Hi all. So I’ve finished my 8 weeks now on the bsd, I’ve had some amazing results weight loss (3 stone down) blood sugars are good, sleep apnea gone -so much to be positive about I could go on and on.

I’ve just naturally continued with the 800 cals into week 9 and low carbs (between 20 to 30 grams a day I tend to keep to) I remember skimming this part on the book as I didn’t believe I would actually get through it about what happens at the end of the 8 weeks.
My question really is, as I am a person who has alot of weight to lose (3 stone down 12 to go) is it plausible to stay on it longer ? I’m really comfortable were I am and naturally just doing it each day, i don’t feel ready yet to increase me cals.
Mentally it really worries me as I think I’m going to go back to the way it was before and the same eating habits and food comforts I used to rely on really haunt me.
Does anyone have an suggestions as to whether it is okay to carry on the 800 for a while longer ? I was thinking in my mind to do 16 weeks and maybe I will feel a bit more confident in myself to know I wont fall back into the same old habits.
Any thoughts or suggestions would be much appreciated 🙂
Many thanks
Nah

Hi Nah
3 stones down – and all the other positives, what a fantastic result!

Yes, from my experience it’s completely OK to continue on the 800 cals for 16 weeks. There are quite a few people on here who have felt the same as you and did a BSD round 2 (& Round 3 etc). Many stay on it for longer.

Personally, I lost almost 6 stone on BSD in 2016, and I did it mostly on 800 until I had lost all my weight – about 7/8 months. There was a period of a month where I was feeling tired when I put my calories up to 900, after that I was fine again. (That month was also during a very busy, demanding time for me so the tiredness may have had nothing to do with the BSD).

Anyway, I’d say you should be fine for 16 weeks, but maybe also listen to your body as you go.

You must be pretty thrilled with your results so far – congratulations.
Jennie xx

Fourteen months in a row, no breaks. Lost 200 lbs and changed my life. Go for it, Nah!

Wow that is great Essie!

Oh my goodness Esnecca that is so inspiring thank you !! Your a true BSD hero.
Thank you so much for the info jennie10, my worry was for the lack of vitamins etc, I have been taking a general multi vitamin, but it cant do any damage staying on this extended, from what I read in the forums alot of people have. Feeling empowered to continue on 🙂 thanks for your help both

Nah x

Hi,
Just to chime in with my experience. I started this WoE in October 2017, I am down over 6.5 stone, and my focus now is continuing to aim for a healthy body composition through eating keto combined with a few fasts.
I think it is a good idea to stay on this way of eating for longer while you get into different eating habits as long as you stay under 20g of carbs and avoid anything that can spike insulin such as artificial sweeteners.
It does take time for us to get to the point where our tastes for food change, during this time I think its a good idea to experiment with different non-food ways of responding to stressful situations. – I now find that heading for a long soak in the bath in an evening gives me the comfort that I used to seek by curling up under blankets with a carb fest.

Hi Nah! Just wanted to chime in on the subject of doing the Fast800 for an extended period of time, too 🙂 I did it
for 10 months straight, without any breaks or “cheats” along the way. My reward was that I discarded 140lbs.(10stone) in
that time period, and felt better than I had in years. You can take this lifestyle anywhere you’d like to go! I’m fast
approaching 2 years in maintenance, and the secret there is to continue to keep carbs low. There will be no weight
rebound if you do. Hang in there, Nah!

Allie

Allie that is fab so keeping the carbs a 20g in maintaining is what you do that is great news for us newbies. Do you have the occasional treat and if so what are they. Thanks 💞🦜

Birdy, I learned through careful trial and error that my carb limit in maintenance has to be <35g a day. That will be
different for each of us. My tastes have changed a lot in the past 3 years, and today a “treat” might be 2 glasses of
white wine on the weekend, or 3 1″cubes of canteloupe melon, or 1/2 of medium roasted beet. I’ve never gone back to
anything containing sugar, or any of the bad white carbs. This seems to spontaneously happen (tastes change) if you
stay with this lifestyle long enough. I can’t say that I’ve ever found it a problem. I just know that it has been successful
for me. Weigh-ins on friday and tues. keep me on the straight and narrow, too 🙂

Allie that sounds good and yes our body’s are all different in how they process carbs, at the moment I am averaging between 20 and 30g of carbs a day, although I made a mistake last week and it went up to 62g but luckily it didn’t mess up a good discard. I don’t really miss bread or pasta, in fact I was getting so sick of pasta! Quite a weekly staple in my household for way to long! I had some slimline tonic water left in the fridge and had sip and oh my gosh it tasted awful! Fake sweet and nasty so I poured it down the sink. I have only had one quick “I need a sweet fix” on sunday evening but I think that is just an old habit as we always had a pud on sundays, I just grabbed 5 blueberries and sucked and chewed them slowly and it went. I am hoping this will be my go to when my dreaded monthly comes as that is the time I had to have chocolate 🤣. Thank you for sharing. Also with how and Essie have done this until you reached your goal is the way I want to do it. I was all up for a 24hr fast today but my asked me to work over time so it went out of the window🤣. No good for me to try and fast when I am up the whole day and most of the night🤣. Hey how there is always another day. 💞🦜

Birdy, you DO make us smile. I have to warn you though, Essie and I are BSD zealots, and we make no apologies for
that fact 🙂 Very happy to have you join us!

I am glad that you are as you can give us a swift kick up the butt to keep us on track🤣💕🦜

Alllie you astound me with your dedication an Essie and it is amazing that we have you both. I want to shift 8 stone 112lbs 50kg so if I need to be a lot more vigilant I will. Show me path and I shall follow. Awesome ladies.💞🦜

Your enthusiastic embrace of this WOE is going to get you where you need to be, Birdy and Nah. All of us who made radical changes and lost the weight are very different people in different circumstances, but what we have in common is that we dove in and fully lived our new realities. It’s the million small changes and epiphanies along the way that will sustain you, like the discovery that sugar substitutes taste like something specific, not a vague, ill-defined sweetness. Usually it’s chemical or metallic. Some even have a texture to me. Stevia is sticky, like it clogs the back of my throat.

Birdy, I think I may still be alone in this, but maybe you’ll come to a point where you can be the second person. I eat 100% unsweetened bakers chocolate. Ghirardelli’s is the best. I soften a square of it in a warm oven, sprinkle Maldon flaked sea salt over it, then put it in the freezer for 5 minutes until it rehardens. It comes out this thin wafer of chocolate intensity with crunchy little hits of salt that just melts on your tongue. I don’t find it at all bitter. I mean, not even a little bit. It’s not that I can tolerate bitter so well that I like it. It’s that it doesn’t taste remotely bitter to me. It’s delectable and rich and so, so chocolatey. Even unsweetened choc still has carbs, of course (3 net per 15 g square of he Ghirardelli), but zero sugar and lots of flavonoids and healthy fats.

Everyone I know who has tried it, low carbers included, has gotten that face — the curled lip, tear in the eye — so it’s very likely I’m a freak. I recently found out that Alton Brown, sciencey food guru whose show I watched for many years, adds a teaspoon of salt to his coffee grounds when he makes drip coffee because salt has been shown to counter bitter far more effectively that sweet. Apparently sweet vs. bitter sets up such a strong contrast that the sweetness actually enhances the bitter flavor unless there’s enough sugar/whatever to completely obliterate it. Salt just takes your palate in another direction altogether. I felt quite validated when I read that. I am not crazy after all! 😀

Essie that sounds really good! I love sea salt in chocolate😋. I will look into getting some for you know when😉. So when it is melted I presume on a bit of parchment paper do you spread it out to make it wafer thin? My enthusiasm is so big it has got me in trouble with my partner as he is sick of listening to me drone on🤣🤣. But I have also got three more people on it in my village including a T2! I advised hiim to go to the doctor as if I remember rightly(even if he gets a negative response) he still may have to do something about his medication. I am probably being thick but what is OH? Old husband? I have lost a stone and I need to budge 7 more and with results like mine so far and even if they drop to 1 a day I will still be walking on cloud 9. Thank you again for all of this. 💞🦜

I use foil, Birdy. I pull out a sheet and fold it into quarters so it has some structural support, then I create a rectangle a little longer and wider than the square of chocolate by folding up the sides and edges so they’re like four little walls. I preheat the oven to 300F, put in the square in the middle of its little foil cart and turn off the oven. It sits in there for maybe 10 minutes until it has melted enough to spread and look really glossy. That’s when I top with salt. If the choc still has a hardish surface, even a thin one, the salt won’t adhere very well. The entire foil assemblage goes into the freezer. Once the bottom is frozen, the wafer just pops out leaving no residue. I reuse the foil cart many times before it needs replacing.

OH is other half, but old husband works. 😆 Great job spreading the word. I believe with every fiber of my being that you are saving lives every time you help someone make these kinds of changes.

Oh yeah other half doh!😳. I have looked for the chocolate you mentioned and amazon can’t get it and the other webpages say only available in the US😢. Is bakers any good? I will look for and English alternative. I like your way of thinking and yes I agree with you about saving a life. My Aunty had to have her leg amputated above her knee because she didn’t look after her T2 and now her toes are going on the other leg but she just won’t watch her diet and never has. She has also always been a larger lady.😢 💞🦜

I haven’t tried Bakers but the nutritional panel on their 100% looks excellent. Just one gram carbs net per 15g! You could easily afford two squares if you kept the rest of your day simple (can’t go wrong with a mushroom omelette lunch and chicken sausage and spinach for dinner).

I’m sorry to hear about your aunt. It’s heartbreaking to see people we care about chipped away by this disease as the medical community keeps throwing insulin at a problem of insulin overproduction. That’s why they’re so insistent about it being “progressive” and “incurable,” because they literally medicate you with the thing that’s causing the problem.

Great I will order some and let you know how I get on with it. We have sausages called Heck here and they do a chicken Italian one I will look into their content. We don’t have loads of choice in my supermarket but I will look out for what is on the market. Thank you 💞🦜

I hope they don’t add sugar. I see it a lot in sausages, sad to say, but thankfully my local organic co-op has several nice chicken sausage options available. I usually have at least 3 different varieties in the fridge at all times. Five minutes in the pan, a dollop of fermented sauerkraut on the side and you’ve got you 180 calorie no-carb dinner full of probiotic goodness.

Essie I have just found a brand in the uk called Montezumas and they do a 100% unsweetened dark chocolate, no gluten, no soya and no milk. Kilojoules 2514.584 kj
Calories 601 kcal
Protein 12 g
Carbohydrate 8 g
Sugar 0.5 g
Fat 54 g
Saturated Fat 33 g
Fibre 1.7 g
Sodium 20mg. How does this sound? Birdy 💞🦜

The heck ones have rice in them and are 4.3g of carbs for every two little chipotles! I will keep looking.

Do you buy pre packaged sauerkraut or make your own? Sorry for the 20 questions. You seem to be able to get a hold of loads more over the pond😢

Okay so those stats are per 100 grams. Let’s say you’ll eat 20 grams just to make the division easy, so 1.26g net carb, .1g sugar and 120 calories. Looks great to me. I vote you give it a try. Make sure you have flaked salt in the house. You really want those individual shards instead of grindings because you’re not trying to make the whole wafer taste generally salty.

I’m keeping my fingers crossed that you love it and I’ll finally have a 100% cacao buddy, but if you’re not quite at that point yet (it did take me a year, after all), stash the bar and try again in a month. The palate shift is constantly evolving.

Looks like you can buy the 100% straight from the website, Birdy. No rice or nonsense there. https://www.montezumas.co.uk/bars-c1/100-cocoa-chocolate-bar-absolute-black-p249

Hi Birdy
I bought a bar of 100% Montezuma Absolute Black for my husband last week; I got it from Sainsbury’s. He bought a bar for me at Christmas as it was one of the brands recommended by people with type II on another forum. The mini-bars are supposed to be nice, too. They’re all a bit dark for me, I like the Lindt 85% dark chocolate ( a bit of a wimp, I know) but my husband really likes it.

Edit: cross-posted with Esnecca. Esnecca, I might try that recipe for my OH, too. He isn’t at all a chocolate eater, but immediately enjoyed the Montezuma bar so I think he’d like it.

I buy sauerkraut pre-packaged and I also make my own. We can definitely get a ton of stuff in the US that is not so easily found on your side of the pond, I’m sad to say. The locavore movement and traditional artisan foods are big here, so you find lots of fermented foods, for example, in shops and farmers markets that were made here or in neighboring states. Chain stores usually do not carry real ferments. Most of the krauts and pickles you buy in regular grocery stores are vinegar brined because it mimics the sour flavors generated in the fermentation process without having to wait for anything to actually ferment. Acetic acid does not create an environment where probiotic lactobacilli can thrive. Real fermentation requires only salt, either in form of a brine or simply rubbed into the vegetable, and time. Check the ingredients. If there is anything other than veg and salt, then it’s not what you’re looking for. If it’s pasteurized, it’s not what you’re looking for.

Looks like there are quite a few brands doing it right in the UK. https://www.amazon.co.uk/s?k=Loving+Foods&i=grocery&search-type=ss&ref=bl_dp_s_web_0
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Winning-Barrel-Traditional-Sauerkraut-UNPASTEURISED/dp/B072ZSGGPD/ref=sr_1_2?crid=26XX25IU4XHMY&keywords=fermented+sauerkraut&qid=1554828449&s=gateway&sprefix=fermented+sau%2Caps%2C215&sr=8-2
https://www.amazon.co.uk/RAW-Health-Organic-Unpasteurised-Sauerkraut/dp/B071G17VG9/ref=sr_1_4?crid=26XX25IU4XHMY&keywords=fermented+sauerkraut&qid=1554828449&s=gateway&sprefix=fermented+sau%2Caps%2C215&sr=8-4

Brilliant I will look into them and get some ordered as I love sauerkraut, I haven’t tried many more fermented veggies but I am going to, get my intestines buddies working hard and happy while they do it💞🦜

Thank you Jennie I will buy some with my weekly shop. 💞🦜

Hi Essie and Jennie I bought that chocolate today and it was on offer at £1.50 for 100g I am am going to try the 20g size like you Essie and will let you know if I like it. Thanks 💞🦜

Wonderful! I’m keeping my fingers crossed that it doesn’t gross you out. 😀

Oh my gosh Essie it smells so good. I opened it to measure out a portion and took a quick sniff and it got me right at the back of my checks and made my mouth water! You know the feeling🤣. It also smelly sweet which I never thought dark chocolate did before. Oven 150 as that is the equivalent of the heat you use. Watch this space🤣

I feel like an old-fashioned father-to-be in the waiting room anxiously awaiting a birth announcement. 😆

🤣🤣🤣 not long now my dear and your creation will be born 🤣🤣

Oh yes I like it. When it first goes in it is salty, then a little sweet and a tad bitter but not horribly bitter. I tried enough to taste it as want to save it for work tonight when I am flagging. It has a bit of an earthy aftertaste maybe even a little smoky? But not unpleasant at all!😉. Yeah I could get used to it as a rare treat and I think the longer my tastebuds go without refined sugar or overly sweet things it will taste sweeter. I might have put a little too much salt flakes but still I love salt. Ever thought of maybe crashing some fresh raspberry an scattering a few bits on before freezing too? Or would that be a no no?

Thank you me likey 🤣💞🦜

Phew! I’m relieved it was an overall positive. You’re still early in the BSD game so it’s a sign of great things to come. I’ve never tried adding fruit as the idea is to detach chocolate from sweetness, but I have sprinkled cinnamon on top and found that quite delicious. I once tried adding a teaspoon of peanut butter thinking it would be like a non-sugared version of a Reese’s peanut butter cup, but I didn’t like it at all. The pb and chocolate clashed. It’s the only time since I began eating this concoction that I found the chocolate bitter.

Yes I understand the raspberries and will leave them off for now. That is a shame about the PB as reeses butcups are one of my altimeter favourites. 💞🦜

Birdy
Sounds like a hit. I’m going to try it for my OH. I was in a small Sainsbury today but they didn’t stock it so next trip along the river to the big Sainsburys, I’ll buy some dark choc and try it for my OH.
Jennie xx

Edited: should’ve said ‘next trip along the road by the river’ although it sounds much more interesting as its written!