Intermittent Fasting Journal – Week 12

 

In Episode 12/Week 12, Donna Reish, blogger, recipe creator, and Daily Intermittent Fasting teacher tells about her twelfth week and her husband’s fifth week of Daily IF. She describes the pattern that she has settled in at 19:5, including OMAD/3–One Meal a Day divided into three parts (see outline). She describes what being fat adaptive means, including the differences between glucose/glycogen store burning and body fat burning. Donna teaches the importance of staying the course, including bringing in eating boundaries and not going off and on and making too many “special occasions.” Finally, she describes several things that affect Fat Adaption each day: number of fasting hours, how much glycogen is being stored/circulating glucose is available to use, how long your eating window is, whether you exercise or not, and how many carbs you are consuming. Subscribe to Donna’s YouTube channel; podcast at iTunes; and here at her blog. Join her FB group where she teaches daily about this way of life.

(more…)

Easy, Convenient Breading Mix – Low Carb & Family Friendly Options!

 

Breading meats (and even vegetables) does not have to a taboo for the low carb cook or the low fat cook or the low calorie cook or the family-friendly cook. We have options! With healthy fats to brush over things, we can pop them in the oven with a healthy breading mix and have chicken nuggets the kids will enjoy. With air fryers, we can bread and fry fish or chicken to our heart’s content—and if we use a lower carb breading mix, we have the best of all worlds: low carb, low fat, low calorie!

 

(more…)

Intermittent Fasting Journal – Week 11

 

 

It’s Week 11/Episode 11 of The Intermittent Fasting Journal! New Year’s Week—and Donna’s hubby is on board too! Yay them! In this episode, Donna gives her week eleven findings and results, including losing weight slowly and steadily during holidays and enjoying a traditional New Year’s Day dinner. She reviews the coping mechanisms of self talk, five second rule, having an earlier eating window that ends by seven each day (and how this benefits her), using the app, and more. Donna goes into detail about her lifestyle with her husband, Ray Baby, who has lost ten pounds in three weeks on his IF plan! She describes husbands and wives planning and fasting together and how much she and Ray enjoy eating out together now as empty nesting fasters. She was encouraged by going into a new year with no deadlines and no drastic weight loss plans in place and explains how to make Daily IF a lifestyle rather than a frantic new year weight loss goal. No time limits! Donna then teaches from AC: The Power of Appetite Correction by Bert Herring with the six kinds of hunger: (1) Appestat–real hunger; (2) Somatic hunger–sensation in the belly; (3) Limbic hunger–drive to continue eating once you’re full; (4) Clock hunger–biological clock–hunger striking 23-24 hours from when you ate last; (5) Appetite-driven hunger–when you visualize yourself eating something; (6) Mouth hunger–urge to chew on something when you’re not really hungry. She ends the main section with how she has finally achieved control over areas of her life that had eluded her even when she had 32 years of homeschooling and writing success–food control. Huge win! We can manage every area of our lives when we are successful with Daily Intermittent Fasting!

(more…)

5 Ways to Start Daily Intermittent Fasting–Hours and Options

For optimal viewing on a mobile device, tilt your device to landscape mode.

5 Ways to Start Daily Intermittent Fasting--Hours and Options

#1

Cold Turkey–Regardless of Plan

Whether your end goal is OMAD (One Meal a Day) or a more conservative 16 hour fasting window (also known as 16:8–16 hours of fasting and 8 hours of eating), you might be the type of person who doesn’t want training wheels, fat bombs, or incrementality to get started. Maybe you just want to GO—and not look back. If this is you and you are going to do a shorter fasting window of say 14-16 hours, you can simply look at your schedule and cut out your evening snack, breakfast, and mid-day snack and choose an 8-10 hour eating window of noon to eight or whatever suits your time period. You might be a little hungry going to bed at first and it might be difficult to work through the morning for the first week or so, but it shouldn’t be impossible for you.

If this is you and you want to end up with a short eating window of say five hours or fewer (also called 19:5, 20:4, and 21:3 protocols), cold turkey can be challenging. If you are used to eating five or six times a day (and only truly being in a “fasted” state for, say, 8 hours of sleep), it can be overwhelming to wake up and face twelve hours without food. You will want to be sure that you are super busy during your first two to four weeks of cold turkey OMAD (while you are waiting for your body to become fat adapted and have less hunger during the fast). You will also want to utilize coping and distraction techniques, such as self-talk, five second rule tips, app use, pink himalayan salt, mineral water, sparkling water, and more.

#2

Fast Start Incrementally to OMAD (One Meal a Day)

For those who are desiring the Daily Intermittent Fasting protocol of One Meal a Day (OMAD—short eating windows of between 1 and 5 hours and longer fasts of 23 to 19 hours), you may desire to get there quickly but not necessarily in one week. You want some incrementality, but you don’t want to wait eight weeks to reach your final fasting goal. Thus, the fast start means that you will reduce snacks and meals quickly–possibly one or two per week–for up to four weeks or so.

Someone following this approach will want to examine their eating schedule and consider where you want to cut first. You will likely start with eliminating your evening snack OR breakfast. This would put you at twelve to fourteen hours of fasting the first week. While it looks like a short jump from 14 to 19 fasting hours, if you are truly going for OMAD, that is not just another snack being cut–but is another full meal and can feel harder than it looks on paper! So the next week, you will cut whichever you didn’t cut the first week (either the night snack or breakfast). Then you’ll be closer to a 16 hour fast. The third week, you will be ready to push lunch out to later in the afternoon until the next week, you replace lunch with a snack/appetizer/salad later in the afternoon when you open your eating window.

#3

Training Wheels Incrementally to OMAD (One Meal a Day)

Some people are afraid of the hunger associated with Daily Intermittent Fasting. They remember their experiences with fasting blood work or working late without having a snack on them and automatically assume that the type of hunger and sometimes sick feelings that they had during those short “fasts” are the types of hunger that they will have for the rest of their lives with Daily IF. This isn’t true, but it is reasonable to think so. Some people assume they will “get used to it” better if they do the introduction to fasting slowly. For those people, a “training wheel” approach over eight weeks might be the best way to start Daily IF.

In this way, the person seeking OMAD slowly starts out simply cutting out an hour of eating on either end (or both), gradually reducing the number of eating opportunities over six to eight weeks. So the first week, you might stop eating at 8 pm and not eat breakfast until 8 am, thus doing a twelve hour fast for a week. The next week, add an hour of fasting to the evening and the morning. And continue in this way until you land in your perfect OMAD. The downfalls of this approach are that you aren’t getting fat adapted very quickly, so it really could take the entire six to eight weeks before ravenous hunger is gone. Another disadvantage is that you will probably not see weight loss in the first six weeks or so unless you are changing what you are eating during your eating window since that is a lot of time with many eating hours each day. However, just like training wheels make the new biker more comfortable during the transition to bike riding, this approach really helps many people.

#4

16:8 to 18:6 With Keto Start Up

In my experience, the people who lose weight consistently and have the most IF benefits while having a shorter fasting window (16, 17, or 18 fasting hours) seem to be those who are eating a low carb diet plan while doing Daily IF. I have never met a person or seen a testimony of someone with life-long weight issues who got to their goal weight eating anything they want for 8 hours a day (two meals). There are three potential reasons for this: (1) Consuming too many calories during a six to eight hour eating window; (2) Not getting the benefits of Appetite Correction during your eating window because you are “getting full two times”; (3) Having too much circulating glucose/glycogen stores to burn through before you get into body fat burning. With those problems, you might not go into body fat burning (become fat adapted) until closer to 16 hours or so; thus, by the time your body starts using its own stores, you are ready to eat again and refill that glycogen.

If a person wants to do 16:8, 17:7, or 18:6, they probably need to be keto during their eating window if they are looking for weight loss. (This is actually where much of today’s IF has its roots–IF/Keto together.) For the most part, a keto diet means that you will get into body fat burning way sooner than someone eating carbs (and you may stay in ketosis all the time). Thus, even a shorter fasting window of 16 hours would still yield body fat burning every day.

#5

16:8 to 18:6 Not Keto Start Up

As explained in the previous protocol, fasting for 16, 17, or 18 hours a day with a net weight loss is challenging at best. Generally speaking, this means that you are eating two meals a day and possibly one or two desserts and one or two snacks (with no other eating boundaries in place). In order for a person to lose weight eating that frequently and that amount, they probably have to put another “diet” into play, thus eliminating one of the cool aspects of Daily Intermittent Fasting. However, many people want the health benefits of IF while still not doing terribly long fasts, or they have health challenges, social situations, or other factors coming into play that make them choose a 16:8, 17:7, or 18:6 fasting protocol. For these people, they feel it is worth it add another “diet’ to IF.

Obviously, a ketogenic diet (high fat, moderate protein, low carb {20-40 grams of carbs per day}) is a great addition for someone seeking to lose weight with a longer eating window. However, there are Daily IF’ers who count calories, fat grams, or points during their eating window. There are those who eat paleo or vegetarian and within those food boundaries, their calories (or carbs) are low enough during a longer eating window to lose weight. If you desire to do a shorter fasting window/longer eating window, you will have to play around with your food choices to achieve weight loss, but it can be done. One way that people “extend” their “fasting window” beyond 16 hours during 16:8 is to eat low carb foods during the first half of their eating window (though, unless you are doing keto, don’t eat high fat or you will end up with a high fat/high calorie diet!). While you will not still be “fasting” once you start eating, you can possibly keep yourself in body fat burning longer by eating moderate protein and low carb for the first meal and snack during your eating window. Again, you will have to tinker with your eating window to see what works for your body.

Resources

1) Cold Turkey–Regardless of Plan: Ways to Make It Through the Fast: https://donnareish.com/5-motivations-keep-fast-daily-intermittent-fasting/

2) Fast Start Incrementally to OMAD (One Meal a Day): https://donnareish.com/intermittent-fasting-journal-week-10/

3) Training Wheels Incrementally to OMAD (One Meal a Day): https://donnareish.com/intermittent-fasting-journal-week-8/

4) 16:8 to 18:6 With Keto Start Up: https://donnareish.com/5-reasons-might-need-shorter-eating-window-daily-intermittent-fasting/

5) 16:8 to 18:6 Not Keto Start Up: https://donnareish.com/5-areas-look-not-losing-weight-daily/

Find ME–and Find Out More About Daily Intermittent Fasting!

(1) FB Group for Support and Daily Help

(2) Blog with all videos, articles, 5 Top Tips for IF Slideshow, and more.

(3) IF Journal Podcast at iTunes

(4) YouTube channel

(5) Donna Reish Blogger FB Page

Thanks for Viewing My…..

5 Tips for Daily IF Slideshow

Find More of These Weekly Slideshows here at donnareish.com

PIN THIS POST!

In the slideshow above are a couple of links to books I use and love. I am an affiliate for Amazon.com. If you click on the links above I will earn a small commission. Thank you for your support of this blog!

Low Carb Air Fryer Roasted Nuts

 

If you are following my grocery fast, you probably know that I am more than a month in to spending $25 a week on groceries in an effort to empty my cupboards, freezers, and refrigerators. As we became empty nesters, I just kept buying and buying if things were on sale, in case the kids stopped by, etc., without really having designated purposes for everything. (When you have a family of nine, you eventually use everything up–not so when you become empty nesters…my house was bulging with food!)

 

(more…)

5 Areas to Look at When Not Losing Weight on Daily IF

For optimal viewing on a mobile device, tilt your device to landscape mode.

5 Areas to Look at When Not Losing Weight on Daily IF

#1

Length of Time You’ve Been Practicing IF

During the first month of Daily IF, new fasters often find themselves overeating. This is for three reasons: (1) Appetite Correction (where your body starts telling you to stop eating naturally—it’s super cool!) hasn’t set in yet; (2) People often enjoy the new-found freedom of not having to restrict foods as much, so they eat craving-inducing foods (and too much of them!); (3) They often still have too long of an eating window, which greatly affects the amount of food they consume.

The good news is that you get better and better at Daily IF! It is amazing how skilled you become once all of the incredible benefits are in play. You will become a fat burning machine during your fasting hours (fat adapted). You will not eat everything in sight during your eating window (appetite correction). And you will start losing weight and looking great!

#2

Length of Your Daily Fasting Window and Eating Window

Many people cannot lose weight with a medium-long fasting window (16, 17, or 18 hours) and a long eating window of six, seven, or eight hours. The fasting window is not long enough for someone on a moderate or high carb eating pattern to burn through their glycogen stores and circulating glucose and really get into body fat burning mode. The eating window might be too long for us, allowing us to eat more than we need for the weight we desire. Also, appetite correction is challenging with long eating windows because you are “getting full” twice rather than once in a seven or eight hour period of time.

It would be unusual for someone who doesn’t count calories or carbohydrates to lose down to their ideal weight with two meals a day and a snack or two (eating anything in any amounts). If you’re not getting the benefits of body fat burning from a long eating window, you’re not getting some of the IF benefits. Then you are relying on eating fewer calories to cause you to lose weight. Bottom line: You might need a longer fasting window and a shorter eating window if you’re not controlling your calories and carbohydrates via another protocol at the same time.

#3

What You’re Eating During Your Eating Window

Many Daily IF teachers (myself included) do not impose a certain eating plan on their students. So many of us have “been there, done that” for many years with a myriad of diet protocols. Daily IF is our ticket out of the rat race of dieting. We can finally enjoy pizza night, birthday parties, banquets, Mexican restaurants, and more without worry. Appetite Correction during a short eating window ensures that we stop eating in time to keep us losing or maintaining our weight. However….if you’ve been doing Daily IF CONSISTENTLY (not off and on!) for a period of time, your body is a fat burning machine each day, appetite correction is in place and works for you, but you are still not losing weight, you will want to examine some other things.

Here are some questions to consider: (1) Are you opening your window with something low carb/healthful? Many people have better weight loss when they do so. (2) Are you eating too many processed foods or junk foods? Appetite correction responds better to real foods (and a real meal as opposed to just a series of junk food throughout your eating window). (3) Are you having more than one dessert or treat in your eating window? I teach an OMAD/3 approach to the eating window–OMAD (One Meal a Day) in three parts—a. Appetizer/salad/snack to open the window; b. Entree or meal an hour or two later; c. Dessert or snack before closing window if still hungry.

#4

How Much Weight You Have to Lose

Daily Intermittent Fasting is like any other weight loss plan when it comes to getting close to your goal weight. The body’s weight loss slows down as it gets close to its goal. While you don’t have to “starve yourself” down to your goal weight like you do when you do calorie restriction, you will be tweaking and perfecting your fasting and eating windows as you get near the end of the weight loss portion.

If you have only ten or twenty pounds remaining to lose, your weight loss will not likely be fast (unless you’re doing an extreme keto at the same time as Daily IF). But it will be steady. This is the beauty of IF–weight loss is not fast and furious, but it keeps going–consistently. If we do not stop Daily IF and we have a lengthy fasting window and short eating window, we will eventually weigh what we want to weigh. And…..at that point, we will maintain that weight (and continue to trim up and lose body fat!) when we using Daily IF for maintenance as well.

#5

 Other Non-Scale Victories

Of course, Daily IF yields many other NSV (non-scale victories) besides weight loss and a great physique. As a matter of fact, there are many IF’ers who do not weigh at all–they rely on their next “goal jeans” to tell them how they’re doing. They don’t care what they weigh as long as they wear the size clothes and look the way they want to look.

So be sure that, even if you are just getting started, you look for the first NSV–inflammation going down (face thinner; less “fluffiness”); less hunger during the fasting period as you move into fat adaption; empowerment that comes through living this lifestyle; a consistency on weekends and for many days in a row that you were never able to achieve with other weight loss protocols; feeling amazing without being bogged down with carbs and food during the day; time freedom of not having to buy, shop, and prepare so much food; no packed lunches and snacks; financial freedoms as you spend less money on food and drinks; and so much more!

Resources

1) Length of Time You’ve Been Practicing IF: IF Journal Podcast

2) Length of Your Daily Fasting Window and Eating Window: 5 Ways IF Can Seem Upside Down

3) What You’re Eating During Your Eating Window: IF Journal Podcast

4) How Much Weight You Have to Lose: Feast Without Fear 
by Gin Stephens

5) Other Non-Scale Victories: Complete Book of Fasting by Jason Fung

Find ME–and Find Out More About Daily Intermittent Fasting!

(1) FB Group for Support and Daily Help

(2) Blog with all videos, articles, 5 Top Tips for IF Slideshow, and more.

(3) IF Journal Podcast at iTunes

(4) YouTube channel

(5) Donna Reish Blogger FB Page

Thanks for Viewing My…..

5 Tips for Daily IF Slideshow

Find More of These Weekly Slideshows here at donnareish.com

PIN THIS POST!

In the slideshow above are a couple of links to books I use and love. I am an affiliate for Amazon.com. If you click on the links above I will earn a small commission. Thank you for your support of this blog!

Succulent, Pan-Fried Steak (SIMPLE 4-8 Minute Instructions!)

 

We went on a grocery fast of $25 per week–so we had to start eating steak every week…..let me explain! The reason for the grocery fast was to try to empty our freezers, refrigerators, cupboards, and pantry of the excess food we had accumulated from gradually becoming empty nesters, but not really knowing how to shop, cook, or live like empty nesters! Part of this process includes using up five years worth of Omaha Steaks that were gifted to our business.

 

 

True confession: We have seldom ever cooked steaks. Sure, we made hamburger steaks, Swiss steak, chopped steak smothered with veggies, meatloaf steak, “poor man’s steak” (out of hamburger), and even ham steak. But with seven children on one income for over twenty-five years, meat was more of a “condiment”—in casseroles, soups, stews, and other combination dishes–than it was a “per person” type of meal element.

 

(more…)

Peanut Butter-Mayo Apple Salad (With Lower Carb and/or Lower Fat Options!)

 

I don’t remember my mom making a lot of salads when I was growing up. I remember some iceberg lettuce here and there on our plates and potatoes cooling in the fridge for potato salad, but that is about it. I do, however, remember the apple salad. Not because I ate it–it has mayo in it! (Yucky! ha ha) But because it was unusual to have anything other than potato salad and cole slaw in terms of “salads.” I quickly discovered that my high school sweetheart (Ray Baby–now my husband of almost 37 years!) loved salads of any kind, and he really loved my mom’s apple salad. So being the dutiful wife, I learned how to make it.

 

It isn’t hard, but it is unique. Every time I take it anywhere, people are always surprised by the combination of peanut butter and mayo–but in a good way. People really like this salad!

(more…)

Pin It on Pinterest

Share This