Intermittent fasting is not a diet, it's a pattern of eating. This is a set schedule of eating meals, daily so that you limit WHEN you’re eating. The Intermittent Fasting method that I’m going to be using is the 16/8 method: Also called the Leangains protocol. This involves skipping breakfast and restricting your daily eating period to 8 hours (I’m doing 1:30–9:30 p.m.) Then you fast for 16 hours in between. The goal will be to maintain the regular eating habits that I have in my life while limiting the time that I can eat those meals in. When you fast, several things happen in your body on the cellular and molecular level.The body adjusts hormone levels to make stored body fat more accessible while cells also begin repair processes and change the expression of genes. This change in the bodies metabolic and hormonal levels occurs in several areas such as Human Growth Hormone (increases and helps with fat loss and muscle gain), insulin (specifically insulin sensitivity, lowering the levels ), cellular repair (cells initiate cellular repair processes, including autophagy, when fasting), and gene expression (changes that can help gene longevity and protection). For more information, feel free to check out these sources: https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/intermittent-fasting-guide#effects; https://jamesclear.com/the-beginners-guide-to-intermittent-fasting; as well as other resources that I will post throughout the challenge.
Day 1:
Skipping out on breakfast is a sad situation. I really enjoyed sitting outside and eating cereal spoonful by spoonful, enjoying the world around me. I don’t know how it would have been today, though, because the weather was gloomy and cold. For the sake of my sanity, I’m going to continue to make a jar of coffee with 1 cup of almond milk, and a teaspoon of brown sugar. This is less than 50 calories (43 to be exact), and it is super helpful for getting a jumpstart to the beginning of the day. The hard part is coming down from the caffeine as the car progresses. I was able to ride the high of the coffee until the afternoon, although I did feel a dip in energy around the students’ lunch time. The fast ended at 1:35 PM and I was finally able to eat for the first time today. I tried to eat slowly and with intention, but hunger is one of my weaknesses in keeping that practice alive. Unfortunately, I was still hungry after eating my lunch, and craved ice cream or chocolate all afternoon. I left school around 3:45 PM, drove home exhausted (probably because my body was settling with the food and not used to not having morning resources to turn to), and looked in the fridge for chocolate. This led to the discovery of cheesecake I had bought over the weekend to share with my Sifu and his family. The cheesecake never stood a chance and was gone within a few minutes of it being pulled from the fridge. I had to study for an exam for my chemistry class, but my energy was still quite down AND I still felt hungry, so it was hard to concentrate. On the way to chemistry. I stopped by Chick-Fil-A and ordered a fry and chicken nuggets. This finally made me feel satisfied and able to enter the chem exam without problems. Meditation for 15 minutes but mind continued to wander. I need to seek a professional or expert to continue to improve this practice because I feel like I’m hitting a plateau.
Day 2:
Today’s fast was a doozie. Things were extremely busy all morning and into the afternoon, and I felt like there wasn’t even time enough to breath or reflect on what was happening throughout the day. There was literally a line of students waiting to talk to me about discipline and support outside of my office.tThis is the 2nd day in a row that it has been like this and I’ve been surviving most of the day on coffee. My colleague, at one point, asked me if I was okay because I looked stressed out. I don’t know if that is because of the fast or the number of kids, or a combination of both, but it did make me wonder if the fast is adding unneeded stress to things. I didn’t eat until 2:30 PM because things kept going a bit crazy with students while they were in the building. Hopefully tomorrow will be a better day, but we’ll see.
Day 3:
Today was the busiest day I’ve experienced this year. Homecoming week, especially as Student Leadership sponsor, takes so much time and energy, and I’m lucky that my principal is fulfilling the majority of the planning and organizing of events. My role of handling discipline just gets to be too much and I’m not able to respond. We had our pep assembly, and it was the best that the school has ever had. I didn’t eat until 3 PM, which is a new and difficult thing to handle, but the distractions of the day meant that I didn't realize that I was really hungry until after the events were done. Woof.
Day 4:
Even though Homecoming week is at a close, there was a lot to do today. My partner was gone, so I was responsible for responding to discipline issues throughout the day. This was made harder by the intermittent fasting. I’ve tried to write down all of the things that are happening throughout the day, and I’ve found (for two days in a row) that my time goes from one moment to the other throughout the day without break. I need to record this in my calendar so I have a lot of things that I do. Today’s adventures kept my going through the 1:30 fasting time and all the way to 5:30 PM while I interviewed a student and his family about a potential gun threat. After 5:00 PM I started to feel a little off my game and needing to eat, so I tried to end the meeting (we had all of the information we needed) and begin to eat my lunch. The food tasted amazing and I tried my best to eat it slowly, savoring each bite. Instantly, after eating I got a bit tired, but still had a lot of work to do. Now that I could think, I was able to get through the reports I needed to follow and left at about 7:30 PM. To celebrate the weekend’s arrival and the completion of such a hard investigation I got ice cream and went home. The last thing I had before the fasting window closed was a cucumber, apple, oranges, carrot, and cranberry juice my husband made. I’m a bit worried that I haven’t eaten enough food today and will really feel it tomorrow morning.
Day 5:
I woke up this morning and immediately wanted to eat something. It’s harder to ignore the hunger I’m feeling when I’m not running around at work all day. It was my husband’s birthday weekend, so we went walking through a corn maze. While this did provide a bit of a distraction, my energy level waned and my hunger grumbled in my stomach right around noon (a little over an hour before the window opened). An hour later, after we’d completed the first part of the maze I started to feel a bit dizzy. We didn’t eat for another hour, and I could free my other senses really activate especially my sense of smell. At night I tried to eat a big dinner in order to last through tomorrow morning’s fast.
Day 6:
This morning it was much easier to make it through the fast, although I still wake up and want breakfast. I have noticed that in the mornings I have maintained my energy reserves and feel so much lighter and less bloated. When I finally did eat, it wasn’t until 2:15 and the food in my stomach felt like a rock had just been dropped inside. I did take care to eat mindfully, but I wonder if I need to start with something small and not as heavy before continuing to things I would normally eat for lunch. I kept hydrated throughout the rest of the day and went to hot yoga immediately followed by Restorative yoga. In spite of there being 3 1/2 hours between eating and the practices, I still felt completely stuffed. I feel like I need more guidance on how to do the intermittent fasting properly, so I looked at these two videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLVf3d0rqqY; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6Dkt7zyImk. Both were helpful in understanding how to modify what I’m currently doing in order to feel better. Key take aways: Break the fasts with high protein and low carb foods, stay away from high amounts of sugar (this counteracts the benefits), try to avoid mixing carbs with fats. My mini goals for this week will be to do my best to keep these strategies in mind.
Chicken, Pinto, Avocado, and Tomato Tostada's Topped with Goat Cheese
Ingredients:
8 (at least) corn tostada shells
3 roma tomatoes, diced
3 medium avocados, diced
1/4 red onion, finely chopped
1/4 cup cilantro, finely chopped
1 tsp cumin1 tsp chili powder
3/4 tsp salt
Lime, juice of
15 oz can pinto beans, drained
4 Chicken Breasts
1/2 cup goat cheese
1/4 cup vegetable oil or lard
How to cook it up!
1. In a large pot, place the chicken breast and cover completely with water.
2. Boil chicken for at 30 minutes or until fully cooked. Dain.
3. Using two forks shred chicken. Put in bowl and place on the side.
4. Make easy avocado salsa by combining tomato, avocado, red onion, cilantro, cumin, chili powder, salt and lime juice. Place in a bowl.
5. Add pinto beans to a small skillet with oil/lard. Cook on medium heat and, using a fork (but being careful about the pan) begin to smash the beans. Place in a separate bowl.
6. To assemble tostadas, top each shell with guacamole, beans, chicken and cheese (in any order or with any ingredient you like). 7. Enjoy!
