Category: intermittent fasting

Personal Good day checklist

If you are like me I you strive to have a good day everyday, instead we start our day with the dreaded to do list that hold us back from truly doing what we want to on our days off. Unlike my everyday checklists this checklist is made to help improve my day and allow me to get a short break from everyday chores and keep me healthy.

Checklist:

  • Creativity-
    • I enjoy doodling or painting, basically anything that involve the creation of something from a creative standpoint
  • Exercise
    • One of my favorites forms of relaxation is exercise
  • Relaxation-
    • Aside from exercise one of my two favorite forms of relaxation are reading and play video games
  • Sunlight –
    • I try to make sure I get some type of exposure to sunlight it makes my mood throughout the day more pleasant
      • I take my puppy to the dog park or even just for a walk
      • Summer time is when I get the most sunlight making it my favorite season because I spend so much time outside my mood is always a pleasant and happy one.
      • Winter, even though there is not much visible sunlight during the winter, outside exposure seems to help improve my mood.
  • Hydration-
    • HYDRATE!! The normal amount of water a person is supposed to drink per day is (1 oz water per 1 lbs) I weigh 230 lbs so I must drink 230oz one gallon of water is equal to 128 oz, but let’s face it I’m not going to drink almost two gallons of water everyday but I do make it a goal to drink one gallon per day

How Fast II

Benefits of Intermittent fasting

I have been fasting since the end of September 2018 at first it was confusing because I was under the impression that skipping a meal was bad, and that breakfast was the most important meal of the day but it got much easier when started to learn more about it. After reading a few articles and books on the the subject I quickly learned about the physical and mental benefits of intermittent fasting. The first two days of fasting were the hardest because I felt like I was going to overeat as soon as my window opened and I am not going to lie I did overeat a few times but once I got into a routine it became much easier. Once I was able to get past the hunger pangs I was able to notice a few differences and one of them was that any bloating that I would feel after eating was reduced. There are many benefits to fasting and once you are able to get past the hunger pangs you are able to certainly feel them.

Although it seems like Intermittent fasting like a fairly new idea, it was a method that was common in ancient life when when hunting and gathering where the only means to survive. Back then they obviously did not have a choice, because of the scarcity of the food they had to make it last.

Benefits of intermittent fasting:

1. Helps take off and keep off the weight

a. Eat fewer meals which means less calories consumed.

b. Hormonal changes, your body will adapt to fasting which in turn enhances your body’s ability to burn calories

c. It takes 10-12 hours for the energy from meal to be used up by the body and then it has to resort to the stored energy (fat).

2. Fasting will help regulate your digestive system allowing it to better repair and revitalize

a. Fasting helps the body eliminate toxins and waste from the body

3. Helps with the increase of energy, I know it seems hard to believe trust me I was as much of a skeptic until I started to feel this benefit for myself

4. It allows your muscles to recover faster.

a. This is something that I was more amazed at because I was feeling sore for less time allowing me to progress faster in my fitness I was able to increase the weight that I lifted more frequently

b. Also one of my favorite effects of this was that my joint pain decreased substantially. My knees would hurt after a good workout and after Jiu-jitsu but now the pain is low to none. This is because my body had more time to work on repairing itself rather than to try and use the energy of the food from the day before.

5. Fasting can also help build character:

a. It has helped me become more disciplined by creating a schedule in which I can be more productive during my day.

b. It has helped me become strong enough to fight off temptations outside of my cheat meal, that might compromise any fitness progress that I have made that day or week.

Overall the benefits of fasting are huge and the only way for anyone to be able to feel them is by trying it out. Yes it will be horrible at the beginning, trust me I struggled with it at first but like I said once it becomes a habit it will be much easier. You don’t have to start off with the 8hr eating window and 16hr fasting, maybe it is best if you try at first maybe 12/12. Remember the 21/90 rule? 21 days to create a habit and 90 to create a lifestyle, well this applies to fasting as well it is only hard at the beginning and eventually it will become a no-brainer.

Fasting tips:

1. Start off slow if you are not willing to test your will power

2. Eat food that is healthy

3. Skip first or last meal not the middle one that way you get the best out of this method

4. Push through the hunger pangs you will become a better person trust me.

HOW FAST?

For this week I am going to start with the basics how I found out about Intermittent fasting and other weight loss methods that I have tried and I will give you a basic idea of what exactly it is.

I have tried different types of diets in my weight loss journey and I found a few that were very effective but they always had the same results once I met my goals which was the yo-yo effect. I would always put some weight back on once I got off the diet it seemed like it was a never ending cycle of dieting and then reaching my goals only to put the pounds back on I honestly thought that I was going to have to diet for the rest of my life and that was something that I was not willing to do.

Here are some dieting methods that I have tried that have been effective

1. vegetarian diet (not vegan)- This type of dieting was the first one it was the on that started my weight loss journey and I lost a total of 50lbs but since I love steak and all of the meaty deliciousness this was not maintainable. With this diet I couldn’t eat anything that my family cooked because it all had meat it was great for weight loss and it made me feel amazing with more energy and motivation but it also made me cry because I couldn’t eat carne asada.

2. Mediterranean- essentially this diet consisted of having seafood and since I was not very experienced in cooking fish my go to was Cod or shrimp, after a while I was just not able to stand the smell of fish but it was very effective oddly, this was when I learned about veggie substitutions in plates that included pasta(such as zoodles or zucchini noodles). I lost my next 30 lbs on this diet.

3. Counting calories- this method has been the most effective one that I have used and it was super hard, I didn’t know what I was doing I just knew that I had to do this. I learned that the easiest way to keep good on you calories was by cooking all of the meals at once and having putting them away or meal prepping. With this method I lost another 20lbs.

4. Keto- well what can I say about this dieting method to tell you the truth I did not lose any weight with this because I gave up about a week into it. It looked amazing on paper, I mean you get to eat cheese, bacon, steak and ham and what not and the results of other people were great. I could not get past the feeling of it I always felt gross and it really affected my skin it was just not for me. I knew of the keto flu which was the name of the reaction and that it was normal, all I had to do is get passed the first couple of weeks and it would go away. I plan to give this method a try once again to see what results I have but it will not be anytime soon.

I am not trying to persuade anyone to not try any of these methods my point to this is to motivate everyone to try different methods. All of these worked for me it pushed me to lose 100 lbs but the reason I kept moving on and trying more methods was because I kept hitting a weight plateau which made me lose motivation which made me gain some of the weight back, which pushed me to try something different. With the calorie count method I did not plateau but it was starting to get hard and there was not way that I could do it forever and I did not want gain the weight back so I started doing some research which helped me better understand why I was not losing anymore weight. In my research I stumbled across intermittent fasting, it stated that all of the top stars in Hollywood do it and that it is a new trend, I normally do not believe those types of ads but I decided to focus on finding more information about the subject and what I found was that it was simple to do all I had to do was skip one meal a day and that it normally would be breakfast. Yes, I know what you are probably thinking WHAT, SKIP THE MOST IMPORTANT MEAL OF THE DAY? Yes that is exactly what I am saying, if you skip one meal a day a you will naturally consume less calories.

For example:

If your normal day is like this

Breakfast 500-800 cal

Lunch 600-800 cal

Dinner 700-1000 cal

You are consuming anywhere 1800 to 2600 cals per day by the way if you’re not into bodybuilding then you should probably not be having 2600 calories. Now eliminate one of those meals and naturally you will be consuming less calories, the meals that are options for cutting out are either breakfast or dinner. Since you are eliminating meals it is easier to plan out what food you will be consuming during the time you are able to eat.

So to be exact, fasting is scheduling when you eat and I do not mean scheduling like eat chicken at 3pm then at 5pm and so on, intermittent fasting is just setting a time of the day that you are able to eat for example my schedule goes like this:

(Since I work night shift I had to make two schedules one for workdays and one for days off.)

1. The days that I work I eat my first meal at 6 then I snack any time before my next meal and usually I eat it whenever I have a free minute at work. My last meal of the night is between 130 and 2 am which is an 8 hour window meaning I fast for 16hrs but I make sure that I get all of my calories in with those two meals and the snack.

2. On days that I do not work I don’t eat until either 12pm or 2pm depending on how hungry I am feeling of course my first day off I fast for a shorter amount of time but my window still closes at 8pm or 10pm putting me back on the 8/16 fasting schedule.

At first it might sound confusing but when you get used to it the schedule works great, plus fasting has been what made me survive the holidays I managed to stay the same weight and I ate everything ha.

There is so much more information that I want to share with you about intermittent fasting so keep an eye out for my weekly posts I will be going over where the idea of intermittent fasting comes from what other types of this dieting methods there are.