Weight: 226.4 (-4.8)
Fat: 34.1% (-5.2%)
Meals: Not available
Exercise: Cardio (Treadmill 37:00 WL3 - 353 calories, 2.21 miles)
Pictures: Front/Side/Back
Today's Numbers
Before I dive into my intended subject for today I wanted to make a few comments about today's numbers. I think they represent a perfect example of why you shouldn't pay attention to the daily fluctuations of the scale and need to focus on comparing the weekly averages. As you can see, according to my scale, I gained 2.6 pounds overnight, while simultaneously dropping 1.1% body fat. Given my current weight, that fat drop represents almost 2.5 pounds of fat. So logically, I must have lost 2.5 pounds of muscle... and gained 5 pounds of muscle... in 24 hours.
This is clearly ludicrious. I can't say with any degree of certainly exactly why those numbers changed, but I'm sure it's a combination of scale error plus water retention and how many bowel movements I had between weighings (sorry, I don't track that kind of thing). My guess is that I'm going to magically lose 2 pounds or so overnight.
Incidentally, if I only weighed myself every Friday, my weight last week was 225.4 pounds. My weight this Friday is 226.4, meaning that if I didn't have other measurements this week, I'd be trying to figure out how all that work on the treadmill resulted in me gaining a pound. By contrast my average weight last week was 225.4 and my average over the last three days has been 224.8, which is surprisingly comforting. This is a clear example of why I believe daily measurements are better than weekly, and why it's important to ignore daily changes.
Sermon over, let's discuss the big change I plan to make to my diet...
Intermittent Fasting
My preference is to make blog posts that stand on their own, either nuggets of wisdom that I glean on my own fitness journey, or a look at my progress and self-evaluation. But my process of finding the right eating plan has proven to take longer and be far more complex than I originally thought. The basic premise, eat less, has remained the same, but the methods for accomplishing this have been many. And like any field of research, the amount of contradictory opinions, misinformed 'experts' and actual scientific studies is not only vast but daunting as well. I never expected to learn how to eat better overnight, but I thought I knew most of what I needed to know going into this. Regardless, I can't spend a few years studying nutrition and basic biology. I need to figure out how I can start changing my diet now, and adapt to my increased knowledge over time.
I started my journey with the idea that six meals a day is very important, and finding the right mix of macronutrients is essential. The more internet research I do, the more I question this conventional wisdom. I'm fairly skeptical by nature, a quality that I think is vastly undervalued in today's society. But without a degree in biology, nutrition science or whatever it is that a diet expert should have, it's difficult for me to separate fad from reality. Instead I have to rely on corroborating evidence and common sense.
I want to be perfectly clear that I'm not a registered dietician, I haven't studied this in school, I'm not familiar with the latest research and I'm relying on the filter of many different sources on the internet to learn what I need. I don't understand a lot of the terminology, I have only a vague idea of what I'm talking about and I am likely wrong about a number of things. In other words, I am not an expert. Question anyone who says they are, and even if they are, take what they say with a grain of salt until you hear other experts that independently confirm their theories with plentiful research. Yet another topic for another blog post.
Back to the topic of this blog post: Intermittent Fasting (IF). This concept is pretty much completely new to me and one I've only encountered in the last few weeks. It's a very broad topic with a variety of approaches, backed up by an increasing amount of research, but is still considered fairly new and the full effects are not completely understood. Additionally, it completely flies in the face of conventional wisdom which has advocated more regular meals.
The concept is pretty simple: your body responds to short but extended periods of restricted calories by drawing on your fat stores, maintaining a high level of energy and metabolism. It's actually a lot more complicated than that, but I don't understand the science well enough yet to explain it without just making stuff up. Bottom line, instead of constantly eating smaller and smaller portions, you eat regularly sometimes and don't eat (or eat much smaller portions) at other times.
Some people recommend IF as a means to break through a plateau, while others see it as a permanent way to control their eating. I'm looking into this as a means to change my feeding habits, to alter my lifestyle. But if you prefer to stick to traditional dieting, you may want to consider IF as a method of breaking through a stubborn barrier in your own weight loss.
Tomorrow I'll discuss the four basic approaches to Intermittent Fasting, as well as my initial impressions to the whole idea.
