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143.62 average
Because I’ve had several easy fast days recently, when going to bed at the end of a food day I feel much more relaxed about the fast day coming up. In the past I was sometimes a little bit anxious about the whole day’s fasting up ahead but this week has been really easy. No trepidation at all and I’m enjoying the fasting much more now than I did about a month ago.
My weight this month has been extremely stable. I’ve not lost very much and so I’m considering myself on a bit of a plateau but that’s ok with me. Those pink peaks are where my weight has gone above the average line. This drags the line upwards. I had a week where I just wasn’t fasting every day (I’d have a smallish meal -what I called a fastish day) and then I started fasting properly again. That’s where you can see the deeper green points, which draw the trendline down again (here it’s only very very slightly downward).
I am beginning to like how my body feels and looks. I’m still a pearshape and can’t wear whatever I want, but if I accept that I will never be able to just wear anything and instead have to find things that suit my shape, then I’ll be a much happier bunny. It’s better that than wasting my time and energy fretting about the perfect body I’ll never have. That’s not a weight issue, that’s a shape issue.
It helps considerably that today and yesterday have been days I have taken off work, so I don’t have to do anything strenuous. That makes fasting a bit easier. Cycling to work and back the morning after a fast day can be quite hard. It’s not as if I have a huge commuting distance (it’s only 12 miles both ways) but some of the hills just feel harder when I’ve been fasting the day before. I am hoping that over time my body will get used to the regime and be able to draw on energy suppplies elsewhere (fat metabolised through the liver or spare pockets of glycogen as reserves). An article in one of TSC’s cycle magazines suggested as part of cyling training to skip dinner and breakfast and then go on a long, hard ride to force the body to cycle despite depleted glycogen. Doing this once in a while is meant to promote the body’s ability draw on energy reserves more effectively.
I cooked TSC a cream of onion soup and it used on egg yolk. Although today is a fast day I figured it wouldn’t be the end of the world if I dropped the egg white into a pan and made a mini omelette. I think an egg white is about 12 calories of pure protein. Not exactly a blowout.
Eats: 1 milk tea | 1 hot water w/lemon | water| 1 egg white
Exercise: none
144.02 average
I’ve put in aaaalllll my previous weighs (going back to April 2007!) and of course that’s affected my average (it’s bumped it up a little). Now that I’ve done that, my lowest weight to beat is 143.67lbs. Once I get my average below that, I can start adding ‘lowest weight’ tag to my post. For now, I’m just reclaiming ground I lost from not fasting on fast days.
This morning saw a hefty drop. That’s good. It means that, as expected most of the gain yesterday was water (which means, of course, that most of the drop today is also water). But still. It’s nice to see the weight-numbers are quickly reversible. Responsive to what I do. In the past it always seemed so beyond my control. Whatever I did, I weighed the same.
Yesterday was a pretty easy Fast Day. I felt very little hunger, although I did find myself looking forward to brekkers by the time bedtime came around. Still, I felt fine all day. Good. I needed an easy day to remind myself this isn’t torture (if it’s too unpleasant, I’m not going to be able -or indeed want- to sustain this for the rest of my life).
I had some of the bread I’d made. Because of the alternate day fasting schedule, I rarely get to eat the freshly made bread. I tend to get some once it’s a few days old. It’s just because of when we make it, but the TSC eats about 90% of the bread we make and the chances of me getting to have some while it’s fresh (soft inside, crusty outside) are slim. Sometimes I don’t get to have even a single slice, cos TSC eats the whole lot!
I very much like toast, so to have some of the loaf I made was nice. I also had muesli at work (I really like muesli, too) but it makes me drowsy. I always forget how drowsy I get when I eat oats!
As soon as I got in from work yesterday, I got out of my cycling gear and into my running gear. We went for a run around the park and I got very tired about 5 minutes into the run. I didn’t know if I could do a whole loop, but by halfway around the endorphins had kicked in and I enjoyed it. Not as much as when we run along the seafront, but enjoyable nonetheless. Part of the tougnness was compounded by the hefty wind against us during an uphill part of the run. It felt considerably easier when we had a tailwind on the downhill part. I felt like I could fly if I’d wanted to.
I’m getting that craving for fresh foods again. Crunchy vegetables like cucumber, broccoli – asparagus season is starting again! yay! I’m also permanently feeling cold. My hands are usually like ice. When I’ve been fasting, I find it very difficult to warm up once I go to bed, too. I’m lying under a cosy duvet but covered in goosebumps. I’ve suffered from unusual coldness for about 4 years now so it’s nothing new, but fasting makes it worse.
I was extremely hungry today and had eaten my lunch before 11am, and that’s despite having a big bowl of muesli at about 9ish. I had a plate of salad at 2.30 and then ate sweets in the afternoon (this is very bad. I ate far too many sweets and now feel blegh! as a result. Serves me right)
Looking forward to the spagbol for dinner tonight. I think I need some protein. I’ll also be glad to fast tomorrow. I’m sure with the amount I’ve eaten today I’ll see some high numbers on the scales. Fasting always makes that feel less bad, as I’m aware that I’m doing something about it. Empowering, in a way.
Eats: 5 milk-tea | 1 toast w/honey | 1 bowl muesli| 3 slices homemade pizza | 1 plate of salad | polo mints | jelly sweets | spaghetti bolognaise | fresh pineapple| 1 glass red wine
Exercise: commute in with headwind (oof!) | commute home with a tailwind (wee!)
(windy, cloudy day, a tad chilly at 13C)
143.69 average (STILL losing)
I’m now AT my lowest recorded weight and I can definitely tell by my clothes that I’m smaller around my most troublesome area (le derriere).
As I start to shrink, and I do genuinely feel better at this size than I did at the 150lbs stage some months ago, but I also know that when I was anorexic I still felt frustrated at my hideous body. I had the saddlebags on my thighs so they will never never go.
Being underweight and still feeling fat means my body image is screwed up and I need to address that.
I started googling for advice on how to tackle this mental block. Trying to explain it to TSC, he just does NOT get it. But then men don’t suffer from it nearly as much as women. If anything, men tend to overestimate their physical attraciveness and assume they are nearer to their personal physical ideal than they actually are. Women tend to see themselves as further from the ideal (and that ideal is even more narrowly defined and large unattainable in TOP of that).
So, for this month I have some exercies to do to help me to learn to accept my body as it is and to shut up those nasty voices that bully me into feeling bad about myself.
One is to lavish my body with tender loving care. In the shower I’m to touch all areas, including the hated jiggly bits and soap up with love, to treat my body with the care I’d give a lover’s body. As I go along, take note of what is nice. For example I have very nice skin. It has a nice colour and a soft texture. My thighs, hideous as they are, can also be seen as femininely voluptuous. Generous rather than fat. Having a layer of fat around my body probably makes me nicer to hold and squeeze close to and cuddle. I should be glad about that.
As well as that, if I do get a nasty comment pop into my head, I’m to acknowledge it but also to counter it. Positive self-affirmations will be more beneficial. I think about what my body can do and how it looks is only part of my life within this body.
I also have to remember that what I have is what I have. Everyone’s body is different and that that is perfectly ok. Just as I can’t expect to have someone else’s face, I also cannot expect to have a body like theirs. Mine is mine and is uniquely so. They have theirs along with their own flaws.
In the grander scheme of things, I’m pretty lucky. Now that I’m a little bit slimmer I have a nice tummy and waist. I have a nice chest and good shoulders and neck. My face is nice. Everything above the waist I like and would not change. What is below the waist is where my disdain is focused. I have to learn to love all of that area, too.
I was pretty famished by about 2pm so went off to find some food. The sandwich and banana were filling but I still wanted something else, so I bought some chocolate and sweets as a treat. I’ve not had that for ages, so why not?
Strangely I couldn’t finish the 35g bar of chocolate and the five jelly sweets were quite enough! Normally I’d have wolfed down the chocolate and finished the packet of sweets and broken into the next one! what an appetite reset!
tonight I’ll be meeting a friend for dinner, where we’ll discuss our current woes and jubilations. How fortunate that’s fallen on a Food Day.
Eats: 2 milk tea | 375ml water | 2 black tea | 2 bowls of muesli w/ milk | 2 biscuits | char-grilled veggie sandwich | 1 banana | 5 jelly sharks (sweets)| 25g Dark Maya chocolate | potato wedges w/sweet chilli sauce | pitta and houmous w/olives| side salad (all three as shared starters) | belgian waffle w/white chocolate ice cream | 1/2 pint cider
Exercise: commute to work (empty legs feeling), commute home feeling alive
Today we cycled home and again no food. It was a glorious spring day with warm sunshine and the gentlest of breezes. It was no effort at all and I didn’t notice it being harder for not having had breakfast or lunch. Mind you, we ate a LOT of pasta at dinner last night, so I’ll have been running on that energy.
So despite the long ride on a fast, a walk with food and then ride on a fast again, it all fitted around that very well. I had dinner after the first ride but I’m sure I could have missed that. I felt normal during the walk and then normal for the ride home. that’s pretty amazing, really.
Eats: water | 4 milk tea
Exercise: 4.5 hours cycling home.
145.10 average
(automated post)
I’m away this weekend, cycling. TSC and I will be cycling to a campsite we know about 40 miles from here, staying two nights and then cycling home again Sunday, having done a lovely long walk Saturday (tomorrow).
This is going to be a bit of an experiment. I’ve never fasted while cycle-touring before. We’ll be on cycling for about 4-5 hours, so it’ll be hard going on the body to do it on no food. We’re also planning on doing a long walk the next day and I will certainly have depleted the glycogen stores by exercising without food for a prolonged period. I’m also concerned that my electrolytes will be out of whack from salt loss in sweat not being replaced by any salt-containing foods.
So, I’ll be adopting a 24hour fast system instead (rather than the 36 hour fast I do at the moment). The plan is to
cycle the 40 odd miles to the campsite while fasting today
cook up a meal in the evening to eat -replenishing salts and carbs
Have the Saturday as a food day and go hiking
Start fasting on Sunday and cycle home without food.
Back to a Food Day on Monday as normal.
I might be persuaded to buy an isotonic drink to have along the way for those electorlytes. This is endurance, after all. I can be sweating and losing salts qutie badly over the day. Normally when we tour, we eat salty foods as snacks (such as crisps or peanuts). There’ll be none of that for me, so I’m going to have to see how it goes. This’ll be an interesting experiment.
Eats: 2 milk-tea | water | 1 ribeye steak | couscous w/ onion, mushroom and peppers | pecan plait
Exercise: 4.5 hours cycling (40 miles)
146.17 average
wow! I wasn’t expecting quite such a large drop in weight this morning! As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, however, that is not what I would consider my actual weight. I go by the average so I’m really more like 146.17lbs. Because of yesterday’s fast, I’ll be low on water due to glycogen depletion. Glycogen is the form of sugar the body stores in its muscles. The foods (particularly carbohydrates) you eat get converted into glycogen, are bundled up with water and stored in the muscles for them to use as energy for movement. Water is heavy so if you use up the glycogen, the water goes, too. Getting fitter is partly about increasing the muscles’ ability to store this vital energy and to utilise it effectively.
When you exercise, you are using either the sugars in your muscle or the fat reserves which are converted into usable sugary by your liver (more on that later). It’s almost always a combination of the two that’s driving the engine but high intensity exercise increases sugar consumption from the muscle, depleting the glycogen. Recent studies showed that doing high intensity interval training (in which you go at the peak of your capability for a brief period of time – e.g. 30 seconds or 2 minutes – followed by either light exercise or complete rest) led to diabetic subjects showing improved insulin levels. When you clear out the glycogen in your muscles, the excess sugar in your bloodstream can be hoovered up by these empty muscles.
Fasting does a similar trick and there seems to be something very important about removing glycogen in your muscles for a refreshing later that is superior to just keeping the muscles continually topped up through regular meals or through no exercise.
I’m not saying fasting is equivalent to or can replace exercise. Fasting won’t make you fitter but it does seem to mimic some of the chemical processes that are part responsible for the healthy side effects of exercise. Fasting, like high intensity exercise, clears out the muscle of its glycogen and allows excess sugars to flood in its place.
I do both, though. I cycle 5.5 miles to work and 6.5 miles back (it’s a slightly different route home) whether I’m fasting or not. Some weekends TSC and I go touring on our loaded up bikes and cycle ten times that distance, camp a night and then cycle on again the next day. How I’m going to incorporate that level of glycogen depletion while fasting is something I am going to have to play around with and be flexible on, I think.
Critics of fasting point out (quite rightly) that the brain is not a muscle and does not have glycogen stores to draw on when you’re not taking in any carbohydrates. (They criticise low or no carb diets with this same fact). The brain requires glucose to work. Glucose is what all carbohydrates are converted into (be they simple carbohydrates in a cake or complex carbohydrates in porridge. the difference is only how much ‘lab work’ the body has to do with it to convert it into usable glucose). But the body is perfectly capable of producing its own glucose, otherwise we’d all die if we skipped breakfast. People can survive weeks on no food as long as they have enough fat reserves.
The liver is capable of converting fat into sugar. Each molecule of phospholipid fat is made up of a glycerol ‘head’ with three fatty acid chain ‘tails’ (made up of carbon atoms, connected to hydrogen atoms. Where each carbon has two hydrogen atoms each, it’s considered ‘saturated’. Where carbon atoms are missing a hydrogen and have to connect to another carbon atom, it is ‘unsaturated – bit of useless info for you there). Glycerol on its own is a sweet substance (technically an alcohol) that is used for making cough medicines as it tastes sweet and is quite viscous.
The liver can happily pick apart the fats, remove the glycerol part and put it into the bloodstream. This is why on fast days you can be less hungry than on non-fast days. Hunger is complicated and is affected by a number of things including stretch receptors in the stomach, hormones such as insulin and ghrelin and a whole host of psychological goings on, too. Slumping blood sugar levels can make you hungry. This is typically caused by over consuming sugar, insulin is released to sweep up the excess sugar but sometimes it goes overboard and sweeps away too much, leading to low sugar levels in the blood, which sets the brain off to wail for more sugar (and you get that ‘can’t concentrate’ feeling). This is why a lot of diets fail so badly. Your body senses there is a below acceptable level of sugar in the blood. Your brain really needs it and starts to scream for some sugar. Your brain is screaming for sugar and guess who’s in charge of controlling the hand that buys the chocolate bar, hmm? This is why dieting breakdowns are not necessarily your fault. Willpower is all very well but it’s naive to think you have complete conscious control over your brain.
But, if you can leave it for a bit or have no access to food, eventually your liver kicks into gear and starts fatty acid chain crunching and puts sugar into your bloodstream from the fat reserves you have (I did read about a theory that said one reason why bum fat is so much harder to shift than belly fat is because it’s so much less accessible to the liver. I’m not sure how true that is and can’t find anything on it, either. I can vouch that I personally lose belly fat before it moves from my bottom but I’m a pear shape and I think genetics plays the biggest part in where your fat is stored. It might just have been a theory and nothing was proven). So your liver can keep the bloodstream supplied with a steady supply of sugar. Not having the ups and downs caused by insulin prevents one of the mechanisms of hunger.
For some reason, eating protein also suppresses hunger. Again I’m hazy on the details but I think it affects another hormone (ghrelin) to make you feel sated. This is why carbohydrate breakfasts stay with you less long than do protein based breakfasts such as an egg or sausages. Don’t believe me? Start a few days with some protein only (doesn’t have to be fatty. Lean protein would be better) and see how you feel by lunchtime.
Cycle touring around Germany TSC and I started our days with either porridge or German sausages for breakfast. There was no contest when it came to midday munchies. We could go through to the afternoon before eating when we’d started our day with Würstchen. For the TSC not to feel hungry within a few hours of eating is unheard of. He’s one of those ‘needs to eat every few hours’ kinda guys.
It’s a good job the body is not a slave to carbohydrates for its brain fuel thanks to the liver. Incidentally, in studies involving rats, the fasting little rodents had healthier liver function than did the control group of non-fasting rats. The body is an amazing thing. Converting this to that, that to this. We’re quite the chemical lab. Good job too, or all the Atkins lot would be dead or zombies. None has suffered brain damage as a result of not eating carbohydrates as far as I know. Carbohydrates are probably the only macronutrient (the other macronutrients are protein and fat) that we can actually live without. I’m not saying we should. I’m not advocating carbless diets but if you refused to eat protein or fat, you would die.
Anyway, that’s enough chemistry lesson. I’m off for some brekkers. Muesli with some banana. yum yum. I won’t want protein for breakfast or I might end up skipping lunch and this is a Food Day.
Eats: 1 milk-tea | 1 muesli w/ semi skimmed milk | 1 banana | small portion of rice | 2 pecan biscuits | 1 toast w/salmon and tomato | 2 slices homemade bread | spaghetti bolognaise | chocolate brownie w/custard
Exercise: short cycle ride to shops
Alternate Day Fasting 