Dieting update, 5/9/2012

As I posted about recently, Mandy and I have been trying an unusual diet for the last 5+ weeks, a version of alternate-day fasting. I’ve been having some pretty good success with it, and haven’t had too much trouble sticking with it. Mandy, on the other hand, has been struggling. Her low-calorie days were too low for her, and she was going over her calorie goals a little more each week – and because she felt so starved on the low-calorie days, she was also over-doing it on the high-calorie days; the net result being that she wasn’t seeing any results, and didn’t feel good about it, or about her inability to stick to the goals. Starting today (I think – maybe next week?), she’s going back to simply trying to stay under her “maintain” level of daily calories, but she’s also going to try to start doing more exercising. (With Phoenix Comicon coming up, and the last weeks of the school year at hand, my expectation is that she’ll exercise more, but not as much as she’d like, until summer break.)

Alternatively, I’ve been having a reasonably good amount of success with it, and have felt like I could go to actually fasting or near-to-fasting on the low days. In fact, this morning when I got up, I weighed only 189 pounds; this is the closest I’ve been to my goal (188 is the maximum weight not considered overweight, by BMI, for my height) in the ~2.5 years since we started. I also seem to be at the lowest body fat percentage I’ve been since we started, holding steady for several days at about 16% (according to my Tanita scale), or about 30lbs of fat. Plus, two days in a row I managed a set of at least 10 pushups in a row – this is a major improvement, and the first time I’ve ever been able to do 10 pushups. This morning I very nearly managed to do two sets of 10 pushups in a row. Maybe next time. At this rate, I figure … by this time next year, perhaps I’ll reach that 100 pushups goal!

Oh, and with Mandy changing her plan, I’m changing mine, as well. I’m going to try actually fasting (or very near to it) on my alternate-day fasting plan. Based on my experiences so far with fasting, I’ll probably fast roughly 24 hours at each stretch, and have a light supper in the evening of the “fasting” days. I’ll probably come in at around 15% of my “maintain” calorie count those days (as opposed to the 50% I’ve been aiming for) and I’ll still be aiming (roughly) for 100% on the other days. I’m really close to one of my actual goals, of being 185lbs and 15% fat, which gives me a little margin between myself and “overweight”, though I’ll certainly be doing some more research in the next few weeks about how to redefine my goals for more general fitness, now that I’m within spitting distance of my original goals for more generally losing weight.

I’ll update again, when I see how so much fasting actually goes – both in terms of health benefits, and of the difficulty of living with it.

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Teel

Author, artist, romantic, insomniac, exorcist, creative visionary, lover, and all-around-crazy-person.

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