Nine Weeks.

Calculated at bmi-club.com

I am so stoked! This last week, I have reached a long-awaited milestone, all thanks to the Alternate-Day Diet. By the way, I am in no way a representative of the doctor or his plan. I have not been contacted by them, I am not paid, I have nothing monetary to gain by telling you how well this is working. And it is! Today's weigh-in has me at 196.2, and that places my body mass index (BMI) under 30! I am officially no longer obese!

Ask anyone who has ever dieted long term, and they will tell you the same thing: all diets work until they don't. This stoppage mostly happens to women, but sometimes guys too. This is how it plays out: you're going merrily along, doing the diet, losing weight, (hopefully just fat) and not cheating. You're working out, and making healthy choices. Maybe you feel better, maybe not. But then the scale stops.

All your effort continues, but the scale won't budge. It starts to seem your efforts don't matter at all once the scale stops moving. So you ask around to find out how to make the weight come off again. Folks will tell you to look to see if your clothes are fitting differently (looser), which indicates body recomposition. You can be assured it is very likely muscle gain (hardly ever). You can be told you've got to be patient, as stalls happen, and is not a problem until two weeks have passed (which are agonizing and feel like forever). And for the record, I never noticed my clothes fitting differently once a diet stopped moving the scale. If you're large-ish and no longer just 20 or 30 pounds overweight, it takes a proportionally larger amount of weight loss to change sizes. I won't even discuss the folks who just tell you you're doing the diet "wrong".

So using the comfort that I was losing slowly but steadily was taken away when my diets failed. Atkins was the worst, because I had done reasonably well with it for over a year. What did I eventually do wrong to make it stop? Nothing measurable. I have concluded in the years since it happened that it was completely and unfortunately out of my control. Others who have gone down this road have to deal with discouraging results and the echoing emptiness of spirit called failure. Nobody who doesn't diet understands – it is the nature of the body to vehemently counteract attempts to lose fat. All diets will fail in the end, because of the actions your body has taken to shut it down.

So what are you truly left with after diet failure? You're worse off than before. Because you've been dieting, you now have a body that has changed how it handles energy expenditure (has slowed down), and is working hard to regain lost fat reserves, even as you're still trying figure out a new way to lose. Usually that's when people go completely off the rails and eat whatever they want, because why the hell not if the diet isn't working? At that point, weight seemingly goes on twice as fast than before you dieted. It's just not fair.

And what if you have not been on the diet long enough for it to fail? If you have reached your goal weight, your body still thinks it's in dieting mode, does not realize you have effectively stopped trying to lose more, and continues to try and force the fat cells to refill. I have heard it takes years for a goal weight to become the new norm, if ever. I have no idea how hard maintenance is going to be, but I've heard it's actually harder than dieting because of the confusion dieters face as to "what's next".

Back to diets not working... When the leptin/ghrelin dance gets together with metabolic slowdown and decides to mess with your goals, no diet in the world can match it. Scales stop recording losses. Stalls happen. The gamut of well-meaning advice usually covers mixing things up with less caloric intake, different macro or micro nutrients, using a different workout method, refeed, etc, ad nauseum. There are more "fixes" to a diet than actual diets, it seems.

Again, what I have noticed by using the JUDDD method is there are no stalls that last over a week, even with hormonal changes. Even if you're a woman. Even if you're 50. Even if you (still) don't go to the gym and have a sedentary lifestyle. Yes, I said it. I'm still sedentary, and still losing weight. To reiterate, I do not lose weight easily. Yet now I am.

Regarding the methodology of the diet, I can't even call it true fasting, since I eat anywhere from 400-600 calories (usually around 500) on my "down" days. I figure if you're eating, it's not a true fast, so it's only the piston effect of calorie shifting that is doing the heavy lifting. I can only come to the conclusion that JUDDD really IS confusing my body so the leptin/ghrelin effect does not bother me for more than a day. It does not allow metabolic slowdown. It does keep the appetite low so willpower can work. My energy levels are good now, as it takes the body a few "down" days to adjust to much lower calories.

Working out while fasting is not a problem either, (from what I've heard). I actually may go to the gym today, since I really don't have to. (I have a rebellious nature, see previous post) And I've lost 17 pounds since November 14, the start of the JUDDD Experiment.

So after nine weeks, I have concluded this diet is no longer an experiment. I am confident this method is going to take me all the way to goal. It would be perfect if I could completely not focus on food until it's time to have a meal. That would be bliss.