How I Transformed My Health Part 1: My Intermittent Fasting Journey

In this post, I detail the changes that have occurred since I began intermittent fasting two years ago, discuss why I started this Substack, and give you some glimpses of what you have to learn.

If you’re new to this publication: WELCOME!

I’m Leslie, and I’m so glad you’re here.

It occurred to me recently that I don’t have a standalone succinct post that explains my weight loss and health journey from the beginning. When I first began this Substack, I told my story in bits and pieces as it applied to the topic I was writing about.

But now I have many new readers, and I’d like to quickly bring them up to speed about my weight loss and health journey.

I also want a seminal post for you to share with friends who are curious about intermittent fasting, health, natural healing, and nutrition so they can see if this stack is for them.

There’s really only one reason I spend so much time writing this stack: it’s because I am not the same person I was in July of 2022 when the picture on the left was taken. And the changes I went through were too good NOT to share with others.

The two pictures show that I lost 45 lbs of excess weight and inflammation. But there’s quite a bit that the pictures don’t show.

You can’t tell it from the picture, but that the person on the left had:

• Prediabetes: high fasting blood glucose that was getting close to full diabetes.

• Chronic, debilitating migraines for 25 years that had grown worse. My prescription for sumatriptan (Imitrex) barely worked anymore.

• Chronic urinary tract infections: I had on average one about every other month, totaling around 5 a year. I’ve been on over 100 rounds of antibiotics since I had my first UTI 27 years ago. At one point, I was put on a continuous dose of Macrobid (nitrofurantoin) for two years straight to try to heal my bladder.

• Interstitial cystitis: an autoimmune condition of the bladder that I had sought medical treatment from specialists for years, and it only grew worse. I lived in constant pain. This condition developed as a direct result of the UTIs (although the urologists refused to acknowledge the connection for some odd reason.)

• Frequent cold and flu viruses: I caught everything my family had but always had a much worse case. What started as a cold often ended in antibiotics for a sinus infection, ear infection, bronchitis, pneumonia, or strep. The rest of the family rarely needed antibiotics. I had at least three serious bouts of influenza each year and severe colds almost monthly.

• Gastritis: chronic stomach inflammation with burping and bloating. It’s not surprising I ruined my stomach considering how often I was on antibiotics, ibuprofen, pain pills for my bladder pain, and my prescription migraine meds. I carried 5 different pharmaceuticals in my purse at all times.

If there’s one underlying message I can pass on to all my readers, that message is HOPE.

Whether you have serious ailments or you just need to lose a few pounds and gain back some energy, I want to restore hope by telling you about the incredible healing mechanisms your body is capable of.

As you can tell from my health history above, I spent most of my life trapped in the mainstream medical mindset. And the overwhelming feeling I had, when I think back on all those visits with specialists and all the medications I tried for all my ailments, was powerlessness.

When mainstream medical cures were all I knew, I felt that I had no agency to change; I was given no pointers beyond “take these pills;” I was given no insight into what was happening in my body; I was given no hope in the innate power of my body to heal.

SPOILER ALERT: all those conditions above are simply gone, vanished, and I live in a completely new body.

I want that kind of transformation to happen to every person that I can possibly reach.

So what did I do?

There were two interventions that radically impacted my health: first was intermittent fasting and the second was learning about nutrition and natural healing, and then implementing what I learned.

Stage 1: Intermittent Fasting (IF)

In 2022, my only goals were to reverse my prediabetes and lose weight—that’s as high as I had set my hopes. But along the way, I found so much more than just weight loss.

However, figuring out how to use intermittent fasting successfully took me quite a bit of trial and error. I’ve known about IF as far back as 2016 as my older brother, my younger sister, and then my dad all practiced it.

IF sounded so simple to me that for a long time, I didn’t read any books about it. I get easily bored reading books that are underwhelming, especially condescending self-help ones (bleh). When I read, I like to have my mind challenged by very difficult ideas. I enjoy reading the hardest things I can find.

So I didn’t read anything about IF because I thought: “Why on earth do I need to read a book about not eating? I’m just not going to eat for a certain part of the day and then I’m going to eat. It’s not that hard.”

This was incredibly ignorant on my part. However, I have a ministry on this stack of making stupid mistakes so that I can warn everyone not to make the same mistake. You’re welcome.

From about 2016 to 2022, I floundered around at times doing some IF, and sometimes not. I dabbled in it. I had no idea what I was doing.

Below: actual footage of me trying IF “my own way” without knowing what I was doing.

This is Leslie. Leslie tried IF without doing research and had no results. Don’t be like Leslie.

But then, in January of 2022, I became very serious about IF and decided it was time to stop the dabbling and do IF for real. I fasted every single day from about January to July and lost…are you ready for this….(drumroll please)…

No weight. 🤣 And I was strict about it, and I thought I was doing it right, and I was super motivated…and I still lost no weight.

But somewhere along the way, I realized how wrong I had been to think that IF was so simple and that all books about IF would be full of stupid motivational self-help jargon.

So I picked up a copy of Jason Fung’s Obesity Code, and I was instantly fascinated. It was one of the least underwhelming books I’ve read in a long time. The science nerd in me savored every single one of those molecular, biochemistry, hormone signaling details.

I then went on a science-nerd reading binge. I read Fung’s Diabetes Code, then Bikman’s Why We Get Sick (detailing how high insulin levels relate to every major modern disease), and of course Gin Stephen’s Fast Feast Repeat, and then The Power of Appetite Correction and about 10 other books.

I became fascinated by how this incredible human body can heal itself from various ailments when given a break from food. Japanese scientist Yoshinori Ohsumi won the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2016 for his decades of research into autophagy, the cellular house-cleaning practice that happens when one fasts. I just couldn’t get enough of that type of information. I was hooked. (I explain more about autophagy in this post).

And I also started listening to IF podcasts whenever I was cleaning the house or driving.

I was learning so much fascinating science, and I was fasting so hard…but I somehow wasn’t losing weight. 🤔

And then one day, while listening to a podcast at the end of July 2022, something in my brain just clicked. Megan Ramos, Jason Fung’s very first fasting patient, told her story about how alternate day fasting (ADF) reversed her severe diabetes and caused her to lose 80 lbs.

Although a daily eating window works for about 90% of people (that means you eat between noon and 8 pm or 2 pm and 6 pm), there are some people who are so insulin-resistant (explained in this post) that they need longer fasts to get the full therapeutic effects of fasting. I knew she was talking about me. Why else could I have been fasting for over 6 months and not lost a single pound or any inches from my waist?

Looking back, I realize now that I had unhealthy habits surrounding breaking my fast and what I ate. If I had known more then, perhaps I could have lost weight on one meal a day (OMAD).

However, this alternate day fasting worked like magic. I started on August 1st, 2022, and in one week, I was down 7 lbs. Because I had thrown myself into studying the science, I knew this wasn’t 7 lbs of fat loss, but instead, my insulin levels had greatly fallen leading to a huge loss in inflammation and water weight.

After not losing any weight for 6 months of fasting, losing 7 lbs in one week was incredible. I didn’t care if it was all water and no fat, I knew that I had shifted my body’s set weight and that good things were happening.

After one month, I was down 17 lbs, and then I settled into a more normal pattern of losing about 8 lbs/month.

Here’s a graph of my first month of weight loss from an app called Happy Scale that draws a line that smooths out the ups and downs. The blue dots are the actual numbers I entered:

I lost the 45 lbs over 7 months and hit maintenance in March of 2023 at a weight of 135 lbs. I’m 5’6” with a somewhat athletic build (I’ve never been a wiry beanpole) so this is a great weight for me.

Why I Started This Stack

The main thing I learned from this experience of failed attempts at fasting and then finally finding success was that people need help learning how to fast, and most people need some coaching even if only in the form of posts to read. I wanted to help people skip the years of failed attempts that I had and go straight to success.

Most people cannot just hear a snippet about IF and then go off on their own and find instant success.

I also learned that information is motivation. As soon as I understood what needed to happen on a biological level, I was ready to do the work.

I strongly believe there is a direct connection between how much a person is willing to learn about the science behind fasting and how successful they will be at doing it. Those who want to follow a simple to-do list but don’t care about why it works, will not stick with it long term.

That’s the reason I started this stack. People need to know the incredible science behind IF explained in easy-to-understand language. Although I wish every person would read The Obesity Code and all the other books I read, many people find them too sciency. Some have tried to read them but got bogged down. That’s why my goal is to take the science and make it both easy to understand and actionable.

Books like The Obesity Code do not spend much time walking people through the how-to. That’s why I seek to make this stack full of actionable steps.

Lastly, we need weekly reminders to help us along our fasting journey. There’s so much false info that we need to unlearn if we’ll be successful. We must purge our brains of years of programming telling us that breakfast is the most important meal of the day, eat often to stoke your metabolism, weight loss is simply calories in versus calories out, all you have to do to lose weight is exercise, etc.

I used to think that because there was so much controversy about weight loss and diet, there must be so much compelling science on both sides. But once I started digging into the actual science, I found instead that the fasting side has incredible research and science supporting its theories and the other side has nuttin’ but incredible advertising bucks from big food and big pharma.

The "science” supporting eating all throughout the day and stuffing our faces with carbs and pounding glyphosate-saturated breakfast cereals is nonexistent. The studies they try to put forward are based on food frequency questionnaires with margins of error so wide they rival the obesity epidemic. Have you ever wondered why the processed food industry spends hundreds of millions of dollars on nutrition research? Shoot, I’m getting off track.

Here’s what it comes down to: once I had made about every IF mistake a person could make and had finally got it together and figured out how to fast, I couldn’t stop talking about it.

Word spread in my community, and I was thrilled the first time someone invited me over to talk about how to fast. I talked to a mother and daughter pair, Trish and Rachel, (names used with permission), for about 2 hours (I can be long-winded), and I gave very specific (one might even say bossy) instructions on how to get started.

I explained the clean fast, how to break a fast, why to eat more protein, why you have to quit artificial sweeteners, and told them to cut all seed oils. My list of rules was basically just a list of mistakes I had previously made that I wanted them to avoid. This info later became The Three Week Challenge, your on-ramp to IF.

Trish and Rachel had results that were immediate and stunning! They skipped over my ridiculous months and years of trial and error and were off and running. Neither one needed to do the alternate day version of fasting—they had stellar results with a daily eating window.

Five weeks in, Rachel wrote this on our private local Facebook group:

For the last three years I have struggled with fatigue, headaches, chronic colds/coughing, overactive bladder, GI issues, gynecology issues, insomnia, stiff joints, weight gain, moodiness, anxiety & even depression. My hysterectomy in December took care of the gynecology issues but threw me into surgical menopause, which doubled down on my moodiness & depression, and introduced me to hot flashes. I was on two prescription medications and several “diets” had failed me. I pretty much hit rock bottom!

As you know, my mom asked Leslie to come chat with us and the rest is history! I agreed to Clean Fast. (This was huge for me because I loved my “desert” coffee in the morning and diet soda. I also took out all sweeteners and seed oils from my diet).

I started IF (16:8) on July 23rd and, by the end of the week, I was doing OMAD. Today, EVERYTHING in that long list…. IS GONE - including the prescriptions!! I still have hot flashes but they are not as severe (taking a few supplements for this). I have lost 12” off my body!! I’m so thankful. Please praise the Lord with me for His Loving Kindness and all the healing (body & soul) that has taken place!

Rachel went on to lose 40 lbs. When her husband Keith saw her success, he decided to join her. Keith lost 20 lbs the first week, and now is down over 110 lbs!!! The last time I saw him, his clothes were hanging on him.

Then Trish’s husband also began fasting. In April (2024), they posted a photo with the caption that they’ve lost over 200 lbs between the four of them since last July (2023)—in 9 months!

So that is what this stack is about. It’s about setting people up for success with IF. It’s about educating you so that you can be successful.

But it’s not just about fasting, it’s about many other health changes you can make as well. One thing I often tell people is that fasting is the beginning of many other positive health changes.

But this post is getting too long so I’ll cover part 2 of my health journey next week.

For today, I’ll leave you with one more success story from a local friend I got together with once to explain fasting:

I’m so grateful for discovering IF and your substack - for so many reasons, as you’ll see below. I hit the three month mark about a week and a half ago. As of today, I’ve lost 30.5 pounds and 12 inches total (8 of those inches around my belly… new jeans are now a necessity!) All through last year my feet were in agony all day every day, no matter which shoes I wore - swollen and so very painful. All swelling is completely gone, no pain at all, and I’ve noticed less stiffness in joints that gave me problems for years.

So if you’re ready to start on your own fasting journey, start reading through my IF Course:

You don’t have to learn everything that can be learned about fasting before you start. It’s fine to learn along the way. But the more committed you are to learning, the more successful you’ll be.

Whatever you do, please take the time to get some accurate measurements as I explain in this short post. The labwork is optional—the waist measurement is not!

And get ready to be amazed at the changes that are soon about to take place in your body. It might not be a bad idea to spend a few minutes writing down any and every last health problem you can think of: restless legs, difficulty sleeping, headaches, anything off on your lab work, tiredness, brain fog—take detailed notes.

Write down how often you get up to go to the bathroom at night or if you feel winded when walking up stairs or any pain or achiness you have. Do you have a tired slump in the afternoon? All that may soon change.

After beginning fasting, sometimes people know that they feel like a different person but some forget how far they’ve come. Documenting everything will keep you motivated.

If you’ve been with this stack for a while now and you’ve had weight loss and/or NSVs (non scale victories), please leave me a comment below and let me and others know your improvements.

It’s a small thing you can do to pay it forward so that someone else can be encouraged to find the great health you’ve found.

Next week I’ll cover the changes that took place in part 2 of my healing journey and give an overview of how to add to your fasting journey.

Happy Fasting,

Leslie

[This newsletter is for informational purposes only and is not designed as a substitute for medical advice. The reader bears responsible for any advice taken. Talk to your doctor before beginning any dietary changes, especially if you are on medications for diabetes. Fasting while taking certain medications such as Metformin and especially insulin can lead to dangerously low blood sugars. If your doctor does not support fasting, search for a physician who will support your fasting journey. Fasting is not recommended for those pregnant, breastfeeding, or for children and teens still growing and developing. For those with diabetes, personal fasting coaches are available through Jason Fung’s site TheFastingMethod.com. I receive no compensation or ad revenue for anything in this newsletter including links to books, videos, websites, podcasts, or supplements with the exception of a book I contributed to called Yankee Doodle Soup, but I only receive compensation if someone writes “Taylor” in the box labeled “contributor’s code” during checkout.]