Welcome to my seventh month of intermittent fasting! If you’ve been interested in the fasting lifestyle I hope that my experience here is useful to you. This post is part of a series, so if you want to start at the very beginning, click on over to Month Zero – I’ll wait.
Since last month I confirmed that instead of shrinking, I gained a little mass – oops! Luckily this isn’t a big problem. I have a lot of tools in my Fasting Toolbox and it’s time to use them.
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Seven months of not eating all day everyday has definitely yielded positive results, and a clear correlation between my food and my pant size (as expected).
After fasting this long and always trending downward I definitely loosened up my standards and gained some body mass to prove it. But like I said earlier – this just means that I need to use tools available to me, primarily control over what I eat and when I eat; the same tools that most of us have.
Month seven was June for me, I enjoyed my birth month so much that I ended it a larger size than I was when I began! For the record I still fit into size medium leggings, but my Goal Pants show that I am bigger.
Still eating one meal a day, which is an early dinner that starts between five and six in the evening (usually followed by a big snack about two hours after dinner).
Now I will be removing the post-dinner snack and going back to enjoying some green tea in the evening.
Early June – I started breaking my fast with a green juice. A lot of people prefer to break their fast with a specific macro because it makes them feel good, but that wasn’t my motivation (because it’s all the same to me; food is food). I decided to break with green juice because it makes me feel better about not eating ten cups of salad each day.
I like Suja juices from the grocery store, so I often open my eating window with Suja Über Greens or Suja Celery Juice. I’m also trying out green powders, and I like Athletic Greens, but I don’t like the price, so I’m shopping around.
Late June – I did get a NAD+ precursor supplement because I think the science is interesting. Like most things I don’t take it daily, and I don’t expect huge changes.
- Here’s a quick article about nicotinamide = B3 from ScienceDaily.com
- Here’s the B3 & resveratrol capsule I like
The struggle in month seven – Not saying “no” to all of the desserts in the world!
The success in month seven – Not getting bigger than I did? Kind of hard to call this month a success when I gained mass, but I know it would have been much worse if I was eating all day and maintaining high insulin levels.
➤ ➤ Goal Pants, Two Pairs
➤ ALLSAINTS, 30″ waist. I can fasten the entire button fly easily…but I still have too much butt to walk comfortably or to sit.
➤ Community, 29″ waist. Still hilariously too small. Increased muffin top confirms mass increase.
Q. What contributed to the size increase?
A. Several little things! I can easily say that I’ve been
– less disciplined at dinner
– eating too much in general
– not filling up on good vegetables
– eating too many sweets
– not walking as much (too hot & humid to enjoy walking outside right now)
– AND I recently changed hormonal birth control methods
Each of these little things helped me gain mass last month. Luckily this means that (minus the birth control) I can work on each point RIGHT NOW.
Q. So the new plan is?
A. To apply several small tweaks to regain my spot on the downward slide.
I will be
– making two simple vegetable-heavy meals each week (think broccoli & chicken, or fish & zucchini. These meals will be simple, fresh, and as clean as possible.)
– getting back on the treadmill (at least on the weekends when Mister Jupiter can take a shift with the toddler)
– restrict desserts to special occasions only
– get back to drinking green tea when I want a snack
Here goes!
☞ Ready for more? Intermittent Fasting, Month Eight (July 2020)
