To review, I am following the intermittent fasting program where you eat in an 8 hour window and fast for 16. Supposedly, you can increase this to 24 hours for maximum benefit, but you then only fast 2 or 3 days per week. Your fasting times would be from say, 2 pm one day to 2 pm the next. That way you are eating at some point every day and not missing any. From what I understand the magic starts happening at the 16 hour mark. My plan is to start eating at noon and stop at 8 pm.
To start out my day, my bladder woke me up at 3 am and unfortunately my brain also woke up. You ever have one of those nights when you wake up and no matter how hard you try, you can’t get back to sleep? That was me. I tried everything I could to get back to sleep. I tried focusing on one spot and repeating to my self “blissful sleep”. Every time I said “blissful sleep”, my brain would say” no, no, no, I have things to do!”. This went on and on until the voice in my head was thundering, so I called no joy and just got up.
The only problem with me getting up in the middle of the night is, I want to eat. When you are looking at 9 hours until you are suppose to break your fast, that is real hard. I succumbed and ate a bowl of Grapenuts. I’m talking a BOWL of Grapenuts, like the size you would have for regular cereal like Corn Flakes or Cheerios. Grapenuts is a very dense carb rich cereal. The serving size is ½ cup which packs 200 calories and 47 grams of carbs! I ate probably 3 cups, so you do the math. Man my jaws were tired when I got done with that bowl!! After playing Mahjong, reading e-mails, then watching TV, I was finally able to go back to bed.
I already blew my plan for the day and it was only day 1!! So, what to do now? Chuck it for today and pig out? No, from what I read, you just pick yourself up, dust yourself off and keep working the plan. I didn’t eat again until after noon and ate like I usually do for lunch. That was fine until supper time. You see, there was this e-mail special from Pizza Hut for 50% off a large pizza. Since I didn’t have anything prepared for supper, this was a good deal! Well after 2 slices of thin crust meat lovers pizza, 9 buffalo wings (dipped in ranch dressing), and 5 garlic knots (dipped in marinara sauce), I was stuffed! To top it off I didn’t finish eating until 10pm, so I missed my cut off time by 2 hours. I felt like crap!! Kinda like I swallowed a basketball. But hey, it was thin crust. That’s good right?
I am starting to understand why I am so heavy. So, I recommend if you are going to start some kind of diet plan, you do a food journal of what you normally eat and get an idea of where you are. When I weighed myself the next day, I could see why I was up 2 lbs from last week.
Day 1 is in the books and some might say to skip it and start over tomorrow. No, this counts. I will continue tomorrow and keep working the plan.