Summary:
Fasting and red light produced astonishingly rapid weight loss without hunger. This was an experiment of 7 days in which I lost 14 pounds.
Background:
I’m fast approaching 70, and over the past decades I had the willpower to lose weight with exercise and by cutting calories. I would do this for months and then it would all come back. As it was a struggle to lose the weight, this was very discouraging. Recently my will power vanished altogether. I would resolve to go on a fast and I would end up eating more than if I hadn’t made the resolution — within hours! I’ve tried many weight loss ideas over the years, but none worked better than cutting calories and exercise. Until now.
Devices using red light (both coherent and incoherent) are being sold as weight loss aids. For instance, there’s a $400 red LED belt from Hammacher Schlemmer that straps around your waist. While I haven’t tried it, the idea seems ridiculous. Because if such a belt were to stimulate fat cells to dump triglycerides, where would this fat go? Most would just redeposit in other fat cells, or in your arteries. [See note 1 below.]
Bottom line: You can’t just release fat to the bloodstream if you want to lose weight. You have to burn it up.
The experiment:
Thus it occurred to me to combine red light with fasting. On the first day of fasting I used 4 red LED flashlights to irradiate my fatty areas each time I began to feel hungry. It took less than a minute to banish hunger this way, so I cut the flashlights to two. By the second day (while on a wilderness trail), I found that 10-15 seconds with one flashlight would banish hunger and/or symptoms of hypoglycemia. It worked so quickly it seemed miraculous. One might suspect a placebo effect, but I’d never encountered placebo effects with weight loss supplements before.
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Notes:
1. Red light stimulates the release of triglycerides from adipose tissue, but by itself does not reduce weight—
Efficacy of Low-Level Laser Therapy for Body Contouring and Spot Fat Reduction
In vitro studies suggested that laser treatment increases fat loss from adipocytes by release of triglycerides, without inducing lipolysis or cell lysis . . . low-level laser therapy appears to offer a non-surgical option to mobilize subcutaneous fat for body contouring without weight loss.
https://www.ncbi.nlm...les/PMC5225499/
2. Red LED flashlights are cheap. While not making any recommendation on brands, Amazon has a pack of three for $18. These are 300 lumens and only 3.5” long. There are much smaller keychain flashlights that would be great for runners, but I haven’t seen one with sufficient power.
3. I consumed the following on a daily basis:
One Atkins bar
One teaspoon of essential amino acids
Two teaspoons of sugar-free fiber
A B-complex vitamin, and a few other supplements that aren’t known to impact weight loss.
For exercise I hiked/ran several miles every day, which is my usual routine.
4. I recommend that you don’t use this in conjunction with C60, as C60 produces ROS when exposed to red light.
5. Coherent light is no better than incoherent, as it will lose coherence interacting with fat cells. And as several frequencies of red light have been found to stimulate cells, there is no point in using monochromatic light sources either. Thus, no need for a laser.
The coherent properties of laser light can not be maintained when the beam interacts with a biotissue at the molecular level. This conclusion was made first in the paper by Karu (1987). Under physiological conditions, the absorption of low-intensity light by biological systems is purely of noncoherent nature (i.e., photobiological), because the rate of decoherence of photoexcitation (the processes that limit the appearance of quantum effects, and turns them into classical phenomena) is many orders of magnitude higher than the rate of photoexcitation.
http://photobiology..../Coherence.html