The Fast and Clever Gut Diets

I am one person who doesn’t need to worry about my weight, until now.

Working 9 to 5, watching two pre-teens boy and house chores left very little time for anything else. Walking and commuting is no longer part of my daily routine, so naturally fat is going to pile on. I am also a sloth. It runs in the family. I am not motivated to exercise unless I have to so.

I have been reading health books and magazines and none of them struck me as particularly do-able unless I resolve to change my lifestyle dramatically. The universal law of staying slim is this:

If you love eating, make sure you exercise a lot more (output > input) and if you don’t want to exercise then make sure you eat less (input < output).

You can’t eat your cake and have it. lol

The third alternative people rarely think of before this is: Not eating and exercising hard.

That’s exactly what The Fast Diet is championing. If you fast 2 days a week, very much like what is being practised by Muslim as Sunnah teaching on every Monday and Thursday, your body not only benefits from not eating occasionally but would seek to preserve and repair its cells. Not only you would lose fat, your blood sugar and cholesterol level goes down, your metabolic rate re-sets, inflammation reduced and the body switched on genes that protect and repair. The process autophagy is activated and the body will start looking for its own fat reserve and use it. Better results can be achieved with including HIIT (High-intensity interval training) Workouts, which again is another topic for another book, Fast Exercise.

Dr Michael Mosley published the book in 2012 and since then Intermittent Fasting has been hailed as the most effective slimming approach, except it is not fasting as we know it, but personalised fasting according to individual’s capability. You can fast without food with water only, or fast by eating only 500 to 800 calories per day. It is up to you. This 5:2 (eat 5 days, fast 2 days lifestyle) is not one-off but has to be sustainable but it also makes you conscious of the signals that your body is trying to tell you.

It is true in this passage that modern humans tend to mistake a whole range of emotions for hunger. We eat when we’re bored (that’s me), when we’re thirsty, when we’re around food, when we’re in company or simply when the clock happens to tell us it’s time for food. Most of us eat, too, just because it feels good.

I think it’s time to change that. I should eat just because I need to, not when I want to.

The other book, the Clever Guts Diet however is about taking care of your guts. Dr. Mosley is one of the very few people who swallowed a camera and saw his guts in action. Here, the book reads like a disgusting and dark adventure of the guts and readers would need a strong stomach to read it without cringing as there is a lot of mentions about bacteria, worms and poo testing; some of the which (the bacteria and worms) are vital for our digestive system to function properly because a lot of the modern disease of allergies, auto-immune disease, obesity etc. is a result of over-sanitisation of modern living and consumption of processed food. Contrary to what most would think, microbes, microbiome influences your mood, weight and immune system and it pays to take care and feed our stomach the right food. The hormones that are generated by your stomach is the one who tells the brain to stop eating or…… eat incessantly.

Research says babies born of Caesarean-section are prone to be overweight and developed allergies problem. Not travelling down the canal would mean the baby hasn’t had a good gulp of the mother’s faeces or vaginal fluids and the baby will not have the good bacteria in the system to fight the bad ones. The same would happen to babies who are exposed to antibiotics at a very young age. The ones that extract more energy from food thus make you fat.

As far as book reviews is concerned, I have been on a reading slump for a long while but I managed to finish these two books within 2 days. No sweat by far because the fonts are pretty big, explained in good humour and succinct, and only about 180 pages of written text that matters and the rest are recipes that readers could try if you wish. The Clever Guts Diet however contains prescriptive 2-stage plan to repair and reboot the guts. There are a lot of science and research talk included in these two books which only serves to be a delight for a reader like me. I am known to be stubborn by my family and friends but they got it all wrong because I can only be convinced by facts and evidence and these two books gave plenty of them. 🙂

I suggest having a go at the book and then leave it on your bedside or work table and dip in and out to be reminded of why you read them in the first place. You can get some inspirations on recipes that are good for you, practise the principles and hopefully in 12 weeks or however long or short you need, you’ll see a difference in your body weight, health and well being.

I know I am definitely going to give it a go. 🙂