Welcome to my ninth month of intermittent fasting! If youâve 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 â Iâll wait.
Last update I straightened up and started shrinking again. Since then I’ve been…”eh” about my eating window and or food choices – depends on the day. Truth is that it’s harder and harder for me to be disciplined at home when I’m watching a toddler all day. I’m not licking spoons or anything, but I have been having a big snack after dinner again, and my sweet tooth is torture most nights. Also my hormones have been…more rollercoaster-like than I’m used to, so that’s fun.
Apologies for the delay! I wanted to hop on a scale to update some graphs – so we all had to wait a few days. Enjoy the new weigh-in information below.
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Nine months of intermittent fasting has really underlined the importance of bioindividuality. Bioindividuality is simply the notion that what works for me may not work for you because we are so unique. It makes absolute sense to me that everything effects us differently despite being the same species. Think about allergies – an easy example that individual people have their own responses to compounds – but why stop there? Think about bioindividuality regarding non-allergens, positive effects of foods, different macros at different times of the day, even exercise. Everything is connected, but this is why So & So’s Guaranteed Regimen might not work…for you, but works for your cousin.
The upside in everything being different for every human is that it’s easy to disregard some health advice that we don’t agree with. For example, some say that your last meal of the day needs to be at least four hours before bedtime, but I know that I definitely sleep better with recent carbs (as a kid it was toast, and as an adult I prefer instant ramen). I don’t counter all health advice though; I wholly agree that exercise should be done in a fasted state, and that pre- and post- workout ingestibles are simply expensive things that stop you from burning your own body fat.
*steps down from soap box*
Month nine was August for me.
I eat one meal a day (OMAD) between five and six in the evening. If I am still hungry two or more hours later I try to fill up on fibrous veggies unless I am craving simple carbs. I try to resist sweets.
I aim to eat for my microbiome twice a week, and have excellent results when I can. Some weeks are just too hectic for this level of planning, so I could do better.
August – My body definitely benefits from those microbiome-focused days, but I can’t do it as often as I would like to. I also haven’t been cooking as many keto meals as I had earlier this year.
So while I haven’t kept the house on any particular dietary plan lately, the quality is still high. Our beef and pork come from Butcher Box (here’s a code for $15 off your first box), our seafood is a seasonal from Sitka Salmon Shares (not 100% salmon, but a wonderful variety instead), and every other week I get organic veggies from Misfits Market (discount code:COOKWME-NJ8YAR). I try to keep the processed foods at a minimum, and the organic sustainable foods at a maximum.
The tail end of August brought a surprise hormonal shift. I am using hormonal birth control and it is affecting me differently now than ten years ago when I last used this exact type. Full details won’t help anybody (because we are all so wonderfully different!), I just wanted to let you know that the ol’ hormones essentially went berserk and I was ultra hungry for a week.
I have never been a dieter because I am too food-motivated or just too lazy to stick to a torturous regimen. But when my hormones slosh about and make me a super hungry teenager again – I don’t fast. I will eat three meals a day, probably overeating, and I will gain weight. I know that I gained at the very end of August, but I don’t know how much because I weigh so rarely (once a quarter so far).
The struggle in month nine – Staying disciplined is hard when I’m bored at home. I’m not saying that home is boring per se, but my routine doesn’t allow much mental stimulation and “just getting out” is a million times easier said than done. Scheduled hunger is hard to avoid when I’m watching Shaun the Sheep.
The success in month nine – Feeling good when I eat for by microbiome. I’m thinking about doing a DNA analysis for nutritional information.
††Goal Pants, three two pairs
†ALLSAINTS, 30″ waist.
I can sit in these pants now! So they fit my sitting hips, but the waist digs into my tum and is really uncomfortable. For now, wearing them is off the table because I don’t want to sit in them.
†Community, 29″ waist. Adios pantelones!
After last month’s write up I realized that when I am smaller, I’m still never going to wear these pants because the super low rise doesn’t work with my tum. I don’t have the loose “mummy tummy” like I’ve seen on TV, but my tummy flesh does spill out of pants easier than it used to. That spilling is as uncomfortable as it is unattractive – so these are no longer Goal Pants. Besides, September has come in with insatiable hunger and bloating – so these too-small pants look extra bad. Bye now!
†Denizen by Levi’s, size 3. So I replaced the Community jeans with these from Target. This junior’s size three is the size that I have been most of my adult life. These are high waisted and I like the seams. I can button the waist and zip the zipper, but they barely fit when I do that, so this initial photo shows a comfortable fit; unzipped!
†Unofficial Quarterly Weigh-in complete! I found a scale and can provide a data point for one morning in September. As mentioned above, I’ve had a hormone surge that has made me ultra hungry and I can’t not eat like a teenager; multiple meals in one day, generally carb heavy. So of course I barely lost weight recently. I’m still trending smaller, so that matters. Sure I would love to be smaller sooner, but I have all of my life to get where I want to be.
†New BMI Chart is up! Read it slowly three times if you’re not understanding it all.
The Cliff Notes version is that it contains three weights (max weight, current weight, and an earlier middle-weight), and specifies time-of-life when said weight was logged. Note that I don’t know what I weighed when I started fasting – I would guess about 150lbs.
So when you read “25lbs lost over 21 months” notice that I’ve only been fasting for the last nine months. The heaviest weight noted in December was before giving birth, which was my maximum weight. I didn’t attempt to lose weight until Baby Jupiter was weaned, because I wanted to protect him from any weird fat-soluble compounds from my body.
Q. Any new plans for September?
A. Not really.
I just need to make peace with what I want and what I have. I know that I would meet my goal faster if I could clock out from society for two days a week. But that will never happen…so I’m just going to keep chugging along at my slow and sometimes backward pace.
â Ready for more? Intermittent Fasting, Month Ten (September)
Lady Jupiter 