Speaker 1: 0:31

Hi, welcome to episode six of Hacking the Fat man. First I want to apologize for some radio silence. It's been several weeks since I actually did an episode, not that anyone remembers. But in episode five I talked about taking a vacation. We took three weeks to go to Portugal and Spain and initially I was planning to skip a week and then do a week or two on the road. The difficulties or the challenges I was having, and really it was too much, I brought the equipment but never really had the opportunity to set up or internet connectivity or just to be honest, I was tired. There there were we. We did a lot.

Speaker 1: 1:11

The trip was fantastic. We uh went to lisbon first, spent a day up in Porto, which is the region where they make port wine, did a factory tour there the Sandeman Port and that was really good. That was a lot of fun. And then we stayed in Lisbon for a couple of days. I went down South um to Porto Mayo um and actually got in uh, two days of scuba diving.

Speaker 1: 1:40

Four dives uh, in the in the Atlantic. Uh, the first dive was crazy. Uh, the visibility was zero. Um, it was first time I've dove where I was blind pretty much the whole time. The second, third and fourth dives are better. Um, I could see a lot more and, and you know, I think I put out on the Hacking the Fat man video daily diary. I put a couple of those dives in. Then we went to Seville for a couple of days beautiful city and then over to Barcelona to end of the trip. I did end up going up to a beautiful place called Tossa de Mar up going up to a beautiful place called Tossa de Mar, that's about an hour hour and 15 minutes north of Barcelona and got to dive in the Mediterranean and that was beautiful, it was a lot of fun.

Speaker 1: 2:27

Before I left, just to give you a status update. So before I left, I weighed myself and I was 240. I didn't do a single fast during the trip. I'm going to be honest, I probably didn't even do a micro fast during the trip. I kind of let myself I don't want to say go but it and I freaked. But I calmed myself down, realized when you travel there's a lot of fluid, especially for me at my age. I get fluid in the legs, especially for me at my age. I get fluid in the legs and a lot of that was a lot of the weight was that I weighed myself this morning and I'm 245. So I, you know pretty much back to where I was. This is also remember. After surgery a month ago I had gained 20 pounds. So I still think I have some fluid floating around. I can still feel it up here. I'm not really too worried about it, you know, but this happens right Every day. You just kind of wake up and you deal with what life has given you, and so I'm sitting at 245 right now. I'll just continue to work on it. Hopefully the goal is still to, by the end of the year, get close to 200 or at least under 220. So I'm still working on that and, yeah, the break.

Speaker 1: 4:04

Also, you know, some interesting things happened during the trip. One is I still have a problem taking my supplements when I travel. I had packed it, I'd done the daily, you know, sorted them, done the daily organizers, and I still probably only took about a third of supplements I should have been taking through the whole trip. And as the trip progressed I started noticing that I started having some bad thoughts. Not bad thoughts, not bad bad thoughts, but just, you know, I was getting tired and I was getting. Yeah, I can't really explain it. Anyway, didn't want to do the supplements started having thoughts.

Speaker 1: 4:43

I probably had more refined carbohydrates during this trip than I've had in the last two years combined, but it was good. I'm in a country that I may not get to again Hopefully I will at some point but you know, I'm going to enjoy the food, I'm going to enjoy the food, I'm going to enjoy the cuisine. All in all, I think I was for a vacation overall pretty good. The refined carbs and the alcohol is probably what led to me not losing weight. Yeah, cause the five dives I did actually was pretty heavy exercise. So, even given all that and not losing weight and coming in neutral, I guess, yeah, that's fun, fun, fun, fun things.

Speaker 1: 5:26

The other thing is and you know it gave me some time to think about it you know I was thinking about this. I was getting frustrated that I couldn't, couldn't do the podcast and I realized getting frustrated that I couldn't do the podcast, and I realized I had I don't know how to describe it I started to make this into something more than I originally intended. You know I started oh, I've got to do research and I've got to have something interesting to say, and I still hope this is interesting, but it wasn't really the reason why I started this podcast. Going back to episode one when I talked about it, I started this because I really am not I'm getting better at it but I wasn't sure of why the diet was working at this point. I had spent my whole life dieting. I talked to you guys, I was a swimmer, I was a water polo player. I talked to you guys, I was a swimmer, I was a water polo player. And yet somehow this is all starting to work and work naturally, and there was a lot of thought put into it, right, I made sure that it was part of my life, part of every day, and it's got to be easy and it's got to bring me joy and all the things that we've talked about in the previous episodes. But I really wasn't quite sure why it was working.

Speaker 1: 6:38

And ultimately, once I get down to my goal right, I'm not going to say I'm not near my goal I've lost over 300 pounds, yay, but I still have another 60 to go 70. And I've talked about this before is at some point I'm going to stop looking at pounds, my weight, and start focusing on my fat percentage, and I'm thinking somewhere in the 15% fat range or 12%, something like that. I don't think I've ever actually I was going to say I've never been under 20% fat ratio, but my sophomore year I definitely was. But my sophomore year in high school I was at a 29-inch waist and I was basically starving myself. I was anorexic, I was bulimic, I was going weeks without food and still working out Completely stupid. So, anyway, but the goal is to get down, get my fat down, percentage down. And at that point I think is when I say, okay, I've arrived, I've accomplished what I wanted to accomplish. Yeah, so you know. And so, thinking back on this, and you know, spending the time during the vacation and thinking about what I've been doing here with the podcast, yeah, I really, at that point, once I, once I get to the goal, whatever that goal is, I get to the goal, whatever that goal is, I plan on writing a book about it, right? And at that point I'll put in recipes and I'll put in things like that.

Speaker 1: 8:11

And so the original idea of this podcast was just to help me record this last little bit, the 60 pounds that I have left. I have to transition from being in weight loss mode. Know, I keep saying that it needs to be an everyday thing, but at some point I'll stop being in weight loss and start being in maintenance mode. At that point, do I continue to take the ZEP bound? These are still questions I have. Do I cut back on the ZEP bound, you know?

Speaker 1: 8:39

And so I really wanted to do this podcast to help me document that. I really wanted to do this podcast to help me document that, and I hope you know that all of you will want to join me on this, just to see if I actually make it. But yeah, I was starting to cut corners a little bit Not cut corners, but you know, it's one of those things where, like, if you have a weekly check-in, I was trying to be more than I was ready to be here. This is a side, not even a side gig for me. This is I'm doing this in my spare time. Half the time I'm talking I'm actually talking to myself, though I hope you get value out of what I'm discussing, but yeah, so I just wanted to kind of reset expectation. If I miss a couple of weeks, it's okay, my apologies if you're really into hearing me talk, but I will try to do this weekly.

Speaker 1: 9:30

Like I said, I want to document what I faced during the week and, in a year from now, be able to go through these and use this information and what I've captured as the basis for a book. So you get to come along with me on that. You'll be like hey, when you read the book you'll be like hey. I remember when Drew was actually dealing with this and talking about it. So on that, I've kind of given you a status. I'm sitting at 245. I'm happy with that in the sense of well, I'm much happier with 245 than 255. That did worry me. I had a moment of yeah, it was a bad moment.

Speaker 1: 10:11

Monday was not a good day for me. In fact, I was trying to fast that day and I just happened to weigh myself. I was like, let me see where I was, even though in my head I knew that I had gained liquid in the body, I had swelling, and I'm like let's just see where I am and I was not expecting 250. From less than five days later I'm at 245. So and I've had one fast day this week, one micro fast day.

Speaker 1: 10:41

Pretty much it's been a standard week, as I've discussed. So Monday I try to micro or fast. If I can't do it Monday, then I fast Tuesday. I then do a micro fast. Micro fasts are just to remind everyone. A micro fast to me, by my definition, is, is somewhere between 500 and 1200 calories or a thousand calories. So I've had two of those this week. I've had a couple of keto days where I focused just solely on protein, and we're heading into the weekend and I'll probably just stick with keto. I'm going to try to be a little bit better than I've been. Obviously, over the last three weeks I have not been good at all, so I'll get back to that.

Speaker 1: 11:20

So yeah, this week was pretty challenging. I mean, I'm coming off the travel, I'm tired. It took a lot out of me. My feet are swollen, my legs are swollen. The flight from Barcelona we flew from Barcelona. That's a two and a half hour flight to London. We had a five hour layover in London. This is the flight back A five hour layover in London, and then we had the 12 hours from London to LA, and then we had the 12 hours from London to LA and then I had to get back on a plane the next day, fly out to my sister-in-law's in Vegas so that I can get my car and my dogs and drive home and if you've ever driven out of Vegas on a Sunday, it's always bad. This day was a lot worse than I had ever seen it. On that outside of a holiday weekend, there were literally seven accidents. It took me seven hours to drive the puppies back home. So I was pretty exhausted by the time Monday came.

Speaker 1: 12:16

And then stepping on the scale which I probably shouldn't have done, even though I knew better than that and getting that result, it sent me into a spiral. I'm not going to lie. I got very frustrated. I got very, and after a while I just calmed down. I thought about everything that was going on and just got this and I think I talked about this in episode two or three where consistency isn't consistently going down. There's never a straight line. There's always ups and downs. Life's full of it. We know this is ups and downs. Consistency is about making that decision every single day, with whatever you're facing, to go and tackle it.

Speaker 1: 12:56

And by the time Monday afternoon came around, I went okay, I haven't fasted pretty much for the month of July. I haven't been doing any lemon water for the better part of four weeks. I had some lemon water or some citrus while I was in Portugal and Spain, but it wasn't the daily consistent that I've been doing, and you know I swear by it. I actually think it helps with my appetite control, along with the supplements. I think the supplements also help with my mood, and so I had just gotten myself all out of whack and so Monday evening I just stopped and I went, okay, went and made myself some lemon water, went and took my supplements, went to sleep, slept great because I was exhausted. And then every day I've just been repeating that I haven't been doing the daily video diaries yet I'll probably wait. I've got a couple of things coming up next week that it's my 40th high school reunion, so I'm heading down to my hometown of Costa Mesa, california, go Mustangs and seeing some friends I haven't seen in a very long time. So again, another week of I'll try to be good, I'll be good for the most part, but, yeah, probably not a time I really want to put a camera on myself, but we'll see. We'll see how it goes. No, I'll probably won't be doing that. So, yeah, that's been the week.

Speaker 1: 14:26

It's been very challenging and again I just am reminding myself that I need to make this commitment every single day and that you know you can't necessarily. You can take a day off now and again, but at some point you know I will not be gaining weight again. So that the two 55 was kind of a a a wake-up call for me. Not a wake-up call, but uh. Well, there was a wake-up call. It was, uh, wait a minute, we're not doing this, we're not going back up and wait, absolutely not. And I just kind of redoubled down and made that commitment again. Um, so, looking forward to it, I'm feeling good, I'm happy. You know, like I said, five days, 245. Did I lose 10 pounds? No, it wasn't fat, it was just water retention, I suspect. If I suspect, I gained maybe a pound or two from from the vacation.

Speaker 1: 15:18

So during the trip I tried to stay up on my reading, looking for articles talking about weight loss or or specifically around, either keto, cyclical keto or intermittent fasting or fasting, and one came out. Actually, it came out July 30th. That was pretty interesting. I've had questions over the years. So I mentioned that I swam and played water polo and I was anorexic and bulimic during that time.

Speaker 1: 15:42

So one of the things that's always bothered me not bothered me but I had questions about was supposedly you can't build muscle without a caloric overage. If you want to build muscle, you have to eat more than your body expends and then do the workouts and then you get to build muscle. Obviously, if you want to lose weight and I've talked about this in the prior podcast, that I think it's like 3,500 calories you have to be in a deficit for every 3,500 calories for every pound, and so if you're in a caloric deficit, which is what I've been doing, then you'll lose weight. But one of the things I've never really understood was well, that's all timing right, so I eat fairly big meals. When I do eat, I eat fairly big meals. I'm not the 200 to 300 calorie meal. I tend to go for five to 600 calories per meal. Sometimes I'll even go up to 1200 calories, depending on what kind of day it is and what I'm feeling.

Speaker 1: 16:42

So anyway, I came across this article that touched upon it. It's out of Men's Health, published on July 30th. It's by Andrew Heffernan and Corey Ritchie and medically reviewed by Aaron Kinney, and they are talking about well, the title is let me make sure I can see it what to know about intermittent fasting and your workouts. They worked with Luca Donick Lakers over the summer, who was doing intermittent fasting to help get in better shape but then also was trying to work out, and so they actually touched upon this, and so there were some interesting things that I got about it.

Speaker 1: 17:20

So first is definition of intermittent fasting. There's a lot of different types of fasting. I use the term microfast and I'm going to be honest, I invented it. I don't even know if it's a real thing. It is a real thing because it is to me right, and a microfast to me is I'm fasting, but I'm going to stay within a very limited range of 500 to 1,000 calories. Intermittent fasting is pretty much what I do every single day. That's not a pure fasting day and what I mean by that is so intermittent fasting. There's different schedules that can be intermittent fasting, but the most basic one is you only eat for an eight hour period during an eight hour period during the day and I've talked about that I try to tend to get most of my calories in the morning or early afternoon, and by four or five o'clock if I haven't eaten or I don't have any calories or try not to have any calories after five o'clock. So that's intermittent fasting is just this you fast for 16 hours, you eat for eight hours. So that was interesting to me, that there's actually a makes sense, a definition out there for it.

Speaker 1: 18:28

They go into the benefits of it and I've talked about it by restricting our calories. Getting our calories earlier in the day we tend to avoid the. You know I ate at eight o'clock at night. I had 800 calories. I go to sleep and that's all just going to turn to fat. So we tend to use more of the calories for exercise or for activities and it helps us reduce.

Speaker 1: 18:53

For me personally, it helps reduce the weight. But it also you know, there's evidence that you know I found it. It helps lower my blood pressure. At my peak weight I was. I think my A1C was 6'7", which is literally walking into the 6'8 is diabetes, or at least that's what my doctor said. So I was walking through. The way he put it was I was in the doorway heading towards diabetes. Last time I had it measured was April and I was 5'3" and so that's going well. But it also can. So it can also help with diabetes or lower your bread pressure.

Speaker 1: 19:29

The one interesting thing was it says it helps maintain muscle mass and they kind of get into why that is a little bit, basically, by doing the intermittent fasting, the 16-8, or whatever version of intermittent fasting you're doing, it helps preserve the muscle mass because you're not totally starving yourself and your body tends to not. 16 hours is not the point where your body's going to start devouring muscle. But they do talk later on that, if your goal is to maximize muscle, intermittent fasting is there are some what they call them roadblocks or some potholes that you got to watch out for. And really, if you think about it, what they said was it makes sense, basically, you don't want to do your workouts at hour 15 of your fast because your body's not there and your calories aren't there, the carbohydrates aren't there and you could burn muscle faster. Their suggestion was that you sandwich pun intended, you're eating between your workouts. So if you are going to work out, you should eat just before the workout and then you should do your recovery thing and that should all be within the eight-hour window of your intermittent, your eating portion of your intermittent fast. And the other thing that I found interesting and I'm going to research a little bit more was they were saying that even though you, you're fasting and you're you're in a caloric deprivation that lifting weights, even in that uh uh state, actually helps preserve muscle, and that's something I'm going to. They don't really go into it much further there, but it that's an interesting why. Why sort of makes sense to me. But you know, I just said earlier that if you know you did something, if you tried to lift at hour 15 of your fast, you might burn more muscle. So anyway, I've got to research that a little bit more. But that was another interesting takeaway out of the article. So yeah, basically they say, eat before you lift weights, sandwich your workout between the meals. But they also then said that you can do cardio, that it like that Doesn't really burn down the muscle, so that is okay, to do cardio during a fasting. This was all just interesting for me in the sense of, as I'm starting to.

Speaker 1: 22:17

You know, I've talked about the dives that I did. That's really kind of my future. I absolutely 100% love scuba diving. I am in my natural habitat in the water. I still have things I need to work on. My knees still aren't there yet. A year ago I was walking with a cane. I don't need the cane anymore, but I was having problems carrying the scuba gear and getting out of the water. That's still an issue for it. We were in Pasadena Mara out of the water. That's still an issue for it. We were in Paso de Mar it was a shore dive. In Puerto Mayo it was pontoon boats, a boat dive. So anyway, so I still have things to work on.

Speaker 1: 22:56

But as I'm starting to move into a more active lifestyle up until now I've 300 pounds. I barely outside of just doing gardening and getting up and moving. I haven't really done activities. I haven't done the exercise and I've talked about this in the previous podcast. Right, if you're exercising just to lose weight, you're doing it wrong. I want to exercise. I want to do activities that I enjoy, that bring me happiness. I don't want to have to get up and well, I've got to run three miles today because my diet requires me to run three miles. I'm not. I'm never going to do that again. I'll go run three miles to help my knees so that I can go do shore diving. I know it's just mind games, but it matters to me so as I move into it. So these are interesting and it did was.

Speaker 1: 23:40

It's been a long time question I've had of. You know I think I built muscle even when I was fasting, and now this kind of explains it was most of the time. Even in my youth, in my twenties, in college, I tended to eat. Actually, very rarely did I eat before. If you've ever done some hardcore swimming or some hardcore audio, eating is never a good thing because you'll end up just throwing it up. So I tended to eat, but I would eat immediately after and I think that's why I was able to. I knew I had built muscle and lost weight and so it was a question I have and this kind of helped me understand and think about what it is and why that happened. So that helped answer some questions.

Speaker 1: 24:25

Anyway, interesting that Luca is doing the intermittent fasting. Also, now that I understand the definition of intermittent fasting, I realize outside of a pure fasting day, I'm doing it every single day. Even on the days I say that it's free reign on a Saturday or Sunday, I'm still limiting it to the eight hour window. I very rarely will have anything If I know I'm going to a party or a dinner for something. I know that dinner is six o'clock. I probably won't eat anything until then and even then I'll keep it under a thousand calories. So I technically still is it. Yes, it's late in the evening. Yes, I could tend. That's why I kind of tend to if it's a late dinner, late meal in the evening, I tend to make sure to not quite eat as much as I do or as I could. Anyway, I found it interesting More articles on intermittent fasting, more articles on the exercise and how it all works.

Speaker 1: 25:28

So that's it. That was this week. We'll see what next week. Like I said, next week I'm heading down to my hometown, costa Mesa. I'm going to be down there and for my 40th high school reunion. Yes, I'm old. I look forward to having some good times with people and seeing everyone. So anyway, thank you all for listening and we'll see you next week. All right, cheers, bye.