Week 7 Summary

Day 51, Feast Day #27

I woke up this morning to good news from the scale. I have lost another 2 lbs, for a total of 16 lbs lost. I also started taking waist and hip measurements this month, and I have lost a half inch from both my waist and my hips. So now I am averaging a little over a 2 pound loss per week. My clothes are beginning to feel looser and friends are starting to notice the change. Here are the numbers:

Calories
Week 1: 1,437 kcal or 76% of baseline calories
Week 2: 1,938 kcal or 102% of baseline calories
Week 3: 1,680 kcal or 89% of baseline calories
Week 4: 2,196 kcal or 116% of baseline calories
Week 5: 1,829 kcal or 96% of baseline calories
Week 6: 1,531 kcal or 81% of baseline calories
Week 7: 1,954 kcal or 103% of baseline calories

While ADFing: 1,795 kcal or 95% of baseline calories
Baseline Days: 1,896 kcal

All Feast Days: 2,966 kcal or 156% of baseline calories
All Fast Days*: 471 kcal or 25% of baseline calories

For reference
Week 1: 4 fast days, 3 feast days
Week 2: 3 fast days, 4 feast days
Week 3: 3 fast days*, 4 feast days
Week 4: 3 fast days, 4 feast days
Week 5: 3 fast days, 4 feast days
Week 6: 4 fast days, 3 feast days
Week 7: 3 fast days, 4 feast days
*Includes faux-fast day that was my mama's birthday dinner.

So I ,obviously like collecting data and using it to evaluate my behavior. I am kind of a numbers junkie in general. I use SaveUp as a free tool to track the money I use to pay down debt and save money. The thing with SaveUp, is you get rewarded in credits for the money you save or pay debts with and you can use credits to enter into raffles for prizes, lotteries, or play other luck-based games. After a little over a year of using SaveUp, I finally won a raffle for a $100 Whole Foods gift card. I don't normally shop at Whole Foods, but $100 of free groceries is awesome. 

I took this gift card as an opportunity to try some non-grain flours and meals and non-corn oils so Zach and I can work on eating less processed and refined corn and wheat products and start eating more primal food, in addition to the produce and meat we'd normally have on our grocery list. Tonight we enjoyed some bison sirloin steaks with mashed red potatoes (without milk) and sauteed asparagus from our grocery trip. Yum! Bison steak is great because it is leaner than regular steak. My 7 oz. steak was only ~210 calories with 47 grams of  protein and 35% of the DRV of iron. In comparison, the same size and cut of steak from a cow has ~368 calories, 44 gram of protein, and 18% of the DRV of iron.

While at Whole Foods, I also bought GT's grape chia kombucha on the recommendation of a friend, since my first kombucha experience was unpleasant. I basically had taken a swig of a friend's kombucha on a hot, humid day not knowing what I was putting in my mouth. All I could taste was a funky, fungal flavor---not refreshing like I had expected from refrigerated tea on a hot day. 

Kombucha is a fermented tea made with fungus that is becoming increasingly popular as a "living" food (there is bacteria and yeast in it). I doubt kombucha is becoming popular because of its vinegary and yeasty taste. However, the glucuronic acid in kombucha may reduce one's risk of cancer, which seems like a good trade off. Luckily, one can find kombucha in flavors, since I am too much of a wuss for the unflavored stuff.

This grape chia flavor kombucha tasted a lot better than the non-flavored kombucha I had previously, although there is more sugar from the flavoring. I like the chia seeds in there because it reminded me of drinking bubble tea. I think the mistake I made with kombucha this time was drinking it on nearly an empty stomach at the end of a fast day. My stomach was making all kinds of strange noises and I think it triggered my heartburn from the acidity. I will try to drink the rest of it on a full stomach and see if that is less cruel to my stomach. Otherwise, I may have to scrap kombucha.