What Were My Egg Fast Diet Results?
If you’ve done any research on keto or low-carb dieting, you’ve probably come across some reports about a type of temporary diet plan called an egg fast. I tripped upon information about the egg fast because I was trying to break one of those frustrating weight-loss plateaus.
Since I felt frustrated, I decided to give a three-day egg fast a try because the idea did not seem that crazy and nothing else appeared to work. Of course, you should also look or a sustainable, long-term diet, and Keto Comfort Foods offers an excellent place to start.
Some benefits of the diet known as the egg fast include:
- It doesn’t involve fasting or hunger at all.
- It’s a frugal diet because the main ingredient is cheap.
- It’s easy to follow and relies upon a variety of real food.
- Also, in my opinion, the egg fast works as a short-term way to bust a diet plateau and get the scale to move. Yes, my egg-fast diet results included getting the scale to finally budge couple of pounds after three days.
- It’s an easy diet for vegetarians to follow, but it won’t work for vegans because of the eggs.
The Egg Fast Diet Plan (My Version)
I want to share my own three-day egg fast results with you. Since there doesn’t appear to be a consistent, one-size-fits-everybody diet plan, I’d like to first mention how I personally planned my own personal egg fast. You might tailor it a bit for your own body size, activity level, and preferences. If I get some positive feedback from this post, I’ll also share some egg fast recipes that I found really easy to make.
This is a quick summary of the basic egg fast diet plan:
- Eggs: You should plan to consume a minimum of six to eight eggs every day. Fry, bake, microwave, or boil them, but you’ve got to incorporate those eggs in. Bigger or very active people may need to plan to eat more than eight eggs.
- Fat: With each egg, you should also use a serving of fat. You could choose butter, olive oil, or even mayo to make egg salad, but you need to include that fat.
- Cheese: Yes, you can have a serving of cheese with each of your eggs too. With servings of hard cheese, cream cheese, cottage cheese, and so on you can actually come up with savory and sweet egg recipes. Again, I’ll include one of my favorite sweet egg plan dessert recipes below.
- Veggies: I included plenty of non-starchy veggies in my egg fast. I also included a serving or two of low-sugar berries during the day. A squirt of lemon juice in your water or tea is fine.
- Hydration: Plan to drink plenty of water, coffee, tea, or other no-sugar drinks. I like mineral water, and that’s fine.
- Extras: You can also enjoy no-carb sweeteners if you tolerate them well. I usually had a couple of servings of something I would make out of sugar-free Jello every day, and that was fine. You can even have a serving or two of heavy cream and whipped cream. If you want to make a salad, a serving of low-carb dressing is fine. Many salad dressings are naturally low in carbs because they are made with natural oils.
If you do a bit of searching on the internet, you’d be surprised at the number of dishes that you can concoct out of these ingredients. You won’t have to consume a vegetable and cheese omelette for every meal at all.
Why Does the Egg Fast Diet Plan Work?
You can find positive results from people who could not lose any weight, folks like me who had hit a diet plateau, and even body builders. Why does the egg fast diet work so well? Well, I haven’t seen any scientific studies, but I have read a number of theories.
Eggs Contain Choline
The National Library of Medicine calls choline an essential nutrient, and eggs provide it. In fact, the NLM says that egg yolks are the most concentrated source of it. Dr. Axe tells us that we need choline for energy, brain function, and fat metabolism. He even claims that this vitamin-like nutrient helps with detox and has anti-aging properties.
I don’t know a lot about the science, but I do know I felt fine on my three-day egg diet. Dr. Axe says that if you’re feeling tired, moody, or forgetful, you might need a boost of choline.
Fat and Protein
I think that we’ve moved beyond having to argue that healthy fat makes people fat. For most people, sugar, processed foods, and unhealthy starches are the culprit. This diet includes plenty of protein to keep you satiated. In fact, by the second day, I didn’t even want to bother with all of the eggs I was supposed to eat because I wasn’t really hungry. If that was some magical property of the food or simply the fact that the fat and protein kept my belly full, I don’t know for sure. It worked.
Nutrient Estimates for the Egg Fast
This is an update that I thought I should include for those readers who, like me, appreciate figuring out some numbers behind why diet plans work. Of course, your plans may vary, but let’s simply estimate what kind of calories and carbs you might eat per day.
The Eggs
The eggs have virtually 0 carbohydrates, and let’s say about 70 calories. They contribute 6 grans of protein. If you eat the minimum of 6 eggs a day, they’ll add 420 calories and 36 grams of protein.
The Fat
Let’s say you use one tablespoon of butter for every two eggs. You still don’t add in carbs, but you will consume about 300 calories.
The Cheese
As with the other ingredients, the kind of cheese may impact your calorie total. We’ll estimate an ounce of cheese for every two eggs, which will give you 330 more calories and about three carbs.
The Extras
With the minimum number of eggs, fat, and cheese, you’ve consumed 420 + 300 + 330 = 1,050 calories. You’ve only eaten about three grams of carbohydrates. No matter which way you count it, you’re probably eating enough of a deficit to lose weight. Still, it’s a bad idea for most people to ignore their need for fiber.
Broccoli only has about 30 calories a cup and about four grams of digestible carbs. It’s doubtful that you would want to eat enough broccoli to upset your diet plan. Go ahead and season your vegetables and even use some oil sparingly if you want. You can use a website like Health Line to look up the values for other extras that you plan to eat.
The Conclusion About Why the Egg Fast Diet Plan Works
If you stick to the plan, you’ll probably have to struggle to eat 20 or 30 grams a carbohydrates a day. You are supposed to include fat, but you may need to make sure you don’t add more than a serving for each two eggs.
Anyway, you can use this handy calculator to estimate how many calories you would need to restrict yourself to in order to lose weight. The rule of thumb that you will see published on that page says that:
- An average woman can lose weight by consuming 1,500 calories a day.
- The average man can lose weight by eating no more than 2,000 calories a day.
Because one of the main characteristics of this plan is that it causes satiety, it’s likely that dieters who have had success with this plan are naturally restricting themselves to fewer calories than they need to lose weight.
Of course, nobody is exactly average. Your age, the size of your body, how much activity you get in a day, and other factors might impact how many calories your body needs to maintain your body weight, gain weight, or shed pounds. Of course, the egg fasts focuses more on reducing carbohydrates than calories.
Even Dr. Atkins admitted that his diet would not work if somebody ate 4,000 calories a day. The conclusion here is that you shouldn’t worry about the number of calories that you consume that much unless you think you’re eating twice as many as you should in a day. It’s doubtful that you will.
What Were My Three-Day Egg Fast Results?
Originally, I just followed a typical moderate-carb diet plan. I tried to keep my carb count under 30 to 50 grams a day. In addition, I used my carbs wisely for a slice of sprouted bread with my breakfast or fruit for snacks. Anyway, I was doing something right because I lost about 8 pounds at first.
Sure, everybody always seems to lose that first weight faster because some of it is water weight, but I felt certain my jeans felt a bit loser. Then the scale just stopped moving for the next two weeks, and I felt so frustrated I was about ready to give up and resign myself to chubbiness.
After three days on my egg fast, I dropped another 2.8 pounds. Actually, I felt so motivated that I kept it up for one more day for another fraction of a pound loss. I finally broke it on the fifth day because i had plans to meet friends at one of my favorite Indian restaurants, and hey, life is for living, right?
With that said, I’ll probably try it again. Some people alternate egg fasting for a couple of days with a regular diet plan of healthy, lifetime eating. I might become one of those intermittent egg fasters too!
Easy Egg Fast Diet Plan Recipes
I hope to include more recipes as I find them. The problem with a lot of egg fast recipes on the internet is that they ask for some unusual ingredients. These are some that worked well for me with normal food I had around the house.
Sweet Egg Fast Plan Dessert Custard
I call this a dessert custard, but since it conforms to the rule of eggs, cheese, and fat, I often just ate it for a meal.
Ingredients: Two eggs, 1 tablespoon of butter, 1/4 cup cottage cheese, pinch of salt, 1/2 Splenda packet (or equivalent), and a couple dashes of cinnamon.
All you need to do is mix everything up in a microwave-safe bowl. With microwave, two minutes cooked it perfectly. It has a bit more of the consistency of eggs, but it tasted like a custard to me. You can also experiment with other spices or no-calorie flavorings besides cinnamon.
Final Tips for Your Three-Day Egg Fast
Don’t skimp on the vegetables because you’ll want to consume fiber. Also, keep yourself hydrated. If constipation is a problem, you might add a pinch of chia seeds to your eggs. I did sometimes, and it didn’t seem to hurt my weight loss. I suppose you could also use flax seeds, but they seem to taste odd to me in some dishes, so I prefer chia seeds.
Thanks for taking the trouble to write about your experiences with an egg fast. I saw some messages about it on a body building forum I read. Of course, I spend more time reading than body building, LOL. But i might give a three day egg fast a try.
Thanks! I hope you return to report back, so I don’t think my experience was just a fluke.