Day 9: too long in the bath...

The trouble with technology is that you get used to it, and you assume it will keep working, the same as you keep assuming the sun will come up in the morning.  The sun does indeed rise each morning, but technology inevitably fails.

Of course, it is often the fault of the human that this happens, and so it was on the morning of Day 9, my second day with the 19C bath.  I've been using the timer on my phone.  It has always been set to go black when unused, so I can't see the timer running down.  Unfortunately, I had previously also set it to silent, and had forgotten to turn the sound back on.  I didn't notice this with the 2- and 3-minute segments of the bathing programme - I saw the timer light up the phone.  However, I saw nothing during the 10 minute full submersion, for the obvious reason that I was immersed in water, with a bathtub wall in between me and the phone.  After a while, I began to wonder when the time would be up.  And after a very long while, I decided to check the phone.  Of course the timer was finished, and I realised the phone was on silent.  I was also remarkably shivery.  I'd got the bath temperature up from 19C to 20C just by being in it (the room temperature was below 19C, so it really was me).

The result was that I was shivery for more or less the whole day.  Luckily it was a sunny day, and standing in the sun's warmth was very pleasant.  I didn't mind the ordeal in any case - I survived it, and could think of all the fat I was burning!  At any rate, I have now reset the phone so that it doesn't go blank until it has been ignored for 10 minutes.

The science of weight loss
I mentioned last week that most diet books turn me off - they tend not to work, or tell me what I already knew, or are badly referenced so I don't know whether they have real evidence for their claims or just personal experience (which worked for them but might not work for me).  An exception to this is the articles and books by Dr. Briffa, a british doctor and journalist who writes on health generally, including the ever popular subject of diet and weight loss.  He has a regular blog with commentary on recently published medical research, what it might mean, whether it's reliable, and how it fits with what he's said before.  This week he has written about fasting and weight loss in a mouse study.

He is careful to point out that mice are not people, so you can't take all this as being definitely something that would work for our species.  He also provides references to the research, and to other relevant research and commentary.  This approach to writing diet advice appeals to me enormously.  I am inclined to listen to what he has to say because I've been doing so for years, and whenever I've had any doubts, I've read the original medical research, and found that he is drawing sound conclusions.  He also has clinical experience of working with patients who are trying to lose weight, and he is very good about saying when he is drawing on that clinical experience (which is interesting, but not scientific), and when he is reflecting on the results of proper research.

The interesting thing about the current mouse study is that it found a particular state in which fat was not stored, but rather used for energy.  In this instance, mice were eating high fat diets, but their eating times were very restricted, and the result was that they didn't store as much fat as the mice who ate high fat diets but without any time restrictions.

How this fits with OMG
Fulton's diet also makes use of periods of fasting - in other words, restrictions on the times when you can eat.  Everyone notices the advice to skip breakfast, the banning of snacks, and the regimented delay between exercise and eating.  This mouse study is not the first to look at the impact of restricting eating times, but it does show that even on a high fat diet, mice gain less weight if their eating time is restriction (in other words, if they fast), than if they can eat whenever they want.

In short, when it comes to the various ways of restricting when you eat on the OMG diet, there is recent research to support the idea that this should help reduce the amount of weight that is stored as fat when you eat.