Best Fasting for Weight Loss Stories on the Internet

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When I started fasting for weight loss I was unaware of any large scale success stories other than that of legendary hero of fasting Angus Barbieri, (AKA “The Mad Scottsman”). After I did my initial fast I gradually found a few more, but there are not many out there and aside from Barbieri none seem to be documented in the medical literature in a helpful way. Finding them can be fairly difficult so I decided a resources article was in order.

The best and most informative stories came off Youtube, which has a lot of skinny hippy dudes doing long fasts, but has a few serious fasting for weight loss studies. I concentrated on stories that involved longer fasting periods. I’ve included a few intermittent fasters, especially of longer duration.

YouTube Stories

Lindsey Adams with a 140 pound weight loss probably has the most informative fasting for weight loss that I’ve found on the internet. I checked out her facebook page and she had a recent picture up and she’s keeping up the loss. She is highly religious and African American which may have led her to fasting. I’ve found that talking to African Americans about fasting that there is higher probability of an open mind on the subject or approval. I think this is due to several religious traditions that emphasize fasting that are popular in the African American community.

She’s now a health coach and motivational speaker. In her videos contemporaneous with the loss she talks about needing to fast for the rest of her life, which I think is something I will clearly need to do as well. (In face it seems like kind of an obvious no brainer that I get asked about a lot.) She also commented about the fasting retraining her hunger which I’ve found as well.

She has a lot of content on her channel, not all of which emphasizes the fasting. I suspect that fasting gets a poor reception with paying clients.

Fasting for Weight loss is a youtube channel of an African American lady who fasted for weight loss and lost eighty pounds. She didn’t post for 4 years and then posted an attempt at a forty day fast to attempt to lose what appeared to be a regain of a large percentage of the weight. The videos progressed up to day 10 and then there appears to be no more content.





Bad Ass Prius is the 2012 channel of a male who lost 125 lbs over a 40 day and then a 65 day water fast. It’s informative as there are longer fasting periods. The videos are daily takes of his experiences periodically. You can see him shrinking if you watch the videos.

I rank this as the second most informative and inspirational post. There are no followup posts. I usually take this as a bad sign, but you never know. One of the reasons I’m shying away from fasts longer than 20 days is that I want to make periodic fasts a lifetime habit and I think longer fasts have a one shot deal type of effect and don’t lend themselves to making fasting a habit.

Part of his story that I found interesting was that he didn’t really gain weight until after he left the Army. This agrees with a lot of what I’ve observed that exercise doesn’t really have a lot of effectiveness for weight loss, but can really help with preventing gain.

I’m avoiding as a general rule single fasts for weight loss since I believe most people need to make it a habit. The exceptions would be people who just want to lose a few pounds. However, this young woman seems to have maintained the benefits of her fast which took her from in really good shape to fashionably healthy. She also eats really healthy and has compelling content so I’m including it.

25 day water fast in 2014. Frequent Youtuber appears to have maintained benefits.

The best fasting for weight loss story off youtube I think is that of Sumaya Kazi. Published in a Medium article she describes a 4:3 style of fasting where she eats for four days and then fasts for three. The length hits a grey area between intermittent fasting and using longer term fasts.

I especially like her story and writings on it because she seems like a fairly observant rational person who is careful in coming to conclusions. She mentions both not being able to exercise for the first couple months and failure with other more traditional methods. She’s also into startups and entrepreneurship, affinities which I assume are correlated with intelligence and goodsense. (I sell domain names for entrepreneurs as a side business.)

Reddit

Reddit has an especially active fasting subreddit that you should upvote. Alot of the threads seem to be one-off long fasts, which are cool, but not what I was after in terms of large weight loss. Two stories standout.

User Wallabybyebye on Reddit writes on reddit of having lost 100+ pounds through a combination of 48 hours fasts and some longer ones up to about 6 days. He has a neat graph of his weight and fasting days at imgur. This was an especially good post.

When not eating he tries to be low carb and cooked by him but not super strict

Slash Caleb is another good story. More intermittent fasting with shorter periods.

Intensive Dietary Management is the blog/site that I think I read before trying fasting. In any case I found it soon afterwards at least and formed much of the basis for my fasting. There are a number of patient profiles to check out. Put patient in the search function on the site to bring them up not all the stories are tagged patient profile. A lot of profiles don’t have extreme weight loss but have individuals achieving diabetic control. Some notable profiles to me were.

Shannon – Male who is doing a four day fast weekly. Has lost approximately 100 pounds.

Reyn – Male who has lost 100+ pounds some longer fasting session.

Kirk –-Male with 100 pound weight loss not clear how much fasting involved.

Other Stories

5-2 Diet Forum

Kilda on the 5-2 diet forum which isn’t quite an intermittent fast or extended fast, but alternate days of extremely low calories, has an interesting blurb. She talks about the fasting resetting her relationship with food and hunger.

Quora

There’s an interesting thread on quora about intermittent fasting.

Business Insider

Dan Zigmond an executive at facebook has practiced a daily 9 hour eating window and has lost 20 pounds. He credits intermittent fasting with changing his life.

Cure Zone

Curezone has an extensive discussion board on fasting. It has a lot content but more kinda new agey then I’m usually comfortable with. I did find a post by a user named Mouseclick informative.

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