The JUDDD Experiment.

OK, here we go again with a new approach because frankly, it seems all my old approaches do not work. I am speaking of course, of dieting (yes, I will use that word for the time being), losing unwanted fat, and regaining stamina that seems to have disappeared over the course of the years.

A bit of previous history: I am obese. I got that way through a chain of events, starting with pregnancy in 1994. Up until that time, I was not thin, but I was within range of “normal” weight and BMI. That pregnancy not only changed my body, but my daily lifestyle also. I got married, I had a baby, I stopped commuting (which drastically changed how much walking I did in a day), I got depressed, I got obese.

Probably in that order. From that time on, I have been up and down on the scale, as high as 235, as low as 165, that low weight almost right after the pregnancy. I was forced to lose the weight because my husband (ex, for many years now) insisted I not be a fat wife. He caused the depression mentioned in the previous paragraph.

This is also not my first blog, it is my third on my weight loss “journey”. What a word to use. Journey. It’s not a journey, it’s war. You are fighting skirmish after skirmish with your own tendency to hold onto stores of fat your hormones don’t want to let go. They fight dirty, too, amping up hunger and cravings, slowing down metabolism, making the fat-burning process harder than it ever needs to be, due to some age-old DNA that says “Store it! Store it ALL!!!”

The way to win is to have a better strategy than your body. I have been absolutely positive I have had that winning strategy, only to have my body outflank me time after time. The charts don’t lie, and that’s only since I’ve gone online to track my “progress”.

The things I’ve tried are myriad: Lots of exercise, and no exercise, cycling between weight lifting and cardio. I’ve tried thermogenics, carb blockers, fat blockers, leptin blockers, yohimbe, green tea, cinnamon, CLA, ALA, vitamins, lots of water, no caffeine, HGH, high doses of fiber, meal replacement shakes, creatine, ECA stack, and the list goes back for over a decade and a half.

The “official” diets have been two: Weight Watchers and Atkins. The unofficial one has been just starving myself slowly. I have since learned that approach is the worst of the bunch. Weight Watchers never worked, and Atkins worked until I stalled. And stalled again. And stalled again. And stalled again. Infuriatingly slow and full of weeks or months where the scale refused to budge more than a fraction of a pound a week, or not at all. All this while eating tuna, eggs, meat, nuts, cheese, and salads. And working out like a fiend.

After a year, I started asking in the forum I journaled in what was wrong with my approach. It drove me nuts that other people were seeing progress and meeting their goals, and I was stuck. Simply stuck. After the usual “one size fits all” advice, I was then told I must be hypothyroid.

The advice I got was so insistent to find a “good” endocrinologist that I embarked on a flurry of doctor visits in order to “prove” I had a very good reason why my diet wasn’t working: my thyroid was wonky! Unfortunately, the numbers were low, but within range. No miracle cure to help me lose weight was forthcoming. This news was devastating, and I gave up on Atkins, and over the next years, put all the weight back on again.

And I would diet again. And gain it again. And diet again. And gain it right back. Yo-yo, rubberband, call it what you will. I could not get enough momentum to get to goal, or the desire to do so. It takes a huge commitment, focus, willpower, and patience to diet. If you have all those things and a dietary approach that won’t “work”, the house of cards comes down.

My problem in a nutshell is snacking. I love sweet, I love salty. I love crunchy and creamy. I love indulging in pastries, cookies, pies, brownies, muffins, chips, chocolate, and other foods that are meant to store fat. My Italian heritage made the rest of the picture complete: the overabundance of pasta and bread in my daily life while growing up, which taught my mind and body to love starches.

I also grew up semi-athletic, so this is even worse for me, as I can’t move like I want to any longer. I recently had to run to catch a connecting flight, and couldn’t run more than partway. I literally could not. It was humbling. That was after I started my diet, but had not found a strategy to do so, so it was slow, almost nonexistent weight loss.

I am currently 50 years old. I am a woman. I have not hit menopause, but it’s making itself known in several ways that it won’t wait much longer. I know it’s going to be a worse war if I let menopause onto the field. It’s got to happen before then. I must reach goal, and I keep reading, reading, reading to find the key.

I have bought Tom Venuto’s “Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle”, I have bought “Fat Loss for Idiots”, I have both the new and old version of Atkins, I have a membership for the online version of Weight Watchers, I subscribe to ediets, I have “The South Beach Diet”, I have read Lyle McDonald’s carb cycling book, I have read Jon Benson’s material. I am the Energizer Bunny. I won’t give up. But it’s extremely hard to find something that sounds so promising in the first months but ultimately fails me by not taking metabolic slowdown into account. This is true for anyone, by the way.

I not only needs a diet that continues to work, I need something sustainable, and something simple. I can track calories, but planning meals for the long run is just beyond my capabilities. I can’t keep track of all my macronutrients, and don’t want to. I hate many diet foods. Fiber is NOT my friend. I hate drinking only water, and no, I haven’t gotten used to it this past 15 years. I still hate water.

I also hate going to the gym, although I used to be a gym rat. Zumba and other dance-related workouts make me nuts, as I have two left feet and always get the steps confused. I was never a disco girl, and dance like my feet are sticky. It’s not pretty, and I hate doing it. So I tried videos. Then I tried exercise games on the gaming systems.

Nothing stuck. I have a two-day-old membership to Gold’s, which I haven’t used yet. I keep telling myself I’m going tomorrow. And this time, I will. The almighty blog will keep me accountable.
So on to the experiement: For the third day now, I am giving the Alternate-Day Diet a go-round. It’s also known as Johnson’s Up Day/Down Day Diet, or JUDDD. I’m keeping it lower carb for the time being, as I believe starches are still a problem for any dieter.

This time I started dieting again around mid-July at 229. I bought a bodybugg, and will comment on that later. I started wearing it and counting what I was burning, and journaling my food intake. It eventually got me to about 223 pounds, and on October 20 I went back to the old mainstay, Atkins. Except once the water weight was gone, I immediately stalled at 213.5. For weeks. And I realized this was going to take forever again, have the same frustrating stalls again, and settled into the long wait for the first of many stalls to break past this set-point.

Then I came across a JUDDD thread in a low carb forum I occasionally lurk on. I dismissed it immediately, simply because in the past, well-meaning posters on forums were the reason I went a bit batshit while looking for a cure for my nonexistent "hypothyroid problem" in 2006.

But the subject of JUDDDing kept popping up. I lurked and saw the numbers on some of the JUDDD’ers. A good number of them had hit goal. Furthermore, some were having trouble getting the weight loss under control. They were losing beyond goal! I decided to look further, do the research, and read Johnson’s book. The science seems sound, and other professionals have espoused different approaches to this form of dieting.

The method I’ve decided upon is the Johnson method of intermittent fasting. Other IF methods use the approach of eating within a permissible time window, some approach it by fasting for an entire day, from one to four days a week in order to fool the metabolism. The IF theory is that the body does not get the signals it needs in order to slow metabolism, so it can’t create the environment where fat-storing mode is maintained, and by using the Johnson method, cravings and hunger pangs are reduced greatly. The simple beauty is the rapid-cycling nature of the diet keeps the mechanism “guessing”. It claims a SIRT1 gene is expressed, but I am unsure of that at this time. I like specifics, not vague generalities.

Using this approach, I fast every other day, but still eat roughly 500 calories through the day (because it’s easier to maintain for a lifestyle change), followed by a higher calorie day in order to average out to a caloric deficiency. The story goes, every other day the decrease in caloric intake makes the fat release from its stores.

I have seen it compared to a piston action, and it makes sense. I have also seen it compared to anorexia, and that does not make sense. I mean, really. I’m over 200 pounds. I am in no danger of becoming anorexic because I reduce my calories several times a week. If you are in danger of this disease recurring, dieting in any form is off the table.

So what has it done for me so far? On November 1, I was at 213.5.

Until November 13, I was at 213.5.

On November 16, after only one up day and one down day, I was at 211. As an FYI, it’s not water weight. I shed that during the Induction period on Atkins, weeks earlier.

Coincidence? Maybe. Probably likely. But I’m sticking with JUDDD for now and will report further.