My Health and Fitness Rules - Eating

I’m one among the few individuals who manage to lose weight and keep it off. Want to know how I do it? Here are some of my health and fitness rules.

These are my personal rules that you don’t have to follow. However if you do, you’re sure to benefit in one way or another.

Let me start with my eating rules.

1. Eat Less
When I eat less, I feel better. Foods taste better, I feel happier and less worried. You may already know that eating less can help reduce risks of cancers and diseases.

2. Eat Fresh and Natural
I drink orange juice from a real fresh orange. No bottled or canned orange juice. I’m sure you see what I mean. I don’t take supplements. That’s right. Reading through my blog, you won’t see me recommending any supplements. Fancl House, GNC…no way to make money from me.

If you eat a variety of real fresh good foods, your need for supplements is close to none. And I’m not alone. In fact, overdosing on supplements/antioxidants may take your health in the wrong direction.

3. Eat Less in an Enjoyable Way
I successfully lose weight and stay fit by eating less. More importantly, that’s the way I enjoy. I suggest your finding a sustainable and “enjoyable” way of eating less. That way you will stick with it because you enjoy it.

If you want to learn how to eat less in an enjoyable way, here are the two books I recommend: 2 Meal Solution and Eat Stop Eat.

4. Learn to Cook
The more you cook for yourself, the healthier you eat. Do learn to cook and teach your kids to cook as well. No time? Do you have time to date your boy friend or girl friend? Why not cook together? Share the fun of cooking with people you love and eat healthier.

5. Make My Own Dressing
Eating salad is healthy, isn’t it? But don’t forget the dressing which makes you fat. I start making my own dressing after reading this article - The Salad Dressing To NEVER Eat. It’s quick and easy, however delicious and healthy, and I’m never tired of it.

Finally I suggest everyone read The Paleo Solution: The Original Human Diet if you seriously want to know “what to eat”. You don’t have to agree with it all…but at least it gives great insight into food and your health.

These are my health and fitness rules in terms of eating. I’ll continue with my workout rules.

I wish you eat well!

Intermittent Fasting Success Report - Health and Fitness Rules

How To Make Fasting Weight Loss Work For You

Want to do fasting weight loss? If so, you’ve made the right choice.

Listen. I mean short term periodic fasting. It is very often referred as intermittent fasting (IF). And it is what this blog is all about.

Fasting may sound scary in the first place. I understand how you feel. If you’ve been on 3x, 6x or 10x meals a day for years, fasting could be something beyond imagination. However if you understand what fasting is and how it works, fasting weight loss is not that scary. In fact, I am eating EVERYDAY.

Why Not Fasting To Lose Weight
Few people will tell you that fasting is a healthy act. Why? Because there are many people who want to make money from people who want to lose weight. Cereals companies advertise heavily by promoting how important breakfast is; diet programs and recipes producers want to sell more of their products. Not to mention the luxury gyms want to recruit more members in order to charge them extremely expensive fees.

99 doctors out of a hundred will not suggest fasting weight loss. Their license which they spent years of hard work to acquire will be challenged.

So why am I here to talk about fasting weight loss?

Well, because it works.

Why Fasting Weight Loss
A fast cleans up the body. If you bath once a week, you may spend an hour in bathing. If you bath everyday, it may be just a matter of minutes. Fasting works in a similar manner. Prolong fasting cleans up your body, your colon and your bloodstream; short term intermittent fasting can do the same.

A Clean Body Needs Less Food. If your car engine is clean, the same amount of fuel will let you run more mileage; in other words, you need less fuel to run the same mileage. Our bodies work similarly. Food is absorbed and utilized better in a clean digestive system. Your clean body will need less food to run. That is common sense. We don’t need research reports, surveys or clinical tests to prove that.

How To Make Fasting Weight Loss Work
Review your eating habit. Today, we have a world of chronically tired, sick, rapidly ageing, overweight and mentally clouded persons around us. Unfortunately they are still being told to eat more often. Or eat like a king over breakfast, like a queen over lunch and so on. Well, eating 3x, 6x or 10x a day is your choice. Have you made the best choice? Review your eating habit and see if there is another way which might be better for you.

If you ever want to find out what the 12 strangest and most destructive obsessive compulsive eating habits are and how to avoid them, while still losing weight, read The Dirty Dozen. Brad Pilon, author of the book has allowed my readers for a free download.

Learn to control food desire. Fasting on a periodic basis allows you to gradually gain control over your appetite. Learn to control your desire for food. When you successfully merge short term periodic fasting into your life, you will not feel hungry when you end your fast. You are not hungry, but the desire to eat is there. There is a big difference between actual hunger and desire for food.

Prepare for a lifestyle change. This is the ONLY way any type of permanent weight loss becomes effective. You must have a change of thought pattern and a change of lifestyle. If you go back to your old destruction way of eating, you’ll soon gain back the weight you lost through fasting.

Intermittent Fasting Success Report - Fasting Weight Loss

Fasting For Weight Loss

When I talk about fasting for weight loss, some feel curious, some feel feared. Many wondered why and how I developed this habit. In fact, if we review our eating history, it’s easy to find something in common.

Remember how much and how often you ate when you were 13? Look at the photo here.


The bottom row was how I ate when I were 13. True! No exaggeration! I did have a record of eating 5 bowls of rice for lunch. When I grew up, my food consumption decreased accordingly. I thought I cut from two to one at my mid 20s. Now I am eating one meal a day, or even without any food on some days. In fact, this does not only happen to me. Many find that they are eating less and less, especially on weekends when they don’t have to work.

Fasting may sound scary to those who worry about energy level or afraid of hungry pangs. However fasting for weight loss isn’t scary at all. I am still eating EVERYDAY and eating what I love to eat.

The kind of short term fasting I do have almost no impact on my social life and yet my body benefits. That way my digestive system got periodic recess, shifting focus from digestion to cleansing and repairing, resulting not only in weight loss but more energy and better skin, not to mention my bloating problem says good bye to me.

May be you’ve been told a million times that you should eat at least three meals a day; or eat like a king for breakfast and a queen for lunch and a beggar for dinner. Forget about these. They may work for some people, but not for you, if you want to lose weight naturally and permanently. Fasting for weight loss is the new trend, whether you want to shed a few pounds or maintain your body weight. Try to start your fasting weight loss project by skipping a couple of meals a week. I’m sure you’ll see the benefits.

If you are afraid of hungry, drink a glass of fresh prune juice to replace lunch or dinner. Its high fibre will create a feeling of fullness and keep you away from hungry. It will also encourage bowel movements and you will gain additional benefit if you are suffering from constipation. Because of this, please make sure no over consumption of prune juice to avoid diarrhea.

More about juicing for weight loss.

Try it out once, and I’m sure you’ll love the feeling. Be prepared to allow some time for your body to burn fat, and DO NOT expect overnight results.

NOTE: You need to do a little more if you are aiming to maintain a steady body weight, i.e. do this short term fasting in an ongoing manner. It could be even better if you could incorporate some daily exercises. If you do these, you’ll simply save money in buying weight loss programs, diet recipes and still enjoying a healthy life.

Read my fasting for weight loss story.

Recommended reading: Eat Stop Eat – a scientific guide for short term intermittent fasting.

My Fasting Windows

Some readers ask me about my fasting windows. Regarding my eating schedule, I have a diary which records every single details. As someone who eats one meal a day, what to eat, where to eat and with whom to eat are very important to me.

Back to my fasting windows. I have recently draw up a table to compare my eating schedule with two of the mainstream intermittent fasting pattern.

ADF (alternate day fasting) - you know what it means, simply eat every other day. This may suit people who enjoy disciplined life.

IF (intermittent fasting) - one meal a day mode - is my preferred option. But as a matter of fact, I've done this in a flexible way.

Anna - I just pick any week in my diary which records three sessions of 24-hour fasting, two of 16-hours and one of 40-hours.

The big picture is: keep at least two 24-hour fasting windows in a week. That's it. Make it simple and flexible. Never fix a day and do it on an unplanned and natural manner. If you keep your eating schedule too rigid, you will have no fun, and somehow will affect your social life.

Anna's Thought Today:

Make fun by fasting, enjoy eating while losing weight!

Intermittent Fasting Success Report

Fasting and Starvation

So let’s talk about the death journey. Scary? Yes, it is. Starvation is really scary, but not fasting.

Starvation induces death. Fasting will not.

But why is there the misconception? Let's clarify it.

Fasting Facts

First of all, let’s take a look at some of the fasting facts.

Health experts say that most healthy individuals have enough fat stored in the body to live without food for several weeks, as long as they keep themselves well hydrated and without emotional stress. Starvation only occurs when the body has exhausted its fat reserves and must use tissue from vital organs as a source of energy to survive.

Human fat is valued at 3,500 calories per pound. Each extra pound of fat will supply enough calories for one day of hard physical labor. Ten pounds of fat are equal to 35,000 calories! Most of us have sufficient reserves, capable of sustaining us for many weeks.

From Fasting to Starvation

There is a huge difference between fasting and starvation.

Fasting is when there are foods around but we don’t eat for a period of time in order to achieve a certain health goal.

Starvation is when food is badly inadequately, people eating scraps of whatever is available or even dirt.

Here is an article describing the starvation death journey in details. I have summarized it for your quick reference.

The Death Journey of Starvation

Until water fasting goes on past the point where all fatty tissues and all abnormal deposits have been burned for fuel and recycled for the nutritional elements they contain, vital muscle tissues and organs are not consumed. And as long as the body contains sufficient nutritional reserves, vital organs and essential tissues are rebuilt and maintained. In fact the body has a great deal of intelligence in doing whatever possible in keeping us staying alive. It knows exactly which cells are essential to survival, which ones are not. The body knows which cells are abnormal deposits, and it goes to work to metabolize them first.

For example, the body recognizes arthritic deposits, cysts, fibroids, and tumors as offensive parts of the landscape, and obligingly uses them for foods in preference to anything else. A starving (not fasting) body also knows precisely in what order of priority body cells should be metabolized to minimize risk of death or permanent disability.

After a starving body has reached skeletal condition, or where some small amount of fat remains but nutritional reserves (vitamins and minerals) are exhausted and there is insufficient nourishment forthcoming, the body begins to consume nutrient-rich muscle and organ tissue in a last-ditch effort to stay alive. Under these dire circumstances, the least essential muscles and organs from the standpoint of survival are metabolized first. For example, muscles in the arms and legs would be consumed early in the process, the heart muscle used only toward the very end. The very last part of the body to be metabolized when one is starving and as has come very close to death would be the brain and the nervous system.

Starvation begins where fasting ends, which is when real hunger begins. If the return of hunger is ignored whenever it takes place, whether it is in 30, 60, or 90 days depending upon body weight and type of fast, at that point exactly, not a day before, starvation begins very slowly. Usually it takes a considerable period of time after that before death occurs. It is important to note that this discussion applies only to the abstention from food, not water. Death takes place very quickly in the absence of water.

So now, do you still find fasting scary? If we are talking about a 24-hour fast, there is practically nothing to do with starvation. However prolong fasting say beyond 60 days could be risky.

HEALTH WARNING: You must discuss with your doctor before going on prolong fasting and received medical supervision throughout the process.

Exercising While Fasting

Is exercising while fasting possible at all? Yes, of course.

When I talk about my eating habit, a lot of people immediately relate to starvation, hunger pangs, energyless and a lot many negative things. Exercising while fasting is somewhat a mission impossible.

Fact is, there are things in the world that look impossible are actually possible and practically doable.

Yesterday at the swimming pool, I had a chat with a life guard. He was wondering why I'm there everyday over lunch hour, so we exchanged thoughts on eating.

He was a young guy but his views towards eating are quite traditional. In fact, he is one of those who doesn't understand what fasting is though he sees a live example who come do swimming everyday over lunch hour without eating. He insisted I must eat breakfast, regardless of amount, I must eat something. And of course he was thinking that eating nothing until dinner will impact my work performance.

He would never know what he thinks is just in reverse of reality. I enjoy doing my workout in a fasted state and feel myself refreshed and energetic working in the afternoon.

People like the life guard who has no fasting experience may find it undoable or unbelievable to go on living without food for 24 hours, not to mention working and exercising during the period. What if you give it a try? You may start to fall in love with this new way of eating.

In fact, fasting is not something new. It is not even invented by people of our generation. It's been around since the Cavemen period when food was not always available. Great thinkers and philosophers such as Plato and Socrates both practiced fasting to attain mental and physical efficiency.

Our bodies are designed in a way to withstand periods of high and low calorie intake in order to keep us alive. Nowadays we have more than sufficient food, so we are requiring our bodies to do only the digestion work without utilize its ability to fast.

Short term intermittent fasting is like adding new wine to an old bottle. We make use of an ancient concept with new methods to achieve health and weight loss. Eat Stop Eat describes the process in a scientific way.

So why do so many people think that fasting means starving? I'll talk about this in my next post.

Intermittent Fasting Success - Exercising While Fasting

The DIRTY DOZEN Obsessive Compulsive Eating Habits

Does any or all of these seem to be the way you are eating? If so, you may want to read my free report on The Dirty Dozen.

1. Eating multiple small meals every day – even if it doesn’t fit your schedule
2. Drinking Green Tea to help burn fat
3. Drinking 8-10 glasses of water every day
4. pre, during, and post workout nutrition
5. Overeating “healthy foods”
6. Allow yourself a cheat meal once a week
7. Eating To Maintain Muscle Mass
8. Avoiding entire food groups
9. Making Your Nutrition Habits The Most Important Factor In Your Day
10. Keeping a Food Diary
11. Obsessing Over Nutrient Timing
12. Letting Your Diet Define You

Many people follow these rules in their quest to lose weight. However, most of these rules do very little to actually promote weight loss. Since it is believed that following these rules should ALWAYS cause weight loss, you have no choice but to assume the rule itself is correct and therefore YOU are doing something incorrectly.

I have a report called the DIRTY DOZEN which is all about the twelve most obsessive compulsive eating habits and how to break them.

I have the author’s permission to distribute it free for my readers. Email me at annafasting(at)yahoo(dot)com(dot)hk with a headline "The Dirty Dozen" and I’ll email you a copy. (I respect your privacy and your email address will be kept CONFIDENTIALLY)

Intermittent Fasting Success Report - Free Report on OCE