Week 1 Summary

Day 8, Feast Day #4

One week of intermittent fasting is complete and I am feeling much more optimistic about ADF being a lifestyle that I can sustain. I mentally handle the idea of being hungry much better now than I was at first. I also am able to get most of the nutrients I need on a low amount of calories from eating mostly vegetables on fast days. I am taking vitamin/mineral supplements now for the rest, and frankly, the amount of vitamins and minerals I have been getting on my feast days compared to my fast days is much lower. 

Eating a standard American diet of pancakes, beer, hamburgers, and fried food is giving me a huge amount of calories, sugar, and fat on feast days. But there is only a little vitamin A, iron, calcium, and potassium getting in my body these days. I will admit getting enough calcium is something I usually have to supplement because I am lactose-intolerant (very much so) and it seems like I would have plan my entire diet around potassium in order to get the 4,700 mg that is now recommended. I couldn't even find a supplement for potassium that had more than 3% of the DRV at the health store. I just have to be more conscious about including potassium rich food in my diet (root veggies, tropical fruit, potatoes, avocado, etc), especially since I know my grandmother struggles with low potassium and has been hospitalized for it.

So far my calories by day looks like this:

Fast day average: 433 kcal
Feast day average: 2607 kcal
Total average: 1,520 kcal - So, I am still eating less on average than I would normally.

What I have found interesting is that the amount of calories I have been eating on my fast days has decreased gradually (down to just 347 calories yesterday), while on the other hand my feast day caloric intake has increased gradually. I think the crazy feasting behavior has also been me seeing if I can manage to make up the entire 1,500 calories I missed on my fast days up. The closest I have gotten is still 500 calories short, and that was with eating two breakfasts, a bacon cheeseburger, and a 3-course meal at a sushi restaurant. (It was an epic feast day.)

Again, I woke up with a headache. However, it was not nearly as bad as the headaches have been. I also took Sondra's advice and got a magnesium supplement, took that today with breakfast, and my headache is gone now. Amazing! Studies like this one show a link between low magnesium and headaches and that adding magnesium to the body alleviates headache pain. Thanks again, Sondra.

The best part about starting ADF is how much more aware I am of the types of food I eat and what dietary values they hold. I also really appreciate eating everything. I also had no idea how many calories were in foods. Keeping a food diary has been a huge wake-up call to how I have been eating for years. It reminds a lot of when I first started using Mint to track my spending. After I tracked my income and spending for a month I had a wake up call about how much money I wasted---mostly on food, drinks, and miscellaneous things. This was the impetus for me saving my money and being smarter with finances. I feel tracking what I am eating is giving me that same wake up call and will help me eat healthier.