Member-only story
I’ve Lost Too Much Weight
Fasting has worked too well for me
I have cancer. I realized, when I was diagnosed with metastatic brain, lung, and liver cancer about 2 years ago that being very overweight was a risk factor. Well, I already had cancer, but I figured losing some of the excess weight would help my body better fight the disease.
So I started intermittent fasting. I varied the duration depending on my mood, which may make it more effective. If you always do a 16:8 fast or a 20:4 fast, then at some point your body adapts. So I’d “trick” my body — I’d go for a week doing 16:8 fasts, then I’d switch to OMAD (one meal a day) for a week. Every once in a while, I’d stop fasting and eat whenever I felt like it for a few days, typically with a 12–14 hour eating window.
This worked really well, particularly when I also started to cut out the unhealthy carbs and fats. I was essentially eating a ketogenic diet though I hadn’t really been trying to do so. I was just trying to eat clean.
I lost a lot of weight at a healthy pace, dropping about 50 pounds in 9 months. That doesn’t seem like much to young, healthy people but for an older woman whose body has been beaten up by chemo and cancer (I first got cancer back in 2004 when I was in my 30s), this was really a miracle.
