Yesterday was supposed to be a fasting day. It wasn’t. I decided not long after I arrived at work that it wouldn’t be. Since it was Friday and I’d made it through another week of misery, I decided I deserved a reward, and that reward would be another trip to P. Terry’s after work. I continue to be dumbfounded at how I can eat a cheeseburger and fries for dinner and still lose weight, and I wanted to test that phenomenon once again. While the fast food meal was the only meal of the day—and it was consumed near the end of the day— it seems like such a high calorie, high carbohydrate meal would have more of an impact. But I still lost a pound, and I’ll likely lose a bit more after my morning coffee. I’m pretty sure I could eat such a meal every day, and, as long as it was the only meal, I’d lose about two pounds each day. Obviously, doing so would be terrible for my blood pressure and cholesterol level, but still it’s interesting that I could actually achieve significant weight loss over time by following a P. Terry’s diet.

It all really does come down to calories at the end of the day (duh). I lost a substantial amount of weight in a relatively short amount of time a few years ago, and I was eating three times per day (including a dinner meal consisting of a carbohydrate-heavy black bean and cheese burrito), but I wasn’t eating a lot (I’d have an apple for breakfast and broccoli and hummus for lunch), so the weight just came off.

One thing about changing your general diet is that it has to be sustainable. What I’m doing right now (fasting three days a week) is not sustainable in the long-term; the function of intermittent fasting is to lose significant weight in a shorter amount of time compared to other diet methods. Intermittent fasting is supposed to be particularly good for losing belly fat, but any diet in which glucose stores are depleted and the body turns to producing and consuming ketones for energy will burn fat (ketones are produced by the breakdown of fats). While a significant percentage of the world’s population survives on a (high-carbohydrate) diet including beans and rice, the reason why they’re not fat is simply because they’re not eating excessively; their daily calorie count is just adequate enough for basal metabolism.

There are advantages to fasting beyond weight loss, however. Immune cells are regenerated, inflammation is cooled, and the production of brain-derived neurotrophic factor is stimulated. But, in terms of losing weight, it’s pretty simple: eating once per day (or not eating at all) exhausts carbohydrates and thus burns fat, and, separately, it results in calorie restriction.

Anyway, I’m not going to change to a cheeseburger and fries diet, but it’s a nice treat once in a while.