Friday, March 15, 2013

Arclein Diet a Complete Success





For the past two and one half years, I have been running a one person experiment on myself that I have called the Arclein Diet.  It has been completely successful and trouble free and sustainable.  Even better, it turned out to be totally easy and natural.

There is one underlying assumption that should be first addressed.  It is that you are conscious of what you eat and generally eat a balanced diet across a wide spectrum of sources.  With our present knowledge, that means elimination of processed foods generally outside rare exceptions of expressing bad judgment and the elimination of wheat products in our diet.  I personally have only recently cut all wheat out of my diet.  The take home is to eat as well as you are able to arrange and make a study of it.

In my case, I had been studying diets and different protocols for years but had always leaned strongly toward ample vegetables and salads as a matter of preference.  What had been certain was that none of that including exercise programs had ever done much to keep my body from weighing around thirty percent more than optimal.  Best practice does little to control weight.

Thus the first thing I ask anyone that attempts my approach is to simply establish a sound diet and make sure you are making it work.  There is no end of good advice out there and you should not need or even want my advice on this issue.

Once you are comfortable with what you eat, then it is time to discuss your experience with fasting.  This takes a little practice to get used to it.  Most make the error of trying to follow a multi day fast and simply are over whelmed and fall of the wagon.  This is very tempting because your motivation is always to lose a lot of weight yesterday.  It is also terribly wrong.  There is an effective way to fast briefly and allow your digestive system to remain dormant for a few hours.

What we set out to achieve is not an actual fast so much as establishing offsetting cycles of dormancy and normal digestion.

Why we need to do this is simple empirical science.  Our digestive tract on been fully engaged will hold 125% of its daily needs.  That means that if you are always well fed, you are always there.  Put another way, you must eat nine days of your body’s natural requirements every week to be satisfied, provide you are eating properly and avoiding addictive fattening agents.

Obviously we need to get two days worth of dormancy into our lives in order to operate at the level of weight which your body is programmed for.

I pull that trick off by picking two separated days and sometimes even three if I wish to push it such as in my case, Tuesday and Thursday and sometimes Saturday.

What happens is that I wake up and recognize I am on a fast day.  I start out with the small intestine already fully emptied and dormant and eight hours into my fast period.  As long as no solids pass my lips, this intestine will not get triggered and begin demanding.  The real surprise is that once you get used to this and perhaps use honey water or tea to replace short term energy that is taken up in the stomach, you will not get hungry at all until you are sliding into the evening or at least twenty hours later.  With a little practice, it is no trouble at all.

You then break your fast and do take it easy.

That is all I did, quite deliberately.  I know just how well my body resists such bright ideas.  Yet slowly and surely, in five pound breaks approximately two months apart, fifty pounds of excess body fat went away and has been gone for months now.

I make the conjecture that the body retains the excess circulation vein network for about two months until it decides you are serious and then lets it go.  It is not fast but it appears to be permanent.

I still retain several pounds of belly fat which is a different problem and we will now see if a limited wheat intake makes any real difference there.

In my case I dropped from a normal 235 pound level to a 195 pound level with a three pound swing either way depending on last meals and time of day.  The effective differential was that magic twenty five percent overage that I had been taught to consume all my life.

So the take home is that this protocol will allow your body to converge on its proper natural weight and stay there.  From that point, it is about polishing the result.  In my case, an active workout program could gain muscle in exchange for more fat loss in a fairly even exchange which is generally ideal for work outs.

What I have effectively done is lower the digestive bar so that the body discovers that it is no longer been forced to store an excess.  The process is slow and patient.  It is just that every once in a while, you will suddenly lose a few pounds.

For calculation purposes, figure out your so called recommended weight.  Better still, how much did you weigh when you were in top shape in your youth.  In my case that was 185 pounds.  Try to get it right because it matters.    Add twenty five percent.  That is the weight your body really wants to be if you never miss a meal.  In my case the number is 230 pounds.  Guess what, that was my default weight for forty years.

I actually started this program at that weight.  Once I made the change, it dropped to my present 195 over twenty months.  I changed nothing else and ate good satisfying meals.

I have done no tests on others with it and diabetics will need to be very careful trying this.  Otherwise, it works completely in eliminating the surplus and I heartily recommend it, particularly if your doctor wants you to lose weight.  This is not the time to test a dozen failed protocols.  I am completely comfortable that I can train everybody to eat this way and that the benefits are real.

By the way, this diet allows you to eat at the best restaurants as long as you dodge the bread and usually share an entree with your partner.  There is no need to sacrifice taste and quality.  It the entree is just too big, order a salad plate and catch up on your nutrients.  Yet if you do pig out, the fast the next day will set things right.

1 comment:

Dan Alter said...

Good idea, the Catholic church used to do this.