Poor little blog, it’s all been very quiet recently. And I do want to write here more regularly - it’s pretty much the only writing I do nowadays that isn’t responding to an email about something dull.
Like many people, I want to get away from screens at the end of the working day, especially when there is no clear delineation between work and home - I never appreciated the fact that my commute, tedious as it was, gave valuable space and time for decompression. But it doesn’t take much time or effort to share a quick account of a nice recipe and having some sort of creative outlet is important. Even if many people might feel that wittering about dinner is playing slightly fast and loose with the notion of creativity.
I said in my last post that I didn’t want to talk much about our current eating regime and I stick by that for the most part, but think it worth noting for posterity that last week I hit a stone loss since we started doing two types of intermittent fasting concurrently, which was late October last year. Now that’s pretty slow - although I note from my records that it’s been a general downwards drift throughout apart from a blip over Christmas. But slow is fine with me - I don’t mind slow as long as it arrives with its close friend sustainable and, all things considered, I think this is very much a sustainable way of doing things for us.
We only eat between the hours of noon and eight in the evening. It’s not a completely clean fast, as we allow ourselves two cups of tea with skimmed milk over the course of a morning, but as long as you keep calorie intake to less than 50, that’s still ok. This is easy to stick to when you’re not going out and doing anything. Eating out might be the spanner in the works as I don’t particularly want to only ever go to Early Bird specials - but assuming we don’t go mad when we can go out and about again, this shouldn’t be a massive issue.
Two days a week, generally Tuesday and Thursday although this is flexible, we only eat 500-600 calories in our eight hour window. This usually means a light lunch at noon (crackers, fruit) and soup for an early supper at six, with a couple of squares of chocolate afterwards (nice to have something to look forward to throughout the day). Some fast days are harder than others. I don’t relish the thought of having to be out and about and relatively active when only subsisting on 500 calories but when you’re working from your dining table it’s definitely doable.
The real win here is that on non fast days, we are eating really well - albeit not in the mornings - and, for the first time in possibly my entire adult life, I feel like I’m getting the hang of eating intuitively. That sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it? But I think so many people, especially women, have been programmed from a very early age to think of some foods as good and some as bad, to always go for low fat or low sugar or low carb options, to ignore (or, at least, try to ignore) our natural hunger signals. We eat when we are happy or sad or bored or tired and then we feel guilty for doing so. We get ourselves into odd patterns of thought - “I’ve already blown it today so I might as well eat an entire packet of biscuits and “start again” tomorrow.” We avoid certain food groups only to end up having mini binges.
While it could be argued that there is nothing “normal” or intuitive about deliberately restricting the hours during which you can eat, and deliberately setting out to eat a pitiful number of calories a couple of times a week, for me, it feels like a worthwhile bargain to make with my body.
I’ve got an exercise bike set up in the spare bedroom so the missing piece of the puzzle - which for me is always the physical movement side of things, I genuinely am part woman part sloth - is being addressed - albeit slowly and sporadically. Once the world is more open I’d love to explore some different options here - maybe swimming occasionally, or a yoga class. And that might boost my rate of loss slightly - or it might not, but that’s ok.
More importantly (as far as I’m concerned) is the fact that I genuinely think this way of eating is good for my health. My recent you’ve-turned-40-time-for-an-MOT blood tests came back showing my blood sugar and cholesterol levels are both entirely normal. Considering my history, and the fact that there is type 2 diabetes in the family, that’s pretty astounding and I do wonder if IF has played a part in that.
I don’t intend to bore on about the subject, but thought it worth getting some thoughts down for my own future reference. Normal service, including awful pictures of dinner, will resume with my next post.
