Week Two

That's week two complete. It really wasn't difficult to survive on 600 calories per day for me. I lost some weight (quite a lot actually at around ten pounds) but that's partly the point of the experiment so I won't worry unduly about it. My average fasting blood glucose numbers fell by about 0.5mmol/l (9mg/dL) but stabilised at that point and didn't go any lower. My body fat percentage fell by about 2% (or 10% of the starting value).

I've now got to think about what I'm going to do from now on, since I return to work on Monday. I also want to increase the amount of strength training I'm doing and I've found that I've not been able to do this on the low calorie diet. In fact, in some exercises I've been unable to even continue with the same weight, sets and repetitions that I could do before the experiment. I've decided that for the next week or two at least, I'm going to return to my "normal" diet. This isn't normal in the English sense; I won't be eating meat, as I haven't done so for twenty-five years, and I won't be eating bread, rice and pasta. It will be the normal-for-me, low carbohydrate, high protein, high fat, high fibre, vegetarian diet.

I'll keep an eye on my blood glucose over the next couple of weeks and report back on any improvement or deterioration. This might help me understand whether the low calorie diet has made any difference. I could do a glucose tolerance test - drinking nearly a full bottle of Lucozade and monitoring the blood glucose over two hours - but this isn't something I want to put my body through.

Week One

Week one is now over. I probably should have monitored more information than just my fasting blood glucose and weight. However, that's the only data I have so it seems worth reporting on.

During the first week my average fasting blood glucose, including the Saturday where no change had been made before the FBG reading, was 5.1mmol/l (92mg/dL). I've gone back through the readings from the week before the experiment and found that my average FBG was 5.6mmol/l (101mg/dL). So that's an improvement of 0.5mmol/l (9mg/dL). Not a huge jump but my starting numbers were pretty good.

My weight has plummeted from the lack of food (hardly surprising!) At the start of the experiment I weighed 11 stones, which is 154 pounds or 69.9kg. After just one week I have lost 6 pounds to reach 10 stones and 8 pounds, which is 148 pounds or 67.1kg. My BMI has fallen from 23.4 to 22.5, both of which are in the "healthy" range. My body fat percentage, measured using electronic scales and some form of magic, dropped from 20.1% to 18.6%.

On the body fat percentage, a starting point of 154 pound in weight and 20.1% body fat suggests that total fat used to have about 31 pounds of fat and 123 pounds of other "stuff". With the new weight and body fat percentage I now have 27.5 pounds of fat and 120.5 pounds of stuff. That means that I've lost 2.5 pounds of something that isn't fat. Assuming that my brain and bones haven't shrunk, some, if not all, of that must be muscle, which is concerning.