I’ll need to check again tomorrow however today weight loss was down to only 0.4 lbs. This is vastly different from previous fasts that I’ve done and something I wasn’t expecting. In the previous two fasts, the average amount of mass lost on a day by day basis never dropped below 1.0 lb.

Now three things have happened that might have contributed.

The first is I forgot to take my supplements before bed. While I have been taking an apple cider supplement, which I hadn’t really done previously, I’m not sure that its actually contributing anything and was considering cutting that out anyways.

The second is that I didn’t really get as much sleep as I was planning on. For some reason only got about 5 hours of sleep before waking up and then was just on and off until the alarm went off. I’m pretty sure this is a contributing factor.

The third is that, as part of the calories I have been consuming, I had included approximately 100-120g of banana the last few days for the fiber and potassium. That actually might have been a bad idea as bananas have a glycemic index of 51 as compared to the glycemic index / load of less than 10 for everything else that I’ve been eating. 

Silly me – I love bananas and figured it would be a healthy alternative to the hummus and avocado as part of my rotation. I should have checked first.

I have one banana left. Will use that today and see what the results are tomorrow. If weight loss has continued to slow, then will definitely continue on to day 14 and see if the trend reverses.

While in previous fasts there have been periods of slow down. In both cases the slow down seemed to hit in around days 10 and 11. It was on the first fast and it was on track to do that in the second. So this may just be a normal period of adjustment before things picking back up again.

In the first fast, while weight loss slowed down around this time period, by day twelve there was a big loss of weight. It may simply be this is your body’s way of asking you if you are serious about continuing this or not and after a couple of days it decides to catch up. I don’t have enough data to know for sure.

Since I’m feeling fine this morning, I think I can safely say I’ve broken through my first physiological barrier. Day 14 is the next barrier which is Sunday. 

My thought however is, after today because I hate to see a good banana go to waste, that for the remainder of this fast any future fasts that any food additions need to also have a glycemic index of less than 20 and a glycemic load of less than 6. 

A 118g banana has approximately 24g of carbohydrate and a glycemic index of 51.

The glycemic load formula[1] is 

Glycemic index x Grams of carbohydrates / 100

So bananas, with an average GL of 12-13, are then outside of that unless you limit yourself to a maximum of 49 g of banana based on a glycemic load of 5 (i.e. 5 or less)

Here is how I arrived at 49 grams:

Grams of carbohydrate = Glycemic Load x 100 / Glycemic Index
Grams of carbohydrate = 5 * 100 / 51 = 10g

If 118g of banana has 24g of carbohydrate
then x grams of banana has 10g of carbohydrate
x = 118 x 17 / 24 = 49 g

Still, bananas fail the first test so after today bananas are off the list during fasts and instead I’ll look to include a potassium supplement to add to my regime. 

— Kevin