Eight Weeks Of Alternate Day Fasting

Any of my regular readers NOT interested in alternate day fasting, will do well to give this a miss as it will bore the pants off you...

Well, believe it or not I'm still sticking with it. My most oft uttered words now are no longer 'who put that there?', but ... 'I'm a good girl I am'. This is my new mantra and is repeated throughout my down days when I've either been crunching on salad (bored with that now), ploughing my way through a delicious 'stir-fry' or chewing on kale which seems to have all the properties of green chewing gum!

I still feel great, my energy levels are way up there where they used to be when I was much younger. I'd originally put my sluggishness down to getting older (any excuse), but now I know - and will admit - the truth ... I was just too fat.

I've decided that when I reach the weight I want - which won't be ridiculously low as I really don't have the frame for it - I'll continue doing the fasting but only one or two days a week. This is what I consider a good way to maintain my weight and should also keep the other health benefits that this lifestyle has promised.

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Yes, about those health benefits ... I'd read about asthma, diabetes, heart disease, alzheimer's, cholesterol etc. But what I'd not come across was stomach problems. It seems odd that I've missed it as I thought I'd have latched onto that one straight away.

All my friends know that I've suffered with an over-acid stomach for donkeys years. I'm always sucking or munching on a fruit flavoured antacid tablet. I've always had pockets full of them and been in a total panic if I think I've forgotten them.

I still carry them with me out of habit, but I haven't needed a single tablet in four weeks ... not one! I usually needed a minimum of four or five a day. AND we had pepperoni pizza the other night - guaranteed to put my stomach in a hyper-fizz ... nothing.

I hadn't noticed that I hadn't needed over-acid stomach remedies ... well you don't, do you. I always empty my pockets onto the dressing table before placing shorts/cropped trousers/jeans/fleeces in the wash - this theoretically means I don't wash tissues, chewing gum or antacids with my clothes. In actuality, something from the aforementioned list gets washed almost every week, leaving interesting stains or shredded, fluffy paper - I then restock my pockets from this pile every day but gradually realised that the same packets were coming back unused.

I will of course write in the future if my apparent 'stomach cure' changes. My intention is to be scrupulously honest (as ever) about this 'diet' as I know that my blog - and I assume it's the same for everyone else blogging about this subject - has elicited some interest from certain medical and scientific reasearch establishments because we're all basically guinea pigs.

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When I embarked on this lifestyle choice, I knew I'd be able to stick with it (for now) because:

1. I work at home.
2. I have will power.
3. I bought the dress I want to wear for my wedding years ago when I was slimmer and I love it.
4. Writing about it publicly is a great incentive, my diets are usually sneaky so I don't look daft when I fail.

Probably point 1 is the most important factor to me. Going out to work doing this 'diet' requires a lot of forward planning and understanding workmates. One of my friends who started ADF keeps coming a cropper because even her husband makes fun of her and deliberately eats yummy food that she loves - in a way that would try the patience of a saint ... or guarantee his swift demise. I've now had a quiet word with him and he's promised to stop being so damned annoying.

Even though I work at home - or the tin hut - and so don't need to think of what to eat at work, I've started to make my soup in batches on a Sunday afternoon, instead of on the mornings of my down day. This has stopped me wanting to eat it straight away and becoming over-souped. I make enough for six days weighing and chopping the vegetables of my choice, cook them either in the slow cooker at home or the oven at the tin hut (caravan near Skegness for those who don't know). When it's cooled I blend half of it to make it nice and thick.

Then I freeze most of it in tubs with added cooked chicken style quorn and soaked and boiled exotic (Morrisons) beans to give it substance. I now have lots of different flavoured soups (chilli, korma, garlic, herb) and a variety of vegetables - yum yum - with a maximum of 250 calories in each huge tub. This does NOT mean I have soup every down day, it's just there in case I haven't got anything in to dry stir fry or for when I get fed up of crunching through salads, oh yeah ... and sick of the sight of tinned tomatoes.

Oh, didn't I mention my weight loss? Well up to now I've lost 24lb ...

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1. Me and Alternate Day Fasting
2. Me and Alternate Day Fasting ... Three Weeks On
3. Five Weeks of Alternate Day Fasting
4. Eight Weeks of Alternate Day Fasting
5. Ten Weeks of Alternate Day Fasting
6. Alternate Day Fasting Three Months On
7. Alternate Day Fasting in Winter
8. Alternate Day Fasting Over Christmas
9. Me and Zumba
10. Saying Goodbye To My Curves 
11. Eight Months Of Alternate Day Fasting And Me
12. Growing Up 
13. A Year Of Alternate Day Fasting 
14. 60 Pounds Of Blubber - Vanished
15. The Perils of Alternate Day Fasting 
16. Mr Grumpy Is Losing It
17. Mr Grumpy Has Lost It
18. Fasting For Maintenance
19. Tweaking Maintenance
20. Weight Gain 
21. Still Maintaining
22. Four Years Of Intermittent Fasting

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