I’m sure that many moons ago, when I was a member of the “Make Your Hair As Big As Possible” Club, I knew that this video was a little dark and/or sad. Of course, all these years later, I didn’t remember this until I looked up the video to use for this post. Well, if you are wanting to make a connection, then simply replace the lost spouse with food. Callous, I know, but again, I wasn’t thinking about all this angst in the video when I wanted to use it.
Now, on with the story!
Either on Friday of last week or over the weekend, Lovey (aka the hubby in case you were unaware) mentioned reading something about intermittent fasting, or IF as the cool kids say. I’ve never been one for all the many diets out there. I just work out and try to eat mostly healthy and splurge whenever. I’ve also put on a few pounds over the last year and a half that I’ve been struggling to shed.
Sidebar: TMI warning. Skip to the next paragraph if you don’t wanna read about my insides. You were warned. Back in 2017, I tried to get into a study for doing something to reduce these gawd awful fibroids. I didn’t get in, but they did have the courtesy to tell me that, at that time, my uterus was the size of a 10 week pregnant woman. Coming up on three years later, I can’t imagine that those suckers shrunk any, so I’m guessing that my empty uterus is at least 3 months pregnant now with fibroid babies. Could have something to do with the weight gain, but maybe not. And yes, I’m gonna go to the GYN eventually.
Exercise happens, yoga happens, pole happens, and chubby continues to happen. So without actually acknowledging that I’m willing to try this whole IF idea, I figure I’ll do it.
You’ve probably heard of IF, or if you haven’t, you can work it out since those are two pretty easy words. Hubby said (and I didn’t check it myself) that 14 hours was optimal for women and 16 for men. Ok, sure.
Before giving this a shot, my morning routine looks about like this:
5am alarm, shit around (most of the time literally) reading emails, Facebook, IG, LI, and checking my roster for the day for whatever fantasy sport season it is until about 5:20, walk over to the gym, put in work for 30-45 minutes depending on that day’s routine, pet a dog, stretch, do handstands, pretend I’m good at my Leviwand, walk back home by 7:10 at the latest, make breakfast, eat, shower, boot up the laptop and get ready for the work day.
Without warning, I goofed off longer at the gym portion of my morning and didn’t get back to the house until about 7:30 and Lovey says I’m running late. I say nope, if I’m not eating, I have more time. To which he replies, OH! So you’re gonna do that. LOL. Obviously I’m a stellar communicator.
Almost every night, the last thing I have is right about 9pm – a protein shake and an iron pill because girl I’m hungray(!) and I’m old with the most deficient iron deficiency ever. I’m not always hungry when I eat breakfast, it’s just the scheduled time. (Yeah, I’m one of those forget to eat people if I don’t eat on a schedule. )
I’m already at ten hours at this point so I figure that I can survive for another four before I eat. I figure this is a great time to go in on the tea cabinet and the ~10 boxes of teabags I’ve got in there. A little turmeric ginger tea (no sugar) plus a bunch of water should get me through. And I’m mostly right. I make it all the way until 10:45 before I get actually hungry and at that point, I know I’ll survive for 15 more minutes.
I think part of the line of thinking is that with less time to eat that you will consume less calories, but they obviously don’t know me. Still had breakfast, lunch, and dinner although I did forgo my evening shake, but that’s typical for Monday since I eat late after class.
Much to Lovey’s chagrin, I weigh myself about 5 times a week. Weekends are scale-free because I don’t need that sort of stress in my life. But imagine my surprise when I saw more movement in the numbers on the scale in that one day than I’ve seen in the last several weeks. Of course, it could be a fluke, and I’ll find out tomorrow when I step back on, but it could be some IF magic, who knows. I’m going to keep trying it for the rest of this week to see if changes continue to happen. Of course, I’ll let you know because I know how much you want to know every detail of my mundane life.
The only downside to yesterday’s new structure was that around 3pm I wanted to go to sleep oh so badly. I pressed on because, you know, work, but I’m hoping that was a one day thing.
Well, I’m in the middle of today’s feeding frenzy and it’s taco night and I gotta go get some refried beans. Stop back tomorrow if you’d like to see how it’s going. And hey, let me know if you’ve gone down this IF road and how it worked for you!