This post is long. I have learned so much on this topic, and I feel that God wants me to share this for your health and well being too! There will be more to come including some pictures. But here is how this recent journey began.
I weaned my son from nursing when he was about two years and three months old. At that point, I had lost all of the 50+lbs of baby weight. Little Man has egg allergies and I was avoiding eggs along with him. This meant that my breakfasts went from eggs and veggies to a yogurt parfait or a piece of sausage, or fruit and almond butter. (READ: less protein!) Our church was doing a 21 day fast and I used this as a chance to try a way of eating which I had read about that required smaller portions of protein (3oz instead of my usual 4-8oz at a meal). You can imagine that I was snacking like a pregnant lady, but I wasn't pregnant or nursing any more. YIKES!
Even after this restricted protein thing, my sleep got worse. and worse. I started waking during the night for two or three hours unable to fall back asleep. Then I started waking up hungry at 12am, 3am, ... and I mean really hungry. I would eat a piece of cheese, still be hungry, eat some sliced turkey, some sourdough bread, and butter, and finally feel satiated. Usually this midnight snack/meal would help me fall back asleep. But soon that stopped working. So I was up in the wee hours of morning, eating, and not sleeping. I gained 10lbs and the weight kept coming. If you're not aware, eating more and sleeping less is a sure recipe for extra body fat! HAHA
Something had to give. I was desperate.
Nutritionists traditionally view lack of sleep as a stress-related issue, or a calorie deprivation, maybe lack of carbs. And I have been studying all of this and tearing through my textbooks for help for my sleep problem. Then I found this post about the Leptin Reset Diet by one of my favorite researchers, Chris Masterjohn. Leptin is a signaling hormone that tells the body when it is hungry. It is hyperactive in overweight people and those with insulin resistance, and it is "under control" in those who have healthy blood sugar levels. The Leptin Reset Diet is as follows:
1. wake up at the same time each day and within a 1/2 hour, eat a keto-style breakfast with about 30-50 grams of protein, and less than 20 grams of carbs.
2. wait 4-6 hours before eating again. eat a good lunch
3. wait another 4-6 hours and eat a good dinner
4. Finish dinner at least 3 hours before sleeping (this is 7pm for me)
5. No snacking, even after dinner, even drinks with calories.
(For more information, check out Jack Kruse's website, but be warned, he is really crass and mean in his writing, but really helpful at the same time.)
I did this for a few days and here's what I learned:
1. I thrived eating more protein.
Active people, and people with any kind of muscle need more protein than others. So 3 oz of protein may be fine for someone my weight, but not with my activity level or muscle situation (haha if you know me, you know I'm not particularly buff, but let's just say I work out, so it's something!)
2. I really prefer to eat larger meals and not snacking.
This had a great blood sugar balancing effect for me. It helped my body relearn when it was hungry and when it was full. So good. It is true, what they say, that no snack is healthy. Unless your snack is hard boiled eggs or beef strips.
3. It is really hard to eat three meals, all spaced by 5 hours. e.g. wake up at 7am. Eat breakfast at 7:30, finish at 8am +5 hours=1pm, finish lunch at 1:30 +5 hours = 6:30. This works, but I found that my 50 grams of protein at breakfast, which is like 4 eggs and two pieces of sausage! would hold me over for longer, I wouldn't be hungry till even later. This is when I started thinking about intermittent fasting.
4. Oh yes! And I started sleeping again! PRAISE GOD! See #2 . blood sugar guys!!! see #1 blood sugar control starts with adequate protein. This doesn't mean you need to drink protein powder throughout the day, but if you are like me, an active female about 5'8", then 90-100 grams is great for a day. If intermittent fasting, 60 grams is necessary.
You're probably wondering why this post was titled Intermittent Fasting (IF), since I was anything but fasting. Yes, you're right. But here's the secret. To start intermittent fasting, and burning fat stores for energy, you need to get your body used to going longer between meals. I was snacking every 3 hours even through the night! Something needed to adjust for me to be able to go 12 or 20 hours without food. And it did! Some people do the Keto diet to get their body into this fat adaptation. That's great if you like that!
So I was doing this Leptin Reset Diet thing, starting June 15, for a couple of weeks, and I was slowly building the number of hours that I fasted at night. Most nights I fasted 8-12 hours. This was mostly because I ate dinner early and breakfast late. Then when I was up to 14 hours of fasting, I had a yucky hot dog at a church picnic. I love my church, and there are a lot of health-minded people there, but Nathan's hot dogs just don't agree with my tummy. The next day, I didn't want to eat breakfast. So I didn't eat. Then I didn't really feel like lunch. So I didn't have lunch either. I fasted for 19 hours. 19 hours, guys!!! It was amazing. I felt so empowered. I wasn't at the beck-and-call of a roller-coaster blood sugar. I didn't need to keep almond butter and celery at my desk all day. I could sleep. I was sold. Intermittent Fasting was on. That was July 2. Two days before my birthday.
I felt so empowered by the idea of not having to eat for 19 hours, that I knew I could keep doing this. I became fixated on the amazing benefits of fasting. My husband will tell you that I tend be "like a dog with a bone" with nutritional topics. The research related to this has been growing astronomically in the last eight or so years. It is now undeniable that IF has potential to help almost every chronic ailment including auto-immune diseases, and especially cancer. While I'd love to enumerate more, right now I want to focus on my personal journey here. Before doing IF, I had never dieted in the sense of restricting calories, because I was always concerned about getting enough nutrients. And this is so important. But here's the deal: our fat stores toxins as well as nutrients. SO if you eat crap and get fat, then your body will have to detox while you loose weight. If you eat healthy and get fat, you will still detox while you loose weight, but your fat should (hypothetically) have some good nutrients in it, to fuel you while you're fasting. SO COOL, huh?
What do you mean detox???
Detoxing is something our bodies just do in order to get rid of toxins. Our livers have enzymes, they bind to yucky things in the blood and get them out, or they bind to them and store them in the liver and in fat cells (this is oversimplified). So you don't need to do a juice cleanse to detox. But you can help your body be awesome at detoxing by eating a detoxification supportive diet, exercising frequently and giving me a call to learn about specific detoxifying therapies and supplements ;)
Exercising? Did you exercise while doing IF?
Yes, I did, but not as hard as I was exercising while I was gaining weight! Shocking, right? But what IF seeks to do is to tap into fat stores for energy, it doesn't necessarily require you to have a super intense workout. Let me give you an example of lower intensity fat burning: I don't eat breakfast, instead, I fold laundry while Little Man eats his sausage and oatmeal. I take Little Man to school, come back and do some work at my standing desk, drink water and maybe herbal natural tea. And then I start to get bored and think about food. I go for a walk and listen to a sermon or worship music. A walk, y'all. Not sprints, not HIIT or a cycle class, just a walk. But I'm burning major calories. I didn't eat yet, and it's 2pm now! The walk really staves off my hunger. and around 4pm, I'm like, yeah, I am hungry now. I drink some bone broth with butter, or eat a green salad with a hard boiled egg, and I'm satiated. Then I have dinner at 6:30pm.
Dinner is like a feast though. Here's a typical menu for me when I only have one meal a day:
That kind of meal is well balanced, has adequate carbohydrate to keep your sex hormones going, and adequate fat to keep you burning stored fat, or ketones, through the night.
A note about minerals:
When I first started IF, I would get light-headed sometimes. I lacked minerals! Some people swear by snake juice, but here you go. Just buy some Celtic sea salt- that has all the good sea minerals in it, and buy some potassium. Putting a pinch of each in my glass of water in the morning worked wonders and allowed me to increase my exercise while fasting. If you're not already using Celtic sea salt in your kitchen, then no better time to start. You don't need to fast to reap the benefits of minerals!
A cool book on Intermittent Fasting from a Christian perspective, is Waist Away, written by Virginia Beach local, Chantelle Ray. I love how she writes about fasting, nutrition and gluttony and what the Bible says about feeding our bodies. Great stuff!
If you want to see pictures of me over this journey, they are in a separate post.
I also wrote about my experience as a female doing IF, yes, I think it's just a little different for us girls.
I weaned my son from nursing when he was about two years and three months old. At that point, I had lost all of the 50+lbs of baby weight. Little Man has egg allergies and I was avoiding eggs along with him. This meant that my breakfasts went from eggs and veggies to a yogurt parfait or a piece of sausage, or fruit and almond butter. (READ: less protein!) Our church was doing a 21 day fast and I used this as a chance to try a way of eating which I had read about that required smaller portions of protein (3oz instead of my usual 4-8oz at a meal). You can imagine that I was snacking like a pregnant lady, but I wasn't pregnant or nursing any more. YIKES!
Even after this restricted protein thing, my sleep got worse. and worse. I started waking during the night for two or three hours unable to fall back asleep. Then I started waking up hungry at 12am, 3am, ... and I mean really hungry. I would eat a piece of cheese, still be hungry, eat some sliced turkey, some sourdough bread, and butter, and finally feel satiated. Usually this midnight snack/meal would help me fall back asleep. But soon that stopped working. So I was up in the wee hours of morning, eating, and not sleeping. I gained 10lbs and the weight kept coming. If you're not aware, eating more and sleeping less is a sure recipe for extra body fat! HAHA
Something had to give. I was desperate.
Nutritionists traditionally view lack of sleep as a stress-related issue, or a calorie deprivation, maybe lack of carbs. And I have been studying all of this and tearing through my textbooks for help for my sleep problem. Then I found this post about the Leptin Reset Diet by one of my favorite researchers, Chris Masterjohn. Leptin is a signaling hormone that tells the body when it is hungry. It is hyperactive in overweight people and those with insulin resistance, and it is "under control" in those who have healthy blood sugar levels. The Leptin Reset Diet is as follows:
1. wake up at the same time each day and within a 1/2 hour, eat a keto-style breakfast with about 30-50 grams of protein, and less than 20 grams of carbs.
2. wait 4-6 hours before eating again. eat a good lunch
3. wait another 4-6 hours and eat a good dinner
4. Finish dinner at least 3 hours before sleeping (this is 7pm for me)
5. No snacking, even after dinner, even drinks with calories.
(For more information, check out Jack Kruse's website, but be warned, he is really crass and mean in his writing, but really helpful at the same time.)
I did this for a few days and here's what I learned:
1. I thrived eating more protein.
Active people, and people with any kind of muscle need more protein than others. So 3 oz of protein may be fine for someone my weight, but not with my activity level or muscle situation (haha if you know me, you know I'm not particularly buff, but let's just say I work out, so it's something!)
2. I really prefer to eat larger meals and not snacking.
This had a great blood sugar balancing effect for me. It helped my body relearn when it was hungry and when it was full. So good. It is true, what they say, that no snack is healthy. Unless your snack is hard boiled eggs or beef strips.
3. It is really hard to eat three meals, all spaced by 5 hours. e.g. wake up at 7am. Eat breakfast at 7:30, finish at 8am +5 hours=1pm, finish lunch at 1:30 +5 hours = 6:30. This works, but I found that my 50 grams of protein at breakfast, which is like 4 eggs and two pieces of sausage! would hold me over for longer, I wouldn't be hungry till even later. This is when I started thinking about intermittent fasting.
4. Oh yes! And I started sleeping again! PRAISE GOD! See #2 . blood sugar guys!!! see #1 blood sugar control starts with adequate protein. This doesn't mean you need to drink protein powder throughout the day, but if you are like me, an active female about 5'8", then 90-100 grams is great for a day. If intermittent fasting, 60 grams is necessary.
You're probably wondering why this post was titled Intermittent Fasting (IF), since I was anything but fasting. Yes, you're right. But here's the secret. To start intermittent fasting, and burning fat stores for energy, you need to get your body used to going longer between meals. I was snacking every 3 hours even through the night! Something needed to adjust for me to be able to go 12 or 20 hours without food. And it did! Some people do the Keto diet to get their body into this fat adaptation. That's great if you like that!
So I was doing this Leptin Reset Diet thing, starting June 15, for a couple of weeks, and I was slowly building the number of hours that I fasted at night. Most nights I fasted 8-12 hours. This was mostly because I ate dinner early and breakfast late. Then when I was up to 14 hours of fasting, I had a yucky hot dog at a church picnic. I love my church, and there are a lot of health-minded people there, but Nathan's hot dogs just don't agree with my tummy. The next day, I didn't want to eat breakfast. So I didn't eat. Then I didn't really feel like lunch. So I didn't have lunch either. I fasted for 19 hours. 19 hours, guys!!! It was amazing. I felt so empowered. I wasn't at the beck-and-call of a roller-coaster blood sugar. I didn't need to keep almond butter and celery at my desk all day. I could sleep. I was sold. Intermittent Fasting was on. That was July 2. Two days before my birthday.
I felt so empowered by the idea of not having to eat for 19 hours, that I knew I could keep doing this. I became fixated on the amazing benefits of fasting. My husband will tell you that I tend be "like a dog with a bone" with nutritional topics. The research related to this has been growing astronomically in the last eight or so years. It is now undeniable that IF has potential to help almost every chronic ailment including auto-immune diseases, and especially cancer. While I'd love to enumerate more, right now I want to focus on my personal journey here. Before doing IF, I had never dieted in the sense of restricting calories, because I was always concerned about getting enough nutrients. And this is so important. But here's the deal: our fat stores toxins as well as nutrients. SO if you eat crap and get fat, then your body will have to detox while you loose weight. If you eat healthy and get fat, you will still detox while you loose weight, but your fat should (hypothetically) have some good nutrients in it, to fuel you while you're fasting. SO COOL, huh?
What do you mean detox???
Detoxing is something our bodies just do in order to get rid of toxins. Our livers have enzymes, they bind to yucky things in the blood and get them out, or they bind to them and store them in the liver and in fat cells (this is oversimplified). So you don't need to do a juice cleanse to detox. But you can help your body be awesome at detoxing by eating a detoxification supportive diet, exercising frequently and giving me a call to learn about specific detoxifying therapies and supplements ;)
Exercising? Did you exercise while doing IF?
Yes, I did, but not as hard as I was exercising while I was gaining weight! Shocking, right? But what IF seeks to do is to tap into fat stores for energy, it doesn't necessarily require you to have a super intense workout. Let me give you an example of lower intensity fat burning: I don't eat breakfast, instead, I fold laundry while Little Man eats his sausage and oatmeal. I take Little Man to school, come back and do some work at my standing desk, drink water and maybe herbal natural tea. And then I start to get bored and think about food. I go for a walk and listen to a sermon or worship music. A walk, y'all. Not sprints, not HIIT or a cycle class, just a walk. But I'm burning major calories. I didn't eat yet, and it's 2pm now! The walk really staves off my hunger. and around 4pm, I'm like, yeah, I am hungry now. I drink some bone broth with butter, or eat a green salad with a hard boiled egg, and I'm satiated. Then I have dinner at 6:30pm.
Dinner is like a feast though. Here's a typical menu for me when I only have one meal a day:
- 1/2 lb of grass-fed ground beef (85% lean), maybe with a fried egg on top or avocado
- 1/2 plate of cooked low-carb veggies like cauliflower or greens with plenty of healthy fat like coconut oil, ghee, butter, ...
- 1/2-1 cup of complex carbohydrate like a properly prepared whole grain (quinoa, brown rice), or sweet potato, with at least 2 tbs of butter or coconut oil
- sauerkraut
That kind of meal is well balanced, has adequate carbohydrate to keep your sex hormones going, and adequate fat to keep you burning stored fat, or ketones, through the night.
A note about minerals:
When I first started IF, I would get light-headed sometimes. I lacked minerals! Some people swear by snake juice, but here you go. Just buy some Celtic sea salt- that has all the good sea minerals in it, and buy some potassium. Putting a pinch of each in my glass of water in the morning worked wonders and allowed me to increase my exercise while fasting. If you're not already using Celtic sea salt in your kitchen, then no better time to start. You don't need to fast to reap the benefits of minerals!
A cool book on Intermittent Fasting from a Christian perspective, is Waist Away, written by Virginia Beach local, Chantelle Ray. I love how she writes about fasting, nutrition and gluttony and what the Bible says about feeding our bodies. Great stuff!
If you want to see pictures of me over this journey, they are in a separate post.
I also wrote about my experience as a female doing IF, yes, I think it's just a little different for us girls.
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