Days 13 & 14

Some Days are Better Than Others

Oh Easter! You got the better of me with chocolates hanging around the house. Most of my fast day was great and then in the evening I started getting into the mini eggs. Damn mini eggs. I probably had 15 of them. I had a shake so that I wouldn't snack and I ate them anyway.

I had the best intention of eating really well on my feasting day but I am a chronic stress eater so when I found out our car needed more work than just the break I had a piece of cake.

Days 11 & 12

Easter and the Alternate-Day Fast

I made it through Easter! Fortunately, my Feasting Day corresponded with Easter Sunday. My sister had a big meal at her place and I made a fancy cake. It was an Easter Pinata Cake inspired by Sarah Barnes of the Blog Taming Twins. Her Easter Ombre Pinata Cake is truly beautiful. I have much to learn about cake decorating but I think mine turned out pretty good for an amateur. Unfortunately, It was not gluten-free. I have yet to master the gluten-free white cake batter, but when I do I will post a recipe.

Days 8 to 10 - Adding Almased to my Alternate-Day Fast

This is how I broke my fast on Day 8! The eating days are great. The fasting days are getting much easier. I am finding that I only get hunger pangs about 45 minutes before I normally eat my meal on fasting days and then again when I wake up the morning after fasting. I made one change to my regime to that is really helping with getting through fasting days - I started using a meal replacement shake on Day 9 (fasting Day 5). I did this for 2 reasons a) to help control my hunger and b) to make sure I am getting enough vitamins and minerals. I also decided to pick up a multivitamin and a magnesium supplement to alleviate the muscle cramps I was experiencing. 

The meal replacement shake I have is Almased. I had some leftover from when I thought I could do the Almased diet. This diet is like most other meal replacement diets - 2 shakes a day plus a meal consisting of broth for the reset phase. I did if for 3 days then I said screw it. I didn't even make it to phase two where you get 2 shakes plus a meal. I like to eat and I found it was really hard not eating when I was living in a house with  9 people and there was always a kid with food in their hand. Like most other meal replacement shakes its tastes chalky and it seemed expensive to buy. You get 500 g in a container, there are 50 g in a serving and it costs between $34.48 and $42.63 (including tax) depending on where you purchase it. I just picked up a new can of it from Walmart for $29.99 plus tax ($34.48). This makes it $3.45 per serving. Definitely steeper in price than some of the other supplements.  

So why I am choosing Almased as my meal replacement if its the most expensive one? Simple - The Ingredients. Soy protein, honey, skim milk yogurt powder, and a host of vitamins and minerals. There are a few other things in it like maltodextrin and corn starch but compared to some of the other supplements I looked at its by far the healthiest. Importantly to me its gluten free. Don't worry Almased is not paying me to write about their product. I blog only gets about 10 views per post.

The reason I tried Almased in the first place is because it is made in Germany. Almased been around since the 80's and I remembered seeing ads for it when I lived in Munich. I have a strong love of Germany and all things German. It was there I found out about my thyroid disorder and lost weight for the first time in my life. I have nothing but praise for the medical system there. Silly reason to decide to try something but hey.

I have been tracking my calories with Calorie Count at the end of each fast and feast day just to make sure they are in line with protocol. My fasting days I range between 750 and 800 calories. This is about 200 calories higher than recommended for my body weight on the Every Other Day Diet. I should be shooting for 625 calories. This will come down as I lose more weight with alternate-day fasting to 500 calories once I am closer to my goal weight of 175 lbs. 

My hope is that by using a meal replacement during my fast day that I can get the calories down from 750 or 800 to between 500 and 625. If I have a shake and a small meal of fish and vegetable I should be able to do this. The Almased keeps me really full for hours when I drink it and should work better with that Alternate-Day fasting regime than just drinking shakes all day with no food for a week.  

Day 7 - My 4th Day Fasting and Muscle Cramps

Whooooohoooo! I made it through a whole week of alternate day fasting. I wasn't sure if I could make it at some points. This diet is hard but it does seem to be getting easier on fasting days.

Today was pretty standard. I drank broth and tea, had a bit of coffee. Broke my fast in the evening at 5 pm. I had a lovely piece of chicken breast with Italian dressing, green beans and a small baked potato. Logged in at 525 calories. Then I had  2 pieces of gluten free bread and a banana. That put me up to 825 calories for the day. It seems to me that the 500 calorie goal is far too little since I am nowhere near normal body weight.

I also started having muscle pain and cramps. At first I though I pulled a muscle but I had to laugh at myself because I was doing situps when I pulled the muscle in my leg a few days ago. Today both my legs started to hurt. It felt like I was going to have a charlie horse. If you have ever had one then you know they are truely horrid.

I did a bit of poking around the internet and lo and behold lost of people who fast get muscle cramping. There are two camps of though on this A) that toxins are being released from the fat you are losing or B) there is a potassium deficentct causeing the cramps. I tend to believe the its potasium. Had a banana last night and they went away in a few hours.

Another symtom of this fast is acne. Yes, my chin is all broken out in nasty cystic acne. It hurts.

Day 6 - The 3rd Eating Day

Another day of food! I should be stoked to eat anything I want and as much as I want right? Tell that to my stomach. Today I had a sausage, scrambled egg and a rice tortilla. Then one bite (yep only one) of a banana. Lunch was a tortilla with a slice of cheese, a half cup of rice and a cup of curry. I ate the tortilla and about half of the curry. My original portion was 1/2 to a 1/3 or what I would have normally eaten and I could even finish it. I was so full I felt like my stomach was pushing up into my chest. It is pretty crazy how much your stomach can shrink in a few days.

I did have a piece of chocolate cake this afternoon. It was left over from baking on my last feed day. I wanted it and was really looking forward to eating it. For some reason at 7 pm I had no interest in eating. Duh, guess I should have skipped the cake for real food. Dinner happened at 8 pm, mostly because I didn't want to eat any later than that. I had a quesedilla with half a chicken breast and a nectarine. My goal was to have a salad but my hubby ate the salad at lunch. Grrr. Again even though my portion wasn't large, when I was done my stomach was over full.

I logged my calories at the end of the day just to have a look. I was under 2000 calories so with my last fasting day I average 1352 calories. I can hardly believe how consistent that the days are averaging out to with out any effort.

I got on the scale this morning and I am down 4.8 lbs since Day 3. I did not weight myself on the very first day I waited until I had one fast and one feed day under my belt. Honestly, I was afraid of the number and very relieved when I was what I thought it should be. 4.8 lbs in 4 days. I am amazed! I know it's inside of the first week but its very encouraging. I am going to try to weight myself every 3rd feed day first thing in the morning for consistency.

Wish me luck tomorrow. Hope I can make it through another fasting day. 

Days 4 and 5 - A Feed Day and a Fast Day

Feed days are easy. Fast days are hard.

I breezed through Day 4. I had scrambled eggs and fruit for breakfast. Then for lunch I had french fries. My daughter and I made a cake. She has been harassing me about chocolate cake for days ever since she was other little kids make on the BBC. So we made it gluten free and it was pretty darn good. I had a decent dinner with a small serving mushroom pasta and salad, and small piece cake for dessert.

Could I have eaten more healthfully? Quite certainly but I really enjoy the idea of being able to have cake when it is there. Do I make cake often? No way. I also would make icing cause it's just sugar and fat and at that point in the day, after having french fries it wasn't going to happen. I also did not snack at all in the evening. I was so full from dinner that I did not want anymore, which was odd because I had the same portion size as my mother who is notorious for her small portions. It is also odd because snacking is my favorite past time in the evenings. Sometimes I can't even control myself. Usually, it means that  I have either eaten too many carbs in the day or I was trying to cut out calories I the days which made be go off the rails in the evening.  I also find it happens if my thyroid levels are out of whack (or I forgot to take my pills).

Roll forward to my 3rd Fast Day. Fast days are hard. The only thing that gets me though it is drinking broth and the knowledge that I can eat a decent meal for dinner and then eat all the next day. The funny thing is I don't eat all day the next day. I find I have been only eating 3 meals and no snacks.

I drank a lot of water and hibiscus tea on this fast day. Yes I could have drank green tea but I don't like it. I went to the bathrooom a million times. Probably every 30 minutes. I really struggled with not eating this fast day. I was convinced I was going to crack. My husband made curried paneer. It smelled amazing. I was consumed with the thought of food. I almost had myself convinced that I was going to break my fast early but I toughed it out till dinner time.   I did not have the curry, I though it best to save it for my eating day. I had pulled pork (hold the bun) with a large salad. After dinner I was feeling bloated and overly fully. Around 9 pm I was missing my old snacking habits. I wasn't hungry but I wanted to snack. I also knew I had gone over the 500 calories again. It seems I eat around 750 each fast day. I had another cup of chicken broth instead of completely ruining this diet experiment. This time I put a little curry powder in the chicken broth - PURE GENIUS.

Well, all in all I am enjoying the days I can eat regularly and I am not a fan of the fasting days. Hoping it gets easier as I go. 

Day 3 - The Second Fast Day

Today didn't feel like as much effort as the first fast day. That was until 5 pm. I was going to try and make it all the way to the 24 hr mark to break my fast. No way. Totally lost control. The desire to eat was way more than I could handle. I ate about 300 calories more than I should have. This is similar to the first fast day. Instead of having a snack and a meal I went whole hog and consumed all the calories in a 30 minute window. I don't feel guilty about it just uncomfortable and full. I scarfed the food down so fast that my brain didn't have time to catch up.

Tomorrow is an eating day so it will be interesting to see how much I eat. I am also interested to see how long it will take me to naturally get me fast day calories in check. I am not so worried about the feast days. I didn't feel out of control yesterday but I will definitely keep an eye on things to make sure I don't eat two days worth of food in one day.

I weighed myself this afternoon. It was exactly the weight that I anticipated it to be. It was the first time in a long time that I got on a scale, saw how big the number was and didn't cry. That scale has been my enemy ever since the thyroxine scandal where the endocrinologist changed my dosage and I gained 50 lbs in a few months. Every time I have gotten on it in the past 2 years I spent a half hour crying. I added a weight loss ticker to the blog. The hope is that this diet works and that in a few weeks I can log my first weight loss in a long time.

8:00 am	Wake Up
9:00 am	250 mL Water
10:00 am	250 mL Water
11:00 am	500 mL Broth and 250 mL water
12:00 pm	250 mL Coffee with milk and 1 tsp of Honey
1:00 pm
2:00 pm	500 mL Broth (HUNGRY)
3:00 pm	250 mL Coffee with milk and 1 tsp of Honey
4:00 pm
5:00 pm	Break fast with Dinner
6:00 pm
7:00 pm	250 mL Water
8:00 pm	500 mL Water 250 mL Chamomille Tea

Day 2 - The First Eating Day

Last night after eating the "snack" that I should not have eaten I felt way too full. It felt like I ate an entire Christmas Dinner all to myself. Not just my portion but an entire turkey with all of the trimmings and the dessert. Definitely, really uncomfortably full.

This morning I woke up feeling light and refreshed. I never wake up feeling refreshed. It was great. Then I was thirsty, so very thirsty. I downed 500 mL of water in no time fast. I also didn't feel hunger. I ate breakfast but I didn't really want it. I made gluten-free applesauce pancakes. I ate 2 of them and them with some strawberries and I was way over full. Maybe I have been just eating too much food all this time and didn't realize it.

I am not logging calories throughout the day. This part of the feed day is the most liberating. Having to constantly log and keep track is the worst part of doing a traditional calorie restrictive diet. Even having to journal what I eat is terrible. I can't stand the guilt I feel if I have some little thing - like a square of chocolate. How may times have I started with the best intentions, made it a week and said screw this? More times than I can count.  How many times have I eaten one bad thing and then said screw this and ate terrible for the rest of the day? Many.

I ate what I wanted till I was full and then stopped. I didn't gorge or go nuts. I ate a small bit of chocolate and had pizza for dinner. I didn't over analyze it. I ate vegetables and fruit, I could have eaten more vegetables and fruit but I didn't feel like it. I didn't think I ate too much at dinner but my that ate the whole turkey feeling is back again is evening.  I checked my calories just to make sure I didn't go nuts and sure enough Dr. Varday was right - I did not double up on food. I only ate what I would normally eat maybe slightly more. My average caloric intake for the two days 1350 calories. This means I am probably cutting somewhere about 750 and 1000 calories a day or close to 40%.

8:00 am	Wake Up
9:00 am	500 mL Water
10:00 am	Breakfast - 3X3 inch Apple Sauce Pancakes with 1 tbsp Syrup and Strawberries
11:00 am	500 mL Black Tea
12:00 pm	250 mL Water
1:00 pm	Snack - Cheese slice and 250 mL Unsweetened Almond Milk with Espresso
2:00 pm
3:00 pm	Lunch - Homemade Chicken Noodle Soup (GF)
4:00 pm	Snack - 25 g Chocolate Callets
5:00 pm	250 mL Unsweetened Almond Milk with Espresso
6:00 pm
7:00 pm	Dinner - 2 Slices of Pizza (GF) Salad
8:00 pm	Back to Fasting

I also found a blog by a lady named Julie who did the alternate day fasting for a year. She lost a total of 63 lbs in a year and has managed to keep it off for two years. AMAZING!









Check out her journey here http://a-grumpy-old-woman.blogspot.ca/p/blog-page.html It comes with before and after photos. She's a spitfire - Love it!

Will this crazy lifestyle of eating every other day work? Who knows. Let's just make it to day 7 by taking one day at a time.

Day 1 - The First Fasting Day

As part of my experiment with the Alternate Day Fasting regime, I am going to journal on my fasting days. The goal is to keep on track for as long as possible and see if I can make a success out of this lifestyle.

Technically I started fasting last night at 7 pm. We ate dinner. Vijay made a very good  eggplant bharta with mucki roti. We had it with a bit of yogurt and chilli pickles. The only thing I had after dinner was a steamed, unsweetened almond milk.

We had a chat about doing this diet. My husband would support me in anything as long as I am not putting my health at risk. He said he's with me on it but isn't sure I can do it for very long. He pointed out then when I am on a regular calorie restricting diet I complain about being hungry all the time. He's right. I eat and then I am hungry because I am restricting my calories too much maybe. The reality of it is that when I do restrict I am still eating 1500 cal/day so I should not be that hungry. When I don't restrict my calories I eat between 1800 and 2000 calories a day. If I go off the rails I might eat 2500 calories and I pay for it.

So here is how my day went.
  7:00 pm Last meal before Fast
  8:00 am Wakeup
  8:30 am Drank 250 ml water
  9:00 am Drank 250 mL black tea with almond milk and 1 tsp honey
10:00 am Drank 500 mL water
11:00 am Drank 250 mL black tea with almond milk and 1 tsp honey (HUNGRY)
12:00 pm Drank 500 mL water
  1:00 pm Drank 1000 mL Vegetable Broth (HUNGRY)
  2:00 pm Drank 250 mL water
  3:00 pm Drank 500 mL Vegetable Broth (HUNGRY)
  4:00 pm Drank 250 mL black tea with almond milk and 1 tsp honey (mild headache)
  5:00 pm Drank 250 mL water
  6:00 pm Laid on the couch and thought about food while watching an episode of Girl Meets World
  7:00 pm Break Fast with moderate calorie (500 cal) meal
  9:00 pm Drank 250 mL Almond milk with cinnamon and 1 tsp honey

I definitely felt the hunger. Lunch time was particularly bad. I have felt clear-headed, and haven't really gotten cranky likely because I am choosing to have a bit of sweetener in my tea. The broth really helped a lot. It was fat-free vegetable broth but the sodium content was probably too high. I doubled the amount of water so that it would not be so salty. At 3:30 pm I was crazy hungry. My daughter ate cereal while sitting beside me. Not helpful. They say it takes 10 fasting days before the hunger pains aren't disruptive. So we will have to revisit that thought in a few weeks time.

I drank 4.25 Liters of fluid today - water, broth, tea with and unsweetened almond milk. I went to the bathroom a lot. About every half hour to hour all day. Someone once told me when you up your water content if you are dehydrated your cells won't accept the water easily so you excrete it all. I sure hope that part get better in a few day because it is a little much.

The last hour of the 24 hour fast was the toughest but knowing that I was breaking my fast soon got me through it. I ate my 500 calorie meal consisting of a baked potato with cheese and salsa. Then an hour later I got snacky and had some rice cereal. I shouldnt have but hopefully it will still work out for me.

I look forward to a regular day of eating tomorrow. I know I won't binge because I already can't eat any of the "good" stuff. I make no guarantees if a gluten free, nut free cake shows up at my house though LOL.

Everyone has a story about how their journey began. Here is mine.

I have been overweight for almost as long as I can remember. I wasn’t an obese child but I wasn’t as tiny as the rest of the other children out there on the playground. When I started high school my doctor told me I had to lose 50 lbs. I had no idea how I was going to do that since I was really active, I never stayed home I was always on my way somewhere by foot and in the summers I was on my bike.   He’s sage advice – eat less. I weighed 175 lbs and everyone thought I was fat. It was horrible. As the years went by I put on more and more weight, though little had changed with my eating habits. 

 Looking back I’d kill to weigh 175 again.

In 2006, I moved to Munich to work on my doctoral thesis. When I arrived I was tired – dead tired. It was like I was a walking zombie. I don’t think I had ever been that tired in my whole life. A few weeks in I found out that my roommate had mono. So I decided that I should go to the doctor to have some blood tests done.   The very wonderful doctor that I had there said my symptoms didn’t sound like mono but he’d include it on a blood panel along with testing my thyroid function. My tests came back the next day and he called me back into the office to do an ultrasound on my thyroid gland. The results were shocking – almost 75% of my thyroid gland was not functioning. He took some more blood to run some tests to see which type of thyroid disease I had. The end result was I have Hashimoto’s disease. The doctor put me on Synthroid and I started to feel better immediately.

Being the inquisitive person that I am I asked the doctor what causes Hashimoto’s disease and he told me it was autoimmune - that the cells in my body that regulate my immune response were attacking my thyroid gland. He said that judging from my test results how much of my thyroid gland was damaged that I have had this problem for years and was surprised that no one had picked up on this sooner. I told him that I had asked for the tests before because I was overweight and tired and the nice doctors I had in Canada told me the problems with losing weight were because I eat too much and needed to exercise more. He assured me that with a regular diet and moderate exercise that I should start to see some weight come off.

Now I am not a sit down and take it as it comes kind of girl. If anything I am uber pro-active. If I don’t like something, I change it. If I am not happy with an answer, I look to see if there are other explanations. So I started to poke around the internet and see if there were any special diet programs out there or people with underactive thyroids and to learn more about my type of thyroid disease. I didn’t find too much more than general information on the condition. So I kept on doing what I had always done – watched what I ate and went for regular walks and bike rides. The result – my weight continued to go up.

In July of 2007 my stress level reached an all-time high. My thesis was crap – I had spent a year working on a new experimental set up and we couldn’t get it working properly. While doing a test run with my colleagues I started to feel unwell. We all assumed it was just because I was tired and anxious about getting the set up to work. So I left the lab and headed to my boyfriend’s (now husband’s) work. When I got there he knew something was not right with me. I was struggling to breath, I had a tingling sensation down my left arm and pains in my chest. Vijay rushed me to hospital. I spend 3 days there. They ran every test they could think of related to my heart – EKG, EEG, ultrasound, stress tests, etc. They didn’t think they could make me to the stress test because I was so obese – I think my self-esteem also hit a low that day.  Too fat to take the test on a treadmill. The doctor was wonderful and he told the nurses they were full of it, and so he arranged for me to do the test on a recumbent bicycle hooked up to heart monitors. As I rode along they continued to increase the levels and I wasn’t even close to breaking a sweat and showed no signs of having a heart problem. They called the doctor in and I kept on riding and pushing my tired legs on and on while he continued to increase the resistance on the bike. “Are you sure you have no chest pain?” “Now?” “Well how about now?” Continuing to increase the resistance with each question. Finally, after what seemed like forever he stopped. I had taken the bike as far as it would go. He said now stand up. So I did and he started to laugh, one of those full belly laughs, and said that the last person he pushed that hard was the captain of the Women’s Ski team for Germany and when she stood up she passed out. No wonder he was laughing, my heart and oxygen uptake were stellar for a woman of 26 who was pushing 300 lbs. When he came in to talk to me before I was released to go home he said that I would never die of a heart attack as proven by my stress but I was at high risk for diabetes due to my weight.

A month later I ended up back in the hospital with the same symptoms. This time they knew it wasn’t my heart. The ER doctors did and EKG and an ultrasound, confirming again that it wasn’t my heart but said I had fatty deposits in my liver and recommended that I see a doctor he knew that specialized in helping obese patients lose weight. Before being released the most horrible doctor I have ever seen comes in pushes on my stomach, rants about my weight. “You know what is the problem with all you Americans – you are all fat. Fat, you just can’t stop putting the food into your face. And you keep on getting fatter and fatter. It’s acid reflux from being fat – lose some weight.” My response to him was rather colourful and tart leaving his interns laughing. He sent one of the interns back with a prescription to help with the reflux.

Something about the fat comment just stuck and I wanted to change things badly. I went to my family doctor on the recommendation of one of the doctors from my less than positive hospital visit and was set up with an obesity specialist who recommended the Volumetrics Diet plan. This plan was a low energy density diet. I found it extremely easy to follow and with regular gym visits I had lost 65 lbs in 6 months. The new slimmer me was happier and was in love with the new body.

I managed to keep all the weight off for a number of years. Then I moved back to Canada. The lifestyle here is really different. There were no bike rides to work every day and no walking to the grocery store. Really there was little walking at all. Still I managed to keep my weight stable but it was talking a lot of work to do so. I had changed my thyroid medication upon returning home to Canada because we didn’t have the same drugs here. I didn’t see the correlation at the time but combined with less exercise on a daily basis it made a huge difference in keeping the weight off.

Then one day after several moves, having a baby, finally getting my husband into the country and losing my job days after he arrived I cracked. Weight started creeping back on. My stress level was 1100% and I had gained about 25 lbs back. Eeeek! I decided to start seeing a Naturopath. We got my diet back on track I started exercising and took Rhodiola to help with my adrenal gland fatigue. However, the weight was just sticking to me. She recommended I get my thyroid levels rechecked. So I did and they were way off. I was so overactive. Yep you read that right overactive. My TSH level was extremely low. So I stopped taking Rhodiola and they changed my meds by 25mcg. Guess what happened??? I gained 15 lbs in a month and then when they increase my dose slightly and I still gained weight but at a slower rate. By the end of 2014 I had gained ever single pound I had lost while living in Germany back.

And that’s where I am today back at my heaviest with the added twist of having a bad back. That excess weight it still here. I have it. I have tried 4 diets. I can stick to them for a few weeks and maybe lose a pounds or two but not much. All my husband ends up with is a cranky wife. Now I have to be really honest -  I don’t eat terribly. I am gluten intolerant, I have a tonne of food sensitivities that keep me away from processed foods and I am allergic to peanuts and hazelnuts. I have kept my eating in check since I left Germany. I never wanted to gain this much weight. I wanted to actually get smaller but I couldn’t get any more off after I came back to Canada. Lately, I have given up on the whole diet thing and just have been eating. Not anything crazy and not binging cause it is not healthy but I tell you if I eat bad I automatically gain more weight. It only goes one way…on!

So today I am going to try this new alternate day fasting method. Happened across an article yesterday and I thought why the hell not. It has to be better than getting fatter. It is sure as hell better than gastric bypass or that new Swedish Aspire Assist. The later grosses me out so much.

So here we go…..