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 7:
I was doing pretty well and staying strong through 12:30 PM when my energy just dropped. Time moved so slowly until 1:30. After eating lunch, where I sat outside in my favorite meditation spot, I got pretty tired and sluggish. This didn’t last very long, but it was noticeable. The rest of the day went on pretty normal and I made a hearty dinner with veggies and pork. I’m not feeling too different, either physically or mentally, but it’s only a week into this challenge.
Day 8:
Intermittent Fasting has started to be more routine and normal. Thank god for coffee because I wouldn’t make it through my mornings without this cheat. I drink Irvin the morning with a cup of almond milk and a teaspoon of brown sugar. Because it is less than 50 calories (47 together), it doesn’t break the fast and let’s the body continue to rest. https://jamesclear.com/reader-mailbag-intermittent-fasting. This was especially helpful today when I didn’t get as much sleep as I regularly do. I’m actually making it through the mornings with relative ease and it’s in the afternoon (after I start eating) that I start to get tired and lazy. This makes sense because my body begins to focus on digesting instead of what it was doing prior. The difficulty I ran into today is that my Chemistry class gets out at 9:00 PM and since I get home at 9:20, this gives me only about 10 minutes to eat. Luckily, Javier, who’s been on a juicing kick, had a tall glass of juice and a plate ready for me when I got home, and I just managed to eat it all by the time 9:30 arrived. I was even able to eat it mindfully and understand that my body was full and done eating for the next 16 hours.
Day 9:
Okay, I take back what I said yesterday. I have definitely not fully acclimated to the challenge. I woke up this morning and was SO hungry. Again, I’m glad for coffee, but damn, I just wanted a bowl of cereal 🥣. My other habits are in between mildly successful and neglect. I have been mostly mindfully eating, but not always listening to when my body is full, and meditating about 15 minutes a day. Unfortunately, I’ve really fallen off the exercise bus during this challenge and can feel how ill prepared I am for the everyday stressors because of it. I need to get my routines back ASAP. I’m worried that by fasting and not exercising I’m setting myself up to lose all the muscle weight first. Maybe, if I can get a lot of stuff done tomorrow, I can do a quick workout.
Day 10:
It was a busy day with the principal, assistant principal, office manager, and my partner out. This left me as the only discipline support for the building. On top of this, I was hungry from the moment I came to school through lunch. I wonder if the stress accelerated how hungry I felt. I fell off of the mindful eating train today and just powered through the rest of the day eating when I got a chance. I’ve gotten these cravings for chocolate lately and I’m going to need to find a better way to resolve that than chocolate chip cookies 🍪 or ice cream 🍨
Day 11:
Days when I’m not working are always much harder to handle with intermittent fasting. The lack of busy activities and distractions leaves only one thing to focus on, hunger. Again, the saving grace is coffee ☕️. It puts something in my stomach and offers a bit of normalcy into the routines of life that I’ve grown up and lived with.
Day 12:
It’s around 12 hours after last eating that I tend to feel the best. I’m not yet hungry, feel thinner (not bloated), and have a lot of energy. Maybe finding the perfect timing and trying to get the body to extend this timing is the goal of intermittent fasting. Typically, after eating, I start to feel like the blueberry child in Willy Wonka. While the scale hasn’t changed much in the past 2 weeks (probably because I’m slacking on my workouts), I have felt and looked better. One of the hardest parts of the challenge is being with people who are eating. The smells are stronger and it’s almost as if I can taste the air.
Chicken Butter Lettuce Wraps
Ingredients:
4 chicken breasts, pounded thin and chopped into small pieces
1/2 cup water chestnuts (canned is fine), roughly chopped
1 large carrot, diced
1 zucchini, diced
1/2 cup shelled edamame
1 cup mushrooms, diced
1/2 white onion, diced
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 cup hoisin sauce
1/2 teaspoon garlic powder
1 tablespoon rice wine vinegar
1 teaspoon sriracha or chili garlic sauce
1 head butter lettuce
How to cook it up:
1. Coat a large pan with a thin layer of olive oil and heat on medium.
2. Add chicken, water chestnuts, carrots, zucchini, edamame, mushrooms and onion to the pan.
3. Saute over medium heat 5-10 minutes until veggies are tender and chicken is cooked through.
4. Add remaining ingredients (except for lettuce) to the pan. Stir and sauté about 5 minutes longer.
5. Serve in lettuce leaves and top with additional sriracha sauce and green onions if desired.