Day Four - Overeating Phase

Phew, I'm stuffed. I came home and made a big spinach salad. 4 cups of raw spinach, one carrot, one parsnip, and a quarter onion with a little kosher salt and some olive oil and cide vinegar. I can't get over how good this tastes after a 20 hour fast.

Cooked up two more hamburger patties. These aren't as unhealthy as I thought they'd be, only 9 grams of fat each compared to 14 grams of protein. Commercially prepared hamburger patties are better for you then something you'd get at a fast food place. I also had some cheddar cheese with that. Then I ate a handful of almonds and a handful of walnuts. Then I had a protein shake. By the way, if you think Supersize Me is a poignant movie, then you are not good, unless your argument is that the point was to show how you can take something obvious and shock people. Maybe you've heard of the evils of diydrogren monoxide? I'm going to eat as much food from McDonalds as I can for 30 days. OMG, I got fat and I don't feel good! But I digress.

A little bit after that I ate a banana and two apples.

If I can manage to make a little room before 10:00 tonight, I'll add some steel cut oats with dried cranberries and dried cherries. Mmmmmm. Then maybe another protein shake before bed. That'll bring me to a total of around 1900 calories for the day.

Here's the breakdown of nutrient for the overeating phase. If you thought it might be unhealthy eating, check this out:



That's a great macro-nutrient breakdown and I'm getting all my major vitamins and minerals head on. The only fat that's elevated is Mono, the healty fats. That's perfect. Fiber is less than 100% RDA but let me tell you that 30 grams of fiber in a day puts you in the 99th percentile. The RDA is way overboard on that one, they must have stock at Scott Tissue.

I should be trying to hit just over 2000 calories. I don't like being below 2000 calories for the day. I don't want to lose any muscle. So far though I'm not seeing any performance drops so I guess that's not happening at the moment. I feel strong and lean. I might try to up that alcohol amount this weekend. Zero is way too low, I might be suffering from an alcohol deficiency. A nice Riesling should take care of that.

Complete Fast

I had no problems all day. I didn't eat a lick of anything. I had a couple cups of tea with a little bit of milk. There was no sleepiness or hunger pains at all. I felt a heightened state of awareness all day long. Taking a deep breath tasted good. I feel lean, and fast, and I would swear I can feel the fat leaving my midsection. I accomplished a lot of work today and the day flew by. I can understand why religions often incorporated fasting into part of the experience. It definitely transforms your perception. It seems like I focus intently on whatever task is at hand, save for that one craving for almonds earlier. Maybe we should put all our ADD kids on intermittent fasts. I had an idea yesterday that I was eating just because I hadn't eaten for a while and not because I felt like eating. I'm pretty sure that was the case. I had very few thoughts about food throughout the day and certainly wasn't struggling to get through the day. I am looking forward to the big evening meal though. However this turns out, there's definitely something to be said about actually being hungry when you eat and enjoying the experience of being hungry and the satiety that follows the big meal.

He's nuts...mmmm...nuts.

The weirdest thing just happened. I was reading something and the phrase "This is nuts" was in the text describing a situation and I immediately had an extremely intense craving for some of the almonds I have at home. The tin of them flashed brightly in my mind and I could taste almonds in my mouth. I thought it was funny because people doing intermittent fasting tell a lot of similar stories. One guy said he passed some fresh roadkill and felt the urger to pick it up and slap it on his grill. Weird stuff, no wonder fasting makes you so alert. In the distant past, you'd have to be constantly on the alert for an animal to walk by or notice a beehive somewhere. No time to be off thinking about girlies. You couldn't afford to miss a feeding opportunity.

More on Intermittent Fasting

I was looking for more information on the Warrior Diet so I did some searching on the RossTraining forums (link added to sidebar). I found this thread that has a lot of useful information from people that actually tried it. That thread included this link to a Performance Menu forum discussing Intermittent Fasting (also about to be added to the sidebar). Apparently, people will completely fast (no calories) for most of the day rather than limiting themselves to low GI fruits and veggies. The consensus seems to be that the Warrior Diet is an easier to follow version of IF (Intermittent Fasting). Some go so far to speculate that you'd see more benefits from a total fast rather than the Warrior Diet fast. I'm on the fence. I can see both sides. If fasting regulates blood glucose and insulin and increases fat metabolism, and all studies show that it does, then eating throughout the day is going to raise those levels and effect fat metabolism to some degree. However, I believe that if you're strict about the fruits and vegetables you eat, i.e. make sure they are low GI foods, then you can minimize the increase in blood glucose and the benefits of the vitamins and nutrients of the fruits and veggies are worth the minor disruption to fat loss.

That being said I am going to try a complete fast today. Only coffee, tea and water. I've added a tiny amount of milk but I'm not counting this. If everything goes OK I think it might be good to throw in a couple of complete fasting days every now and then.

Day Four - Morning Workout

What can I say? I felt great this morning. I got up early, went to the gym and did 8 rounds of sprint intervals on the treadmill. 2 minutes jogging at 6.0 mph followed by 1 minute of sprinting at 10.0 mph, with 2.0 incline on the treadmill. 3 minutes of warm-up/cooldown on each end for 30 minutes total. Then I moved to the rower and did 5000 meters in 22:00 minutes. Finished up with 95 pound good mornings and some more floor wipers (I like those). Total workout time, about an hour.