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.
Dad looks confused 