Weight: 226.6 (-4.6)
Fat: 35.2% (-4.1%)
Meals: Not available
Exercise: Cardio (Treadmill 38:00 WL3 - 369 calories, 2.30 miles)
Pictures: Front/Side/Back

Today's Update

Well, my prediction that I'd drop 2 pounds overnight didn't pan out. In fact I put on an additional 0.2 pounds. I'm not very concerned about this to be perfectly honest. If my average weekly number fails to drop over a two week period, then I'll worry. Otherwise, it's all just noise in the data.

As for the cardio, I'm going to try to reduce the length of my workouts and increase the intensity. I was thinking I would go up to 40 or 45 minutes to do so, but I think 38 minutes is a good place to reset. Since there's a 4 minute warm up and a 4 minute cool down, the actual workout is 30 minutes. I'll go to 28 minutes, or 20 minutes of actual workouts. My plan is to see how my body handles this. If I still am anxious to push harder, I'll increase my workouts by a minute a day up to 33 minutes and then go to 23 minutes at the next level.

With that being said, it's time to get back to intermittent fasting...

Intermittent Fasting

This isn't just a single diet plan, there's no one approach that you have to folow. Instead, there are several variations on the theme:

  • Alternate Day Fasting
  • 24 hour fasting
  • Eating windows
  • Skipping meals

Alternate Day Fasting

ADF, also know as Every Other Day or (QOD) and Up Day Down Day, is simply eating on one day, and restricting your calories on the second day. From a traditional fasting perspective, you eat regularly one day and don't eat at all the following day, rinse and repeat. But many ADF advocates indicate that a small amount of calories on a fasting day is desirable, although the calorie count (300-500 is what I've commonly encountered) is very low. On eating days, an increase of calories is acceptable and in some cases encouraged.

24 hour fasting

This was the first approach I discovered, popularized by Eat Stop Eat. Instead of alternating days, this approach involves choosing 1-2 days per week to begin your fast. You choose what time you want to fast, usually after a particular meal. Then you fast for 24 hours, resuming meals after that period of time has elapsed. The benefit of this over ADF is that you never go a day without a meal. For example, on Monday I wake up and eat breakfast, then lunch. After lunch, I have a small snack and begin my 24 hour fast at 4pm, skipping dinner that night. On Tuesday, I skip breakfast and lunch, and resuming eating with dinner that night.

Eating windows

Obviously, I don't mean chowing down on glass. Instead, a condensed eating window means that rather than spreading your food intake over an entire day, you eat only during a "window" of 4-9 hours. This means that the rest of the day (20-15 hours) is spent in a fasted state. Depending on the size of the window, you can eat one big meal with snacks, two or even three meals, whatever works best for you. This diet approach is popularized by Fast 5 and the Warrior Diet. For people who have trouble going longer periods of time without eating, this window idea might be more palatable.

Skipping meals

I'm hesitant to add this as a type of IF because it's not really a practiced strategy. I haven't discovered any actual eating plans involving simply skipping meals, nor have I found much research or good quality explanations of the effectiveness of this form of intermittent fasting, so I'm not going to devote any real time to it. There is a tendency to overcompensate when missing meals and this probably leads to poor food choices. That being said, the number of alarmist articles out there from experts suggesting that your body starts to shut down and enters starvation mode because you've gone a few more hours without a meal is pretty disturbing. This seems like a pretty clear example of dogma to me.

Skepticism

Unfortunately most of the IF plans that I've found out there seem to revolve around what I call "personalities". In other words, they usually have a single big advocate who developed and is now promoting the plan, usually by selling a book. This is an automatic red flag for me, as I want something that's widely accepted, not just another fad diet. I want scientific research and consensus, not a charasmatic marketer who does really well selling his plan on Oprah.

Even worse, the first website that I went to learn more was Eat Stop Eat. The website is a terrible example of hyped up marketing. Big, bold print, a popup imploring you to enter your information, oversimplified myths vs facts, pictures of fitness models. Click through to a gender specific page (after all, you market differently to men vs women) and you get an appeal to authority, a "Dear Friend" letter accompanied by a picture of the plan's personality, highlighted text, testimonials with before/after pictures, bulleted promises, even a "Satisfaction Guaranteed" at the end. And that's just the website - the number of affiliates marketing the book make me extra cautious.

Worth trying

Honestly, I would have given up at this point if I hadn't found more and more references to IF from other sources, including links to promising studies on the effects of IF. I'm still fairly skeptical, but I've finally read enough to believe that this might be a viable way to control my eating without overwhelming me. It's not a silver bullet, and exercise is still very important to my overall success.

The concept of intermittent fasting makes sense to me. From a historical perspective, regular meals are an abberation compared to most of human development. Our roots are in hunting-gathering, and food was scarce and usually not calorie dense. Most nutrition came in the form of feast or famine; extended periods of foraging and hunting would be punctuated by a large influx of calories. These ancient hunters would need to maintain their ability to hunt game while going extended periods without eating.

Frankly, I don't understand the science behind IF, I have only a vague idea what insulin, growth hormone, glycogen, etc is, and I won't pretend like I do know, or worse, act like I'm some kind of expert because I can throw big words around. I will be spending more time in the coming days/weeks/months correcting this deficiency, but for now I have to rely on my common sense and realistic expectations.

Tomorrow I'll discuss some of the potential problems and then decide on a plan of action for the coming week.