim. I think that successful maintenance must be linked to reversing Insulin Resistance. There hasn’t been any documented research but Dr Fung claims that over time fasting does lower your body set point and Dr Longo does say that Autophagy does include healing the cells involved in the Insulin signalling system. – So it sort of makes sense to me to try for longer fasts to continue weight loss beyond the 100lb mark to try to avoid loose skin and reverse IR.

Hi JGwen and Wenleg,
I have become absolutely convinced by both my reading and my personal experience that the focus should start and end with the issue of insulin.
High background insulin levels are a sort of “hidden” problem for overweight people and until they start to drop, all the efforts put into losing weight will be much harder than they have to be.
That’s why I keep talking talking about carbohydrate intake — cutting carbs way down (well below 50, best around 20 grams per day) gives your body a fighting chance to lose the weight and develop a more normal response to food.
All the posts about “falling off the wagon” and eating scones and cakes and breads are insulin responses — hardly surprising that people lose control because the insulin system is powerful and literally drives your brain to crave easy sugars.
But when they do that, they just fuel a vicious cycle that is so hard to resist.
I know I posted before, but it bears repeating that I am STILL seeing insulin response changes, now two years later into maintenance. My body is just different and I don’t want sugars anymore and if I do decide to eat some, it doesn’t affect me the same way. This must be what all the normal weight people experienced all those years that I struggled — it is truly a revelation.

There you are, wendleg! NO ONE has the ability to summarize data like JGwen, and she always
articulates it so clearly . I knew you would be along, my friend! Email enroute to you before the
end of the day, when I switch into holiday mode…Running around today ticking off the bulletpoints
to get ready for the mini holiday!

Thank you, Julia! I AM really looking forward to getting away. I 100% agree on the subject of insulin
resistance, rather than BGL. It was a real revelation to me when you posted info on how the malfunction
of our response develops over a period of 10 years or more. Very enlightening, indeed! Have the aspens
where you are begun to change? Dancing gold, on the wind!

Thanks Allie, and have a great vacation!

And yes, Allie, we just moved on the 8th to an apartment to await the building of our new home. Old home sold in a week and new house will be finished next year. Over 40 boxes up 19 steps. Took a week to unpack, get wifi, change addresses etc.

Thank you so much for your strength!

Have a lovely holiday Allie!

Hi lovely people
First of all massive thanks to allie and JGwen for taking the time to reply to me and answer my queries. It means a lot that we can all voice our concerns without being judged and that everyone is so friendly and informative.

It’s a learning curve for me but I really think I might make it this time after trying all sorts of weight loss régimes. I’m comfortable with the food choices and am not really craving anything right now. I would love to be able to eat a lot more fruit but I resist that without too much trouble .

I am so thankful for your insight and research which makes things so much clearer. I am reading lots too and will investigate JGwen’s threads and Prof Longo’s work ( I remember he was mentioned in MM’s programmes.)

Enjoy your break Allie.
Thank you thank you JGwen
Keep going Violinist and Mom2Boxers and zinny
Well done EclecticRajistani !! 3 kilos !! That is a great loss !
Week 3 for me and on I go

xx

Hanging head in shame – weighed in this morning at 2.8lb more that last week, which is 2.8lb over target weight. I’m attributing this disappointment to alcohol, living on painkillers for three days which has caused poor transit.
Excuses aside, I have not been weighing and measuring foods consumed, so it’s time to get real and back to basics. Hope you all had better results than me and that you’ll also be coming over to the week 9 thread – see you there.

Weighing in this morning with a 2lb loss. So am now back in the 8s at 8 stone 13 1/2lbs. Very surprising as I have have averaged 1500 calories a day. It has been another absolutely manic week at work and I have hardly had a chance to sit down. Yesterday I did 18K steps

Have – since beginning of August added some really simple leg strength work. Have basically just tweaked how I sit to stand from a chair and it has really built up my leg and bum muscles. I can actually see that My leg muscles are bigger. My after meal blood sugar readings have improved also so I am wondering if this is helping.

Hi Californiagirl,
I know this challenge has moved on to the next week, but I really wanted to reply to your post about Insulin. – I agree whole heartedly with your views on insulin.
The podcast I watched at the weekend was difficult viewing, a guy filming himself in his lounge, taking 23 minutes to say something that could have been covered in 2 minutes without the dramatic pauses and repeating the same statement again…… and again……. and again. But a graph he displayed showing the Insulin levels between a normal and IR individual (I presume it was for the same food but he didn’t make that clear) really hit home for me.
I have been debating with myself which way to go Keto, or fasting and it was that graph that convinced me to do both.
The BSD was the door that opened my eyes to low carb diets, and I don’t want to be disrespectful to the work done by DrMM and his team, or the people who have been successful in loosing weight through eating low carb. – I just feel that low carb has taken me down to the weight I traditionally have been as an adult but that is still overweight and I need to work on reducing insulin response to get lower, and make maintenance easier.
The spat on the forums a few months ago is the reason I haven’t talked more about this.

JGwen – I absolutely agree with you 100%. Although I am not overweight anymore I do believe I am still insulin resistant. So I think that I still have a very long way to go to overcome the insulin resistance. I know that in staying around the 20g carbs a day I don’t need to inject insulin – so I am basically managing the diabetes with diet but I really do want to sort this out properly.

I am so pleased that you are looking into ways we can overcome this issue. I always find your posts very helpful.

Hi KrysiaD,
Thank you for the complement that you find my posts helpful.

So we don’t scare the new comers to this way of eating with all the talk of the different research into Insulin Resistance, and because its the end of this week, I think we should move this discussion to the maintenance thread and have posted a reply there.

Hi KrysiaD,
The actual thread title is after reaching your target what next.