So if you read my first post, I've decided that I need to lose some weight for various reasons. That leaves me to figure out how best to work things for me. I've always been skeptical of any gimmicky diets. I've joked that I should sell a diet book called, "Eat Less, Exercise More and Lose Weight". Most people don't want to eat less, and people flock to pills, surgery, and gimmicks to try to cheat the system. Dieting isn't rocket science. Your body burns X calories a day. If you eat less than that, you will lose weight.
So if losing weight is as simple as eating less calories, than why is it so hard? That's simple enough to answer. It's because humans are built to want to eat! It wasn't until modern times that we've been able to have food so readily available. Modern factories, preservatives, and refrigeration has allowed food to be readily available in your home. If you run out, you can just rush out to the local supermarket and stock back up. It wasn't long ago that you grew most of your own food and had to preserve and store it for the winter. If you overate, you might end up without enough food to last you the winter. That's pretty good motivation to exercise self control. All of that easy food means that we can finally indulge in eating. Going against your primal urge to eat results in a lot of failure and disappointment.
Where does that leave me? I've tried just counting calories. It's simple enough, and there are some great apps for phones to make the task easier, but it has one major flaw. The more complex a food is, the more difficult to figure out the calories. For instance, if I make myself a sandwich, I can easily calculate two slices of bread, 3 oz of meat, 1 slice of cheese, and 1 Tb mayonnaise. Now when I make homemade lasagna, it's got a few more ingredients. And you can forget about going to family/friends houses for dinner. Even if you have a ballpark figure, overeating by 2-300 calories is very easy, and that can kill all of your calorie deficit for the day. I tried to keep track of my calories using the app LoseIt, and I found that all of my hard work staying low at breakfast and lunch were ruined at dinner. Tracking was virtually impossible, and that left me struggling to have self control. Sure, I didn't gain weight, and maybe I would have SLOWLY lost weight, but it sure wasn't a way to lose a ton of weight.
I've tried doing Atkins before, and that seemed stupid to me. I'm sure it works, but I could never give up carbs long term. It's also very hard to function out of the home, and that makes it hard for me. I did Weight Watchers years ago, and that suffered from much of the problems of calorie counting. I'm also cheap, so I hate to give money to some organisation so I can hear some feel good talk every week.
I was stumbling on the internet, and I found some interesting information. I found some people turning conventional wisdom upside down. We've all been told that you need to eat 5-6 small meals a day to get your metabolism running faster. It's common sense. Skipping breakfast is as helpful to dieting as a Chinese buffet is. It makes sense. If you don't eat, your body enters starvation mode and slows things down. Sounds like common sense. Apparently it isn't. I'm not going to go into the details here. If you want to read more about it, here is the "Top Ten Fasting Myths Debunked". This got me interested in the Alternate Day Fasting (ADF).
ADF is kind of a gimmicky diet, but it's one of the simplest diets to explain ever. Eat every other day. Sure, you can go online and buy a book on it, but that would be pretty silly. Just eat every other day. You can tailor it to fit your life if you like. If fasting every other day is too much, than just do it 2-3 days a week. Does the idea of eating nothing seem impossible to you? Than you can eat a little on your fast days. The common practice is to eat 500 calories if you're a woman, and 600 if you're a man.
Eat like normal every other day, and then have a very sparse menu of 600 calories on my fast days. You may be asking, isn't this all just the same as counting calories and restricting your diet? Well, yes and no. Lets assume you need to eat 2500 calories to break even. So a week of eating would include 2500 x 3.5 and 600 x 3.5 (on average). That's an average of 1550 calories a day. So you've got a calorie deficit of 6650 calories in a week. That's crazy! Even if you eat a little extra on your normal days, you'd be hard pressed to eat 6650 calories extra in a week. So if ADF is just like eating 1550 calories a day, why not just do that? Good question, but one with a very easy answer. Some of the answer is psychological. No matter what diet you use, it's hard. You will fail. The nice part about ADF is that if you fail on your fast day, you can just make it a regular day and then fast the next day. It's impossible to fail on your normal days since you don't have any restrictions. Apparently, there are also a ton of health benefits to fasting. Our bodies weren't designed to eat all the time. Going without food helps.
I started my journey on ADF a little over a week ago. It's a lot easier than I anticipated. I've found the fast days are a joy to get through. I'll get deeper in to what my average days look like in a future post. I can totally see myself doing this long term. The nice thing is that I can adjust the days as I see fit. I've been finding new and filling ways to eat 600 calories. I've also lost a lot of weight in a very short time. I'm looking forward to losing massive amounts of weight.
No comments:
Post a Comment