I want to share about an amazing secret I found.
Let us take a look at exhibit A. On the left was Why Keen a year ago, and this is the same guy now, 16kg lighter than before.
I am telling you this not because of pride about my appearance. If you know me, you would know I don’t care much about how I look. I am sharing this with you because I found an amazing secret to our health that I hope to share with the entire world.
I will touch a little bit about what I have found, but I think this topic has a lot of details and I would probably revisit over the next few months.
Not an Image Problem
That’s not to say I was fully happy with how I looked, it was more of me coming to terms that I would not look any better than how I was so might as well embrace reality as it was?
This was important because of the next point
Liver Let Die
I had a health check done 4 years ago which found that I had a fatty liver. Doctor advised me to check my diet, and abstain from alcohol. Alcohol was easy, as I was always just a casual drinker, but I am a lover of tasty food, and tasty food is almost always unhealthy.
Diets Did Not Work
Over the years, I tried everything to change my diet. I tried totally abstaining from sweet things (still important to cut, but totally stopping was almost impossible), replacing all carbs with beans and vegetables only, eating meat only (a form of ketogenic diet, even though I didn’t know what that was initially). Everything failed. What was the reason?
Because each time I got on a diet, I hated myself for it.
Start with Compassion
On the fitness front, I started doing what I could, tried running, swimming, and going to the gym regularly. I found out very early on that I needed to make sure I enjoyed myself in the process of doing that activity. It was about starting with compassion for myself.
The trick is finding something I enjoy the process of. In my case, it was jogging and walking long distances. At the start, I made sure there was a little reward (usually tasty food!), then over time, I could ramp up the difficulty, by either increasing the distance, or the speed.
It worked because I ‘tricked’ myself to enjoy the jog. Related to my recent framing of a “Shadow Self” or my roommate as I called him, I must get myself aligned with my programme of a better health.
If “trick” doesn’t sound positive enough, to put it in a different way, I was able to convince my body and my mind that this was something fun. I have been regularly jogging and walking for at least half an hour at an elevated heart rate of about 120 bpm every morning for more than a year now because of that.
So why the diets failed was because diets were troublesome, and expensive. Most of the time, it was also difficult to find diets which tasted good. Hence, there were many layers of pain, and I hated it.
Was there thus a different way to ‘trick’ myself into eating healthy without causing so much pain?
Fasting was the answer!
Part 1 – Intermittent Fasting
I began fasting in December 2022. It was an intermittent fasting, so I had 16 hours of not eating, then a window of 8 hours where I would get my meals. First of all, fasting 16 hours was not too difficult for me at all, it just meant skipping breakfast in the morning.
On top of that, how I got myself on the program willingly was to allow myself to eat anything I craved in the 8 hours of eating. That included ice cream, and char kway teow.
Also, I was not super strict on myself. Even during the 16 hours of fasting, if I ever felt pain or discomfort, I allowed myself to eat. The idea was to do this over the long run, and breaking the pattern was acceptable.
Over time, my weight dropped by 6 kg within a little more than a month.
Part 2 – Prolonged Fasting for Long Term health
Some time in February, I found an interesting documentary on Disney Plus. Chris Hemsworth, famous for playing one of the Avengers on the MCU, Thor, was on a journey to discovering secrets for long term health. In one of the episodes, he did a 4 day fast.
In that episode, they featured doctors and scientists who talked about the benefits of fasting, which are amazing (I would share more about what I learnt later). The TLDR version of it was, prolonged fasting had the potential to put the body into ketosis (which burnt fat as a main source of fuel), and autophagy (which gets our cells to go through renewal) if a person fasts up to 3 days and more.
Since I was already getting used to Intermittent Fasting, I just tried fasting for 3 days, and I have not looked back since.
Essentially, this kind of long term fasting was almost painless (I will share more later), I had more energy during the day, I ran faster, and I felt lighter. Thor essentially taught me how to unlock a superhuman power within my own body.
Some caveats I need to state here is that I am not a doctor, so do talk to your doctor to check if fasting is safe for you, especially if you have some underlying health problems! But if you like, we can talk about it too, and I will share more with you about this.