The fast bit comes off first. You know the feeling. The scale moves, the first digit changes, and inside a fortnight you are doing the maths on where you will be by summer.
Mine came off in 47 days. Three stone. Then I gave about a stone of it back, and the fourth stone took 496 days.
That is more than ten times as long, for the same 14 pounds, on the same scales.
I have weighed myself every morning since the day after Boxing Day 2023. 967 mornings without a gap, against an NHS blood record that opens in April 2012. Five stone down as of August 2026.
What follows is where most of that first three stone actually went, and the number I should have been watching instead.
Three Stone in 47 Days. Then 496 Days for the Fourth.
Second of January 2024. One stone off, in six days.
Third of February, the second stone. That one took 32 days. Twelfth of February, the third stone, and that took nine.
Three stone off in 47 days total. I felt unstoppable. I was already working out where I would be by June.
The fourth stone arrived on the 22nd of June 2025. Four hundred and ninety-six days later.
Same scales. Same 14 pounds. Ten times the wait. The honest answer, which took me an embarrassingly long time to reach, is that the first three stone and the fourth stone were not the same substance.
The Fridge, and the Chest Freezer in the Garage
Here is the belief I was working from, and I suspect you might be too. The scale measures fat. So a scale that moves quickly means fat is going quickly. On the surface that makes complete sense. Every app, every plan and every before-and-after picture is built on it.
There is a doctor called David Katz, a prevention researcher at Yale, and he puts the storage side of this plainly. The adult body holds somewhere around 1,200 calories as glycogen. Less than a day of reserve. Quick-access fuel, mostly in the muscle and the liver. Fat is the multi-day reserve, the insurance against a long stretch with nothing coming in.
Here is the bit that matters for the scales. Glycogen is stored wet. It holds water with it. So when you empty that reserve, evidence suggests you lose the water alongside it, and the scale moves fast in the first fortnight because of what left, not because of how much fat you burned.
Think of it as your fridge and a chest freezer out in the garage. The fridge is what you are eating this week. Easy to reach, and small. You open it, you take what you need, it is gone in seconds. The chest freezer holds vastly more, a whole side of beef and six months of batch cooking, but it is out in the cold and you have to go and dig. Most people never bother, because the fridge keeps getting restocked. Glycogen is the fridge. Body fat is the chest freezer.
Empty the fridge and the kitchen looks dramatically different by Tuesday. You have not touched what is in the garage yet.
That is the 47 days. The kitchen emptying.
This is not only something that happens to people who have already been given a diagnosis. It is how the storage works in anyone. If you have started noticing the scale behaving oddly and nobody has explained why, that is the explanation.
Have a think about that before you read on, because it changes what the next 496 days were.
You Are Not Weak. You Are Towing a Rope.
So why 496 days for the next stone?
Andrew Jenkinson is a surgeon who writes about appetite, and he says the hypothalamus, the part of the brain running appetite and metabolism, will try to fix your weight at a particular point. Not the point you would like. The point it has decided on.
Picture yourself as a ship anchored in a harbour. The weight you want is in the shallower water on the far side. You fire up the engines, you cut the food, you walk more, and you start moving across. But there is an elasticated rope on the anchor. The further you get, the harder the pull back.
That is why it works brilliantly for a fortnight, then slows, then gets hard in a way that feels personal. You are not weak. You are towing a rope.
And here is where most people, me included, read the picture wrong. I spent the best part of two years trying to get further from the anchor. Rowing harder. What I should have been asking is whether the anchor itself was moving.
I want to be honest about the limits of that. I can tell you what my weight did across 19 cycles. I cannot tell you what my hypothalamus was doing, because I have never measured it and I have no way to. The set point is a model that explains the shape of my data well. It is not something I have proved on myself.
The Number I Was Not Watching
The belief I held for about eighteen months is the one the whole industry runs on. It is that the lowest number you ever see is the result. Get there, and the job is done.
It is not the result. It is a morning.
Let me show you the record rather than argue about it.
The record opens at 248.12 lb on the 27th of December 2023. Nine hundred and sixty-seven consecutive mornings to the 19th of August 2026. The day before it opened, Boxing Day itself, the scale touched 18 stone. 252 lb. I had not been avoiding it, either. I was on the scales most mornings through that autumn, sitting in the high seventeens, aware of it, doing nothing. Then a Christmas dinner and a bit of curiosity, and the first digit changed. One pound did that. Not the 14 before it.
I stopped eating that morning and did not eat for ten days.
That first fast took off 22.75 lb and, a fortnight after it ended, none of it had come back. Not one pound. I want to be straight about why, because it is not that I executed it better. I started at the highest weight in the entire record, and the first pounds off the top come easiest and stay off.
Every long fast since has given something back. January 2025 gave back 35 per cent. June 2025, 42 per cent. January to February 2024, 75 per cent.
And May 2024 gave back 167 per cent. That fast finished heavier than it started.
That is the one I would have edited out if I were selling something. Ten days of not eating, and I came out the other side above where I went in.
So I went back through the daily record and had it counted properly. 19 loss cycles between the 29th of January 2024 and the 17th of August 2026, where a cycle is any fall of at least five pounds from a local peak to a local trough. The threshold matters. Change it to a stone and you get a different number of cycles, so I will say it plainly: five pounds, and every figure that follows sits at that threshold. Eighteen of the 19 are closed.
Now the number I was not watching. The weight each new cycle started from.
The first restart was 238.0 lb, 17 stone, on the 29th of January 2024. The last was 189.7 lb, 13 stone 7½, in June 2026.
That is a fall of 48.3 lb in the restart weight itself.
It is a trend, not a rule, so here is the messy version. Eleven of the 18 restarts were lower than the one before. Seven were higher. It did not go down every time and I am not going to pretend it did, because the record says otherwise.
The highest weight I ever restarted from after that first one was 225.1 lb. Sixteen stone one, September 2024. Which means that across the whole 496 days when it looked like nothing was happening, I never restarted above 16 stone 1, and the restart weight had already come down nearly 13 pounds from where it began.
I want to be careful with that figure. It is the highest weight a cycle restarted from. A spike that never turned into a five-pound fall would not register as a restart at all, so it is a ceiling on the restarts, not a ceiling on every single morning. That is what the data measures and that is all I will claim from it.
Then there is the number that actually stopped me. Across all 967 mornings, only nine of them sat within two pounds of the lowest weight I have ever recorded. Nine. Ninety-nine per cent of the record is spent above my best number.
I had been treating that best number as where I lived. I visited it nine times in nearly three years.
Someone wrote to me a while back and said, “I’ve been dealing with this for so long and nothing makes it better.” I knew exactly what they meant, because that was the 496 days from the inside. Nothing appeared to be happening. Every few weeks the scale went back up and I logged another failure.
Except the failures were the thing that was working. Nineteen goes at it, and the floor under my feet moved 48 pounds while I was busy grading each attempt against my best morning.
I thought I kept failing. I was just measuring the wrong thing.
Where it sits now, and I will date it because it keeps moving: a seven-day trend weight of 180.59 lb on the 19th of August 2026. Twelve stone twelve point six. Against the 18 stone on Boxing Day 2023 that is 71.41 lb off, five stone one, as of August 2026.
Two things I still cannot explain. I do not know why the September 2024 restart went as high as it did, because I cannot find anything unusual in what I was eating around it. And I do not know whether the restart weight fell because the set point moved, or because I simply got better at the recovery afterwards. The record cannot separate those two, and I would be making it up if I told you which it was.
None of this is a clinical trial. It is one man, one set of scales, and a blood record going back to 2012. Make of it what you will.
What I’d Record If I Started Again on Boxing Day
If I were starting this again on Boxing Day 2023, knowing what 19 cycles look like, I would change one thing about what I recorded.
I would write down the weight I restarted from. Every time. That is it.
Not the lowest number of the cycle, because I now know that is a morning I visited nine times. The number I began the next go from. It is the only figure in my whole record that tells you whether anything durable happened, and I did not track it once. I had to have it counted out of the raw data two and a half years later.
The other thing I would change is what I looked at day to day. A single morning reading is mostly noise. My own current figure is a seven-day trend, not a reading, and I would have moved to that far earlier than I did.
Then there is what to do when it goes back up, because it will.
You are walking to work in January. Icy pavement, and over you go. Two choices. Get up, brush yourself down, carry on, and you are five seconds behind. Or sit down on the ice and wait for spring. Most people pick the ice. One meal out becomes a written-off weekend becomes start again Monday. The slip costs you five seconds. Sitting there for three days is what does the damage.
Seven of my 18 restarts were higher than the one before, and I still ended up 48 pounds lower on the number that counted. Because I got up each time.
On timelines, I would rather be blunt than encouraging. My fourth stone took sixteen months. If you are asking how do I lose weight and keep it off, the honest answer from my own record is that the keeping part is measured in years, and the first fortnight tells you almost nothing about it.
And the safety part, properly rather than rushed. If you are on medication, particularly for diabetes or blood pressure, speak to your GP before you change your fasting pattern or your eating. Fasting can change what your medication is doing, and dosing may need looking at. During a longer fast, dizziness that does not pass, chest pain, a severe headache or confusion means you stop and see your GP. And if there is any history of an eating disorder, daily weighing and fasting are not the right tools, and something else is needed.
So here is what I would leave you with. Not how much you have lost, and not the best number you have ever seen. Where you started from the last time you began again, and whether that number is lower than the time before.
I did not know mine for two and a half years. You might already have yours written down somewhere.
🎯 Key Takeaways
- The first fortnight is mostly the fridge emptying: glycogen is stored with water, so early scale movement reflects what left, not how much fat burned
- A slowdown is not a character failure: the body defends a weight, and the further you get from it the harder the pull back
- Your best-ever number is a morning, not a home: nine of my 967 mornings sat within two pounds of it
- The restart weight is the figure that tells you something: mine fell 48.3 lb across 19 cycles while I was grading myself against the wrong number
- Getting back up matters more than not slipping: seven of my 18 restarts were higher than the last, and the trend still went down
What To Put In Place Before The Losing Part Ends
If the 496 days felt familiar, the thing that would have helped me most was not another way to lose it. It was knowing what to have in place for the stretch afterwards, when the scale stops rewarding you and the restart weight is the only thing still moving.
That is what the free guide covers. It is written for anyone who has lost weight, by whatever route.
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⚠️ Important: This is educational content based on evidence and personal experience. It is not medical advice. Speak to your GP before making changes to your fasting pattern, diet, or medication.
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