Day 23, Fast Day #11
I lost another 2 lbs for a total of 12 lbs. Today was harder to stay motivated just because neither Zach or I got enough sleep since we stayed out late last night and had to get up early (for us on a Sunday) to volunteer at our church today. Also, I might have had a chocolate hangover from two different desserts for my birthday happy hour/eating & drinking fest with friends. It was a good birthday week. Next weekend may be a repeat of bad eating behavior since we have some friends from out of town staying over next weekend.
I skipped a summary last week due to being out of town. So I spent some time last night looking at the numbers from all three weeks since I started alternate day fasting:
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
While ADFing: 1,685 kcal or 89% of baseline calories
Baseline Days: 1,896 kcal
All Feast Days: 2,756 kcal or 145% of baseline calories
All Fast Days*: 507 kcal or 26% 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
*Includes faux-fast day that was my mama's birthday dinner.
Alternate day fasting has reduced my average calorie intake overall, despite me being very bad about sticking to it this past week due to birthday festivities. It is clear to me that one of the things I need to work on is not using my feast day as an excuse to eat everything. More importantly, not as an excuse to drink whatever I want. It is amazing how many empty calories from sugar one can consume in the form of cocktails. I feel like my food decisions have improved over the last couple of weeks because I am more aware of the calorie and nutrient value of foods. I am basically retraining my mind and body on how to eat.
Some other things I need to watch and lower for a healthier diet is my sugar, fat, cholesterol, and sodium intake. I finally managed to meet the DRV of potassium on one day this week by eating a large volume of tomato soup. However, this also had a lot of sodium in it too, so I am sure a lot of that was neutralized.
I also expect the rise and fall of average calories every other week (so far) to be due to the number of fast versus feast days I have on a given week.
I also ordered and received a copy of Dr, Michael Mosley's The FastDiet, so that should be useful and hopefully motivating. I am already liking the calorie guide in the back.
Showing posts with label calories. Show all posts
Showing posts with label calories. Show all posts
4.28.2013
4.19.2013
So Many Birthday Dinners, So Much Food
Day 14, Feast Day #8
One of the worst things about alternate day fasting has got to be when a fast day lands on a special occasion, holiday, or other important or rare social occasion. Being hungry alone is tolerable. But it is just masochistic to be hungry in a group dinner or party setting. For me, April is a birthday laden month which includes myself, my mother, and friends.
Now I have no plans to be so strict with this diet that I end up offending people on special occasions or holidays. Especially when the person likely to be offended is the same person that carried me 9 months and brought me into this world.
My mom's birthday is next Monday, so Zach, my brother, and I are driving down this weekend to spend some time with her. The drive is three to four hours depending on traffic, so we won't make it into town by the end of today's feast day. So what is a girl to do about mom's birthday dinner on Saturday, a fast day?
Zach and I have come up with a decent compromise for this type of socially obligated eating and/or drinking function: the occasional 800 calorie not completely cheating day.
Why 800 calories? It seems that a good number of the research papers I have looked at related to intermittent fasting will use a 800 calorie day as the fast day calorie allotment. Some even go up to 1,200 calories on a calorie-restricted today. So it is cheating in that 800 calories is much more than the usual 400-500 I get on a fast day. But 800 calories is still only 40% of a normal 2,000 calorie diet or 50% of a 1,600 calorie diet. With 800 calories one can eat a decent meal and have a drink easily.
I know very well without any restriction, I will overindulge. After all, my eating habits up until this point lacked boundaries. Hopefully Zach and I can stick to our cheat day strategy and not go crazy. I am also hesitant to just full out eat on a normal fast day because I feel like it would make the next fast day much more difficult.
Have a great weekend!
One of the worst things about alternate day fasting has got to be when a fast day lands on a special occasion, holiday, or other important or rare social occasion. Being hungry alone is tolerable. But it is just masochistic to be hungry in a group dinner or party setting. For me, April is a birthday laden month which includes myself, my mother, and friends.
Now I have no plans to be so strict with this diet that I end up offending people on special occasions or holidays. Especially when the person likely to be offended is the same person that carried me 9 months and brought me into this world.
My mom's birthday is next Monday, so Zach, my brother, and I are driving down this weekend to spend some time with her. The drive is three to four hours depending on traffic, so we won't make it into town by the end of today's feast day. So what is a girl to do about mom's birthday dinner on Saturday, a fast day?
Zach and I have come up with a decent compromise for this type of socially obligated eating and/or drinking function: the occasional 800 calorie not completely cheating day.
Why 800 calories? It seems that a good number of the research papers I have looked at related to intermittent fasting will use a 800 calorie day as the fast day calorie allotment. Some even go up to 1,200 calories on a calorie-restricted today. So it is cheating in that 800 calories is much more than the usual 400-500 I get on a fast day. But 800 calories is still only 40% of a normal 2,000 calorie diet or 50% of a 1,600 calorie diet. With 800 calories one can eat a decent meal and have a drink easily.
I know very well without any restriction, I will overindulge. After all, my eating habits up until this point lacked boundaries. Hopefully Zach and I can stick to our cheat day strategy and not go crazy. I am also hesitant to just full out eat on a normal fast day because I feel like it would make the next fast day much more difficult.
Have a great weekend!
4.16.2013
Fast(ing) Food - Quick Shrimp With Snow Peas
Day 11, Fast Day #6
Weighed myself again this morning and thought I was hallucinating. So I weighed myself twice more. Turns out I am down another 3 lbs, putting me at a 7 lb loss after 11 days. Crazy.
I have been busy wedding planning today, so I did not have time to finish an epic blog post. But I will leave you with a fast day recipe instead.
I basically got tired of eating just cold, mostly raw food on my fast days. So I made a heartier shrimp stir-fry for lunch today instead, yum!
Quick Shrimp With Snow Peas (Yields 3 servings) ~288 kcal/serving
Takes about 15-20 minutes
Stir-fry:
Add the broth, sugar, rice wine, soy sauce, and cornstarch into a small bowl or measuring cup and whisk until blended.
Pat dry shrimp on towel(s). Otherwise your shrimp are going to make the stir-fry watery and diluted coming straight out of the water bowl.
The key to stir-fry is not taking your eye off the pan and stirring continually to avoid burning things. Bring oil to medium-high to high heat in a wok, skillet, or large frying pan depending on how hot your burners get.
Add garlic and ginger to the pan. Stir continually for one minute.
Add shrimp, cook and stir for about a minute. If you bought precooked shrimp like me, these are already cooked so you are just heating them up basically. Otherwise cook raw shrimp until opaque and pink.
Throw in the snow peas and green onions. Cook and stir until snow peas start getting a little floppy.
Pour in the sauce mixture and stir until the sauce thickens up. Salt & pepper to taste and eat!
Weighed myself again this morning and thought I was hallucinating. So I weighed myself twice more. Turns out I am down another 3 lbs, putting me at a 7 lb loss after 11 days. Crazy.
I have been busy wedding planning today, so I did not have time to finish an epic blog post. But I will leave you with a fast day recipe instead.
I basically got tired of eating just cold, mostly raw food on my fast days. So I made a heartier shrimp stir-fry for lunch today instead, yum!
 |
| Ugh, more cold, boring vegetables. |
Takes about 15-20 minutes
Stir-fry:
- 1 lb medium or large shrimp, frozen, no shell, cooked, and deveined (~427 kcal) - If you have time to devote to deveining and shelling your own shrimp and cooking them from a raw state, go for it. It will taste better. However I am cheap and impatient. Most shrimp sold in the US is previously frozen anyway.
- 1 cup snow peas (~42 kcal)
- 2 green onions stalks, chopped (~10 kcal) - I have been saving the bulbs and putting them in shot glasses full of water on our window sill and growing a second batch of green onions for free.
- 2 cloves garlic, minced (~8 kcal)
- 1 tsp ginger, minced (a root piece about half the size of your thumb) (~2 kcal)
- 2 1/2 tbsp vegetable oil (~309 kcal)
- pepper to taste
- salt to taste
- 1/3 cup vegetable broth (~5 kcal)
- 1 tsp white sugar (~15 kcal)
- 2 tsp rice wine (~17 kcal)
- 2 tsp soy sauce (I prefer low-sodium, but if you have a wheat/gluten issue, stick with regular strength) (~7 kcal)
- 2 tsp cornstarch for thickening (~20 kcal)
- 1 tbsp salt
- 2 1/2 cup cold water
- paper towels or a clean dish towel (for drying)
Add the broth, sugar, rice wine, soy sauce, and cornstarch into a small bowl or measuring cup and whisk until blended.
Pat dry shrimp on towel(s). Otherwise your shrimp are going to make the stir-fry watery and diluted coming straight out of the water bowl.
The key to stir-fry is not taking your eye off the pan and stirring continually to avoid burning things. Bring oil to medium-high to high heat in a wok, skillet, or large frying pan depending on how hot your burners get.
Add garlic and ginger to the pan. Stir continually for one minute.
Add shrimp, cook and stir for about a minute. If you bought precooked shrimp like me, these are already cooked so you are just heating them up basically. Otherwise cook raw shrimp until opaque and pink.
Throw in the snow peas and green onions. Cook and stir until snow peas start getting a little floppy.
Pour in the sauce mixture and stir until the sauce thickens up. Salt & pepper to taste and eat!
4.13.2013
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.
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.
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