Shaking Things Up

So I was reading a little bit yesterday, and I decided to try to shake up my weight loss a bit by changing what I'm doing. Is it just me or does it seem like your body gets used to a certain way of eating after a while and it helps to change things up a bit? I know that I also just get used to eating that way and stop being so diligent about every bite, which certainly contributes to the weight stalls.

Anyway, I'd heard about intermittent fasting, especially in combination with low-carb, and I thought I'd try it. Eating low-carb makes me so not hungry that I think it will be easy to skip meals. On the surface, it sounds bad and unhealthy, but in the plan I'm going to follow (Fast-5), you simply fast for 19 hours and have a 5-hour eating window. Five hours is probably more time than I spend eating on a normal day, but my meals are currently spread out. Here's a quote from the (free, downloadable) Fast-5 e-book:


"Because food digestion takes a couple of hours and the blood glucose level takes a few hours to fall back to the baseline after a meal, eating three meals a day maintains a nearly constant flow of glucose into the bloodstream, keeping both insulin and leptin at active levels. The insulin and leptin suppress the body's ability to use fat as fuel."

The "default" eating window is 5 p.m. to 10 p.m. I'm probably going to do 4 or 4:30 p.m. to 9 or 9:30 p.m. That'll allow me to eat a snack before I get home, then make dinner and have another snack or dessert before bed. I'm going to try to blog about how I'm feeling so I can track my progress, but if I'm feeling great all the time, it might be a little bit boring, and I might stop. We'll see!

I read every page of this blog last night, and she sounds a lot like me. We're basically the same height and weight too, so that's even more fun! She's been doing this a long time, which proves it CAN be done and surely it can't be as crazy and radical as it might sound at first!

Oh, and one other thing, when I AM eating, I'm going to keep eating mainly low-carb meals, but I won't feel guilty if I want to eat other things, especially if we're eating out. Low-carb foods are the ones that keep me full and satisfied, and I've had such success eating this way that I don't want to give it up. I AM a bit worried that going without food for such a long time will make me fall back into the grumpy/angry person I was when I was eating high-carb foods. But my guess is that eating nothing at all will be better than eating things that spike my blood sugar and then make it fall dramatically. We'll see!