Beginner Tips: Take Measurements

Your future self will thank you if you spend some time today taking a few key measurements.

Take your waist measurement! You’ll thank me later. 

• It’s very important how you measure your waist.

• Do not rely on your pants size. For example, my husband wears size 34 pants but when he started a few months ago, the largest part of his stomach measured 40” (fasting has him down a few inches from that now). That’s because pants are often worn lower or higher than the largest part.

• You need to measure the largest part of your relaxed belly. Don’t pull the tape measure tight. Make sure you aren’t sucked in at all.  

• Write the number down in your phone with the date so you won’t lose it. 

Take a before photo that you’d be comfortable sharing with others.

When I advocate this, it’s not because fasting is all about how you look. However, when I see a picture of someone who’s lost 10 inches off their waist, I see a person who no longer has fat surrounding their internal organs. Losing abdominal obesity is important for health.

Plus, progress photos are motivating. You don’t have to ever share it if you don’t want. But you never know, you may end up wanting to show others your progress someday. Sometimes people make the mistake of taking their “before” photo in something skimpy because they think they’ll never want to show anyone so wear normal clothes.

Use the scale with caution.

Some beginners write down their weight the day they begin and then purposefully don’t weigh again at all during the first month. I’m all for this, especially if you’re the kind of person who allows your hopes to rise and fall with the scale. No one’s weight loss journey is ever close to linear.

For those who want to weigh more often, I really like an app called Happy Scale (Libra for Android). You enter in your weight and it draws a graph for you that smooths out the ups and downs. Here’s August weight loss. I had the most fluctuations the first month I started alternate day fasting. The blue dots are what I actually entered.

On Aug 1st 2022 I weighed 180 lbs and then on Aug 4th I was 173. But then on Aug 6th I was up at 178 and then on Aug 8 I was down at 173 again. The fluctuations can drive you crazy but it’s nice to see the downward trend.

I’ve found that weight starts to even out later on. Here’s what Jan. 2023 looked like:

You can see that I’m no longer having the wild swings in weight that I used to have. And yet, it would look kind of weird that on Jan 12 I logged 145.6 and then one week later on Jan 19 I logged 145.0. But the graph showed that I was still on a downward trend. (That little plateau you see on the far left, that’s called Christmas. I had a really yummy Christmas).

Blood Work

If you’re motivated by hard data like I am, go to your doctor and ask for 3 tests:

• Hemoglobin A1C (HbA1c or just A1C)

• Fasting insulin serum

• C-Reactive Protein

The A1C accurately measures your average blood sugar over the last three months. It’s much more accurate than a fasting glucose test. Sugar molecules are sticky and they adhere (or glycate) to protein molecules, so the A1C measures how glycated (gunked up) your proteins are.

Fasting insulin serum is rarely used by doctors, but all the newest research says it’s by far the best measure of metabolic health. My doctor hadn’t heard of it for these purposes so I simply said to her: “Fasting insulin begins to elevate for up to a decade before the A1C becomes high. This is because your body requires more and more insulin to control blood sugar until finally it can’t control it anymore and then blood sugar finally rises.”

You could even print out this study and bring it in with you. But most doctors will order any tests you request. (I just start talking her ear off about fasting, insulin, blood sugar, diabetes, the problems with modern medicine, how diabetes drugs cause more harm than good, and she orders me my tests to get me to shut up already. Works every time.) 

Your doctor will be familiar with a C-Reactive Protein test or CRP. This measures the level of inflammation in your body. Inflammation is a both a major driver of most modern diseases and a marker of present disease. It is often correlating with high insulin so watching that marker fall over time can be extremely motivating. 

Understanding Results

A1C Results

For optimal health, aim for the lower 5’s or even high 4’s. (For reference, fasting has me now down to a 5.0)

• 5.6 and below: Non-diabetic

• 5.7 to 6.4: Prediabetic

• 6.5 and above: Diabetic

• 13: Go to the hospital!

You can do a mail-in A1C test from home which my husband and I recently did. I like the mail-in option if you want to test every few months to track your progress without having to visit the doctor.  Unfortunately, this isn’t possible yet for fasting insulin.

Fasting Insulin

An optimal fasting insulin serum is below 5.0. A mediocre fasting insulin is between 5 and 10. Many Americans have fasting insulin scores in the 20s. In extreme cases, it can be up in the 70s or higher. It has a much larger range than the A1C. If yours is high, fear not, you can dramatically lower it through fasting. But the higher it is, the more difficult fasting will be at first. I have mine down to 4.1 now.

C-Reactive Protein

• Less than 0.3 mg/dL: Normal (level seen in most healthy adults).

• 0.3 to 1.0 mg/dL: Normal or minor elevation (can be seen in obesity, pregnancy, depression, diabetes, common cold, gingivitis, periodontitis, sedentary lifestyle, cigarette smoking, and genetic polymorphisms).

• 1.0 to 10.0 mg/dL: Moderate elevation (Systemic inflammation such as RA, SLE, or other autoimmune diseases, malignancies, myocardial infarction, pancreatitis, bronchitis).

• More than 10.0 mg/dL: Marked elevation (Acute bacterial infections, viral infections, systemic vasculitis, major trauma).

• More than 50.0 mg/dL: Severe elevation (Acute bacterial infections)

(Read more about C-reactive protein here.)

Summary:

The bottom line is that you will be really thankful later to have concrete evidence that everything you’ve read about fasting is true, not just in the abstract, but is true in your own body. And no amount of studies funded by cereal companies will be able to argue with your dramatically improved lab results. You may even be able to get your doctor on board when he sees your changes.