Fasting low carb

This weekend I discovered a way I can be inspired to binge without strictly breaking the diet I'm on. I knew cheese was a risk, but compared to this new food, it barely registers on the diet breaking scale... Have you tried cashew nut butter? I don't know if all brands are the same but Myprotein.com now sell big tubs of cashew nut butter and I can eat it by the spoonful... No, actually, I could eat it by the bucket load. Its fairly sweet, very rich and creamy (it only comes in smooth) and its so much nicer than any other nut/seed butter I ever tried... Its basically dangerous to a person inclined to over indulge such as myself, and I need to stay well away from now on. A little is NOT enough...
I'm actually feeling pretty ok today despite eating nut butter at 8pm yesterday.
I fasted today - no breakfast or lunch. If it hadn't been for the nut butter it would've been 24 hours,as it was I went 22 hours with no calories. I had a hungry hour from 9:30 to 11 (yes, I know that's more than an hour!!!) But otherwise the main problem was boredom - the morning stretches on and on when you can't break it up or enliven it with food!
At lunchtime I escaped from an office that never fails to fill with food smells and went for a 3 mile walk. I planned the walk to stay away from shops, restaurants and fast food sources and basically spent the whole hour walking around a little lake / nature reserve. Apart from dodging dive bombing insects it was very pleasant and included swans, geese and goslings, which are always nice. Then it was back to work and another hungry hour.... I'm planning to fast two days a week, hopefully it should get easier with practice, and I'm going to try to walk at lunch break on those days the weather permits just to break up the vast expanse of foodless day and get away from other people's lunches...

I've felt awash with water, black tea and black coffee today. You're supposed to get relief from hunger of you drink plenty (sometimes works...) as well as ensuring that you don't get dehydrated or mistake thirst for hunger. It also allows you to spend a lot of time in the bathroom....

Technorati Tags: Fasting,low carb,trigger foods

On a roll…

Sleeping better and feeling better as a result - two decent nights in a row now!

Getting a better nights sleep last night didn't stop me forgetting that I planned to take my breakfast to work - it was all ready in the fridge, and it still is now! I had the weirdest breakfast in a recent run of somewhat weird meals lately - I'd taken a can of steam-cooked mackerel to work in case it appealed for lunch one day but had chickened out of eating it because I was worried about it smelling too fishy for the office - I was actually carrying it backwards and forwards every day hoping at some point I'd eat it outside! Anyway I let my concerns be overcome by hunger, and ate it in the kitchen, straight out of the tin for breakfast today, and followed it with a couple of mini Babybel cheeses. I quite enjoyed it as a definite one off but kept imagining (i hope it was just imagination) that I could smell fish all morning... It didn't satisfy me for very long unfortunately, despite being all fat & protein, so I ended up eating half my lunch by 11am. Lesson learned... Unless deliberately fasting, don't forget your breakfast, especially when you only took your lunch out of the freezer at 6am so you can't just eat that instead... (I'm using leftovers for my lunches at the moment and don't always even know what they are till they defrost since I never remember to label what goes in the freezer...)
This evening M asked if I fancied eating out and I resisted. I even got takeaway for him and stuck with my planned stewed lamb with asparagus... Go me!!!

Crappy crappy weather and very little walking – but I don’t care!!!

 

Technorati Tags: Low carb

Took ages to feel like posting today

Not for any really negative reason, I just didn't have a lot to write about. I'm quite busy at the moment, so I don't while away the hours thinking of stuff that may or may not end up here on the blog. In my lunch break I was reading a very interesting book. I probably find it more interesting at the moment because it supports my growing obsession with low carbing and more primal / pales eating (well, pales plus dairy because of my love of cheese. And yoghurt.) the book is called The Meat Fix and its by an English guy who was a vegetarian off and on vegan for 28 years getting increasingly ill with appalling IBS symptoms until his wife suggested one day that maybe their health problems, which in his case he had been suffering for about a decade, where not due to something they were eating, but to something they weren't - namely meat. So they did a complete 360 and started out by eating liver before expanding to eat all types of meat & fish, and instantly improved their health hugely (btw please don't think I'm writing about this to offend any vegetarians or vegans who read this, I just find its interesting because so many of my own problems have improved since going low carb) anyway, after telling you his own story the rest of the book is something of an angry anti-government, NHS and big business rant, but its really interesting and I really like the way he looks back at the food and habits of his own childhood (in 60's Yorkshire) and his parents & grandparents to compare them with the ones that made him (and many of us) ill. Really interesting but possibly more appealing to people who already agree with his opinions given his Angry not-so-young man tendencies!
I also did walk a couple of miles at lunchtime around an artificial lake with waterfowl. No walking after work though as once again it started raining the minute I got in my car to drive home. I'm too easily diverted from physical exercise this days, I must work on that.... She says for the 30,000,000,000th time this year alone...
So, anyway. Still very low carbing at the moment mainly because I'm not currently very interested in food or eating. Except far too many nuts, so that's not translating into shed loads of weight lost. I suppose that may be contributing to my loss of interest in getting moving... Or maybe I'm just a lazy cow.

Aaargggh

More rain.
No walking.
Hardly slept. Felt like my body was trying to crawl out of my skin, and my brain was whizzing around insanely.
Déjà vu....
I am a zombie today, struggled to get through work and collapsed when I got home. How long does it take for sleep deprivation to cause insanity? About a day less than I've been unable to get a decent nights sleep I suspect.
Ok, enough moaning from me.
Eating fine. Mood better than the above might imply.
Longing for the next bank holiday.
Lunchtime I went to the nearest shop & ended up running most of the way back. I stopped because the bags I was carrying were annoying and I dropped my phone and settled for walking and getting wet the rest of the way. Almost interval training if you ignore the fact that there was basically one interval and none of it was very intense (I don't wear a sports bra to work so I couldn't even if I wanted to)
After work the sun was put but the clouds were heavy and dark so apart from a quick stroll into town I didn't do much, which was lucky because it poured down not long after I got back, but at least I got a little exposure. And some spots of rain.

BMI still 26. (I decided to add some accountability but this allows me to brush it off slightly as I don't really believe in the BMI.)

Technorati Tags: Weather,moaning

Just going through the motions

The weather is still letting me down and getting me down as well... Today has been showery but the forecast for the rest of the week looks awful - heavy rain across the board. I want the sun back please please pretty please????

I slept much better last night till I was woken by some kind of loud noise outside. At 4:30 am Ffs!!! I'm starting to feel persecuted - the universe is against me... not as tired today as yesterday, but still I didn't have the energy to train, and the river falling from the sky when I got home persuaded me not to go for a walk either...

So I have nothing much to write about today, and totally lack inspiration...

Chrissie out

 

Weekend round up plus

Nothing much to report for Saturday, I did very little - mostly household stuff - and only walked a mile. The forecast was so patchy I didn't trust the weather enough to go for a proper walk, and therefore missed an opportunity because in the end it stayed dry all morning and for a chunk of the afternoon even though it looked ominous.

 Yesterday I walked along the Kennet & Avon canal for 6 miles, mostly in glorious sunshine and, with little wind, high temperatures. It was lovely, but my original plan to walk about 11 miles was cut short because my walking boots died under me and I had to order some more. Luckily they were despatched today so I can start breaking them in soon- I generally spend a few days or weeks clumping around the house in new boots before I take them out for real.

 

Last night I struggled to get any sleep to speak of. I tried to get an early night because I was falling asleep anyway, but it didn't work out so well - I took ages to get to sleep, woke up several times, and woke for the last time just after 4am. It was both hard to get up - because I was knackered - and impossible to stay in bed longer - because I was frustrated, bored and stressed by the lack of sleep.

 I couldn't get a proper walk at lunchtime because I had to go to the post office to return some faulty electronic appliances before the deadline to do so. As always there was a queue and I was stuck in there for 6 years or so. I hate that... I wouldn't have gone much further anyway as it was also showery. Once my lunch break was over of course it got sunny, only to start raining again as soon as I walked from the office to my car. In fact it started to pour down as exactly as I turned into my street... I took that as a sign that I was too tired anyway, and settled in for the evening.

 

I tried a kind of Dukan-ization of my day today. I slipped up slightly yesterday and bought a large cappuccino without remembering that it had almost a full meals' worth of carbs. So I cut back big time on the carbs today - for breakfast I had bacon, a sausage (some carbs but not a lot) and hard boiled egg. For lunch I ate meat and cheese, for my snacking (yes, I snacked!) I had biltong & cheese, then for dinner I had a burger - no carbs, just beef and seasoning - topped with a slice of cheese, a poached egg, and some mushrooms cooked with a little cream. No salad or veg at all. I wouldn't want to do that everyday and I'm pretty sure some of you at least threw up a little just reading that, but as a one off it was kind of a guilty pleasure... ;-)

 

Calming down...

Feeling pretty good today after venting my frustration yesterday. (thanks for letting me get it out!) Obviously I do realise intellectually that Jess' comment was right on the mark - I'm simply eating too much energy dense food (in fear of not getting enough energy without the carbs), and need to deal with that or accept this weight as my 'new norm' - can't see that happening! I'm still not happy about where I am, but I'm feeling re-motivated, once again, to tweak things so that can change. Also I'm snacking too much still, my body may not need to without the blood sugar peaks and troughs of a carbier diet but the brain has been well and truly trained after all these years of 5 'meals' a day. Must un / re brainwash myself... Anyway, no aches or pains after the Versaclimber session yesterday - even in the annoying lower back area. This morning I did 40 push ups before breakfast, and more later on - 60 in total, though I can't pretend they were all done with perfect form. Then another 40 minute session on the Versaclimber today while watching an episode of Criminal Minds... its not as emotionally satisfying as a walk in the sunshine, but then there wasn't a lot of sunshine... and if I'm going to get wet, I'd prefer sweat to rain showers any day... Plus being able to watch TV while working up that sweat takes away some of the pain!