Hi Pollywotsit and Scottishgal,
Your questions set me thinking about my experience this week and I thought it may be helpful to share those with you.
I was a vegetarian from childhood because I really hated the taste / texture of the fat in meat to the point where eating it made me throw up. – There were not all the recipes and acceptance of vegetarianism when I was a child, so my diet was high carb. I was slim enough to wear a bikini in my early teens, but gradually the weight increased and increased and for most of my adult life I was a dress size 18/20 despite living a very active lifestyle and calorie counting. After an accident when I fell landing with my foot back under my leg, I had to spend 6 months not putting the foot to the ground to allow the bone fragments to heal without needing operations to install plates and screws to rebuild the ankle. I was left in constant pain when I walked which led to spend a few years of comfort eating and my weight ballooned. I was fortunate enough to encounter a trainee physio, who helped me become pain free when walking. So then my journey to loose the blubber started, and I found the BSD in October 2017.
I started off cutting out all the big carb sources, bread, pasta, pizza, chocolate, sugar, rice. Then I moved on to using fatsecret to monitor my food intake and tweeked the choices I made to reduce carbs further. That has meant that I have lost 6.5 stone and I got back to my “usual” size. But I don’t want to stop there. I want to be a better shape, and would like to enter my next decade being shapely enough to wear a bikini again.
I love the description someone else came up with that we are each our own experiment on this journey. That is certainly what I have been doing for the last 6 months. – As a vegi its really difficult to have interesting tasty meals and be under 20g carbs. – But the reason for the 20g carb level is to ensure that your insulin levels are low enough that your body can access your fat stores and be in ketosis. The amount and type of carbs each person can consume and stay in ketosis is very individual, it depends on your level of insulin resistance, the mixture of your gut bacteria and the type of carb. – 20g of carbs from sugar is very different to 20g of carbs from fiber rich veg which it takes your body a long time to break down and digest. I use one of the cheap breathalysers to check if my body is in fat burning mode so I can learn the patterns for myself.
I am at the point in my journey where the next issues I need to tackle are emotional eating, and avoiding worrying about loose skin. – Both those are issues that fasting is the solution for. I was playing around with 36 hour fasts but still using coffee with double cream during the fast as I broke down my reasons for heading into the kitchen at different times of day. – Stopping work for the day is linked for me with having a meal. So I needed to find alternative options away from a plate. So far in when its raining, thats a long soak in the bath, or when dry sitting outside with a book while the dogs race around the field.
Decades of being in an office when the only acceptable reasons for putting down the document and stepping away for a few minutes when you wanted to walk to help you think was making a coffee or going to the loo have set a pattern in my life that I am finding it hard to break free from even though I work from home. Its almost a reflex to head into the kitchen and switch the kettle on as part of the process of needing to step away from the keyboard to enable me to think about how to explain a train of thought to someone else.
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Sorry its a long post, but now I am getting to this weeks experience.
I did my first water only fast from Sunday evening to Tuesday morning this week. Breaking my fast with a couple of coffees with cream during Tuesday morning and then between meetings headed into town to buy food. –
I allow myself 1, item that I fancy and isn’t to BSD plan a week. So a box of 4 individual egg custard tarts went into my shopping trolley this week. My excuses are that 1. I see a lot of posts on Dr Fungs facebook group about how people are combining fasting with having a wider range of foods. – 2. I had a couple of stressful meetings on Tuesday. 3. Living out of town means that I have to do a weekly shop. 4. There had been boxes of egg custard tarts calling to me from the supermarket shelf for months. – The obvious happened. I hoovered all 4 tarts up on Tuesday.
I felt really rough on Wednesday, tired and almost like having a hangover. – So I tried another experiment. – eating high fat to get myself back into ketosis as quickly as possible. I really felt so much better as soon as I achieved that. It was like a cloud lifting from my brain.
So the outcome of the experiment – can I combine fasting with not counting macros in my eating window is a definite NO. – But it also highlighted to me how much more alive I feel when eating low carb which makes the work involved in having to plan, and cook from fresh ingredients rather than just being able to open a packet, shove the contents in the oven and go on to do something more interesting less of a hurdle to overcome.