I’m trying a new approach to eating, which I’m calling “fast & graze” and it works like this: I split the day into approximately half, 12 hours each. For the fasting part, which also includes the sleeping part of my day, I don’t eat anything. This means I fast for 12 hours. Drinking water is fine, even encouraged. For the other half, the grazing half of my day, I’ll eat many small meals, five to seven, in fact. Or maybe, it’s just a lot of snacking.
With the help of my handy calorie counter app on my phone, I figured that, as a very large person, I’ll lose weight if I eat 2,200 calories a day. So, if I have two meals of 500 calories or less (total: 1,000 calories) and three meals of 400 calories or less (total: 1,200 calories) I should come in pretty close to 2,200 calories. I could also split some of the 400 calorie meals into two 200-calorie snacks. It turns out that 200 calories is usually one or two servings of pretty much anything, according to the nutrition labels. A bowl of cereal with milk, two eggs, a Snickers bar, a bag of chips, and so forth, all 200 calories or less. By the same token, I could combine a 500 calorie meal and a 200 calorie snack for 700 calories, that’s a pretty satisfying meal!
The idea is behind this is simple: first, I don’t want to go hungry. When I get hungry, I overeat. So, if I eat frequently, I won’t get hungry, and I won’t tend to overeat. Also, when I do sit down for a meal I’m going to keep telling myself to stop eating after the first serving, because if I’m still hungry in an hour, I can eat more. Finally, I’m going to not eat for about half the day, which gives my body a chance to take a break from dealing with food. That’s a good time to drink a lot of water, too.
I’m basically training my body to expect smaller portions. Another advantage for me is that eating less at each meal (or snack) makes it much easier to log what I ate. If I eat a big meal, logging everything in my phone, even with the handy barcode reader, becomes a real chore. If I only eat two or three things at a time, then it’s quite easy to log them all, and quickly.
The toughest meal for me is dinner. That’s when I usually eat with other people: either we all sit down as a family and eat together, or we sometimes eat out. It’s also the time I eat too much. At the end of the day, my willpower is at a low ebb, and it’s easy to go overboard and overdo it at the table.
In fact, that’s exactly what happened last night. That of course was when I exceeded my calorie goals for the day. I was on track leading up to dinner, but there were onion rings, and I really love onion rings! I didn’t have too many, as it turns out, and I did a better job of eating a modest meal than I usually do, but I still ate more than 500 calories. So I’m going to work on this, and see how it goes for a week.
I started this Saturday, after a big, healthy breakfast (spinach omelet with black beans). Well, I thought about it, but there was that party, and all the margeritas. Sunday, I tried again, and snacked on nuts throughout the afternoon, which showed me I could “graze” and keep the hunger at bay. Monday, I really got going: I started with a small breakfast, had a modest lunch, and a couple of snacks in the afternoon, and then did a pretty good job of not overeating at dinner.
So, I’ll see how it goes. If this just makes tracking what I eat easier, it’s going to help, because I always eat better (healthier food, fewer calories) when I track everything I eat. It’s so easy now, with the phone app, there’s really no reason not to do it. That way, I can really eat whatever I want. For example, if I want some ice cream, I can have some ice cream. I’ll just get a small (3/4 cup = 200 calories) instead of the large (1.5 cups = 400 calories) and skip the cone. As long as I’m honest about what I eat, and record it, I’ll do fine. It’s so much easier when I just have to enter a few items, instead of six or eight.
Tuesday, October 23, 2012
Weight: 287.4
Body Fat: 34.5%
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