Lent
Lent is here and I decided to go with the intermittent fasting that I had been considering. First as previously mentioned, I was doing the slow carb diet. Between January 9th and March 1st I went from 251 pounds to 228.8 pounds. And that wasn’t adhering too closely to the diet. For example the diet has you eating smaller meals every three hours and that is something I struggle with. It doesn’t really work for me. So I was just eating 2-4 meals a day depending on the day. At the beginning close to 4 and by the end just 2. Also in that time frame, we celebrated my wife’s birthday, our wedding anniversary, and my daughter’s birthday all of which involved breaking the diet to some degree. I think if I had stuck close to the diet I could have lost that weight in 6 weeks based on the rate that I was losing early on before family obligations came into play. But at the end of the day if you can’t cheat here and there to celebrate the important things in life, that is no way to live. And Slow Carb is definitely a system that if you stick to it most of the time will work for you even with the built in cheats.
As I mentioned in the last post more and more we see studies coming out about the health benefits of fasting. I experimented with my 72 hour fast last year and documented the results. This year I have decided to go ahead with the intermittent fasting. There are tons of different fasting programs out there like the 5:2 diet. I have also seen an argument for every other day fasting. There is fasting built around your Circadian Rhythm. So just picking the right fasting program itself sounds crazy enough. At the end I also need to see what fits into my life. I decided to try to do limited fasting around 1 meal a day. My plan is to only consume calories between 6pm and 10pm at night. So I can have supper with my family every day. While the Circadian fasting might be more effective this should be good enough to test it out and see how I feel. I am still drinking black coffee in the morning since this doesn’t seem to break the fast and in the first two days that has kept me satisfied until supper time. I will report back with an update after Easter on any weight loss and how I felt throughout the fast.