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Situation
With a 10-month old baby and a changed living situation (I now live with baby and his mom), I find myself heavier than when I first started using this app in March of 2019, after having reached my goal weight in June of 2019. No longer living alone, I can't limit what food comes into the house, because I'm not the only one eating it or deciding what to stock. In particular, I can't keep treats away, and that's part of what's derailed me. I have to recommit to healthy eating and rely on my own willpower or other techniques, which is harder when the cupboards always have something quick and tantalizing in store. Baby's mom can eat anything she wants and she just breastfeeds it away.
Plan
I'm going to lose weight again. (I've already started — I was up to 205 and dropped a few lbs before starting to record my daily weight outside this app, and dropped a couple more before retroactively inputting my first couple of weeks of weigh-ins here.) However, this time around, I refuse to devote any time or energy to weighing and measuring food, counting calories, and studiously keeping macros in line, even though that approach was very successful while it lasted, and for me, very necessary the first time around. In the same vein, I also want to find a more sustainable method of eating well and keeping weight off, because closely counting calories is too intensive for me to keep up.
So this time around, I'm going to proceed by approximation, relying on the feel I developed from going through the process once already. I still want to have a few-hundred-calorie daily deficit, more or less, and I know approximately what that looks like only because I've counted diligently in the past. However, this new method is bound to be imprecise, and without something more, for me it's even bound to utterly fail. It's too easy to relax and have a little extra here and there if I don't really know if I've hit my limit, and it's also easy to kid myself and say that I'll make up for it the next day.
To address this problem, I've made an additional change. I'm approximating for most of the week, but on one day every week I'm also doing a 36-hour fast — Sunday, most weeks, but if there's a family dinner or other social event with a meal on Sunday, then Saturday or Monday. A Sunday fast means starting my fast at the end of supper (or after an after-supper beer) on Saturday, and then (apart from taking a bit of fiber on Sunday morning) consuming nothing but water, coffee, and tea until breakfast ("break fast" — it's even embedded in our language) on Monday.
I've done a lot of reading on short-term fasting recently, and what evidence there is suggests that in addition to being a straightforward way to reduce calorie intake, it's also beneficial for "resetting" the body's insulin production and response (to summarize in very brief form), among other things.
If the method I've set out above works for me, I'll consider keeping up the practice of fasting one day per week whenever I'm above my target weight. This is not meant to be a license to overindulge or eat unmindfully for the rest of the week, but I think it will be a useful tool, and probably a healthy one.
I'm recording my weight in the same bullet journal that I now organize my life with, so I may not check in here every day. However, I want to have a clear graph of my progress to show to interested friends (and not the private, messy, hand-drawn one in my journal, which also tracks my sleep etc.), and I thought it might also be interesting for a few people in the FatSecret community to see if my "second" weight-loss journey is successful, so I'll enter a batch of daily weights every week on or after my fasting day if I haven't added them by then. (Yesterday we had Thanksgiving dinner, so my fasting day is today.)
Consumption
For anyone curious as to how I'm eating for this go-round, here's a summary. I have three meals a day, and one or two small snacks in between. I don't snack after supper (most days!). Most importantly, I try to make sure I get a decent amount of protein at every meal, from one or two sources (say a tin of sardines, Greek yogurt [2%], a piece of chicken [with skin], tofu, etc.). I also try to have some vegetables, ideally at every meal, but at least at one meal every day, and usually at two. I eat a modest amount of fruit, and I have a few small slices of cheese throughout the day on most days. I sometimes eat potatoes (regular or sweet), quinoa, or brown rice. I try to stay away from other grains and starches for the most part, especially in the form of refined carbs, but I eat a piece of rye Wasa bread from time to time. I also have the occasional bowl of Rice Krispies or Cheerios with unsweetened almond milk, and/or eat a slice of regular multigrain bread every now and then (mostly because it's there), but perhaps only once or twice a week. A couple of days a week I might have a bit of jam, usually just on a spoon. Every day or so I have a small handful of almonds or a little trail mix. In addition to water I drink coffee and tea, and occasionally kefir. On most days I have a small glass of almond milk. I used to drink kombucha but I don't keep it around anymore and my body probably doesn't miss the few extra calories or whatever nutritional benefits it's supposed to have, which I can probably get from sauerkraut, kefir, yogurt, and cheese. Every week or two I'll have a beer, and at social dinners (rare in the time of covid-19) I'll have a glass of wine if it's offered. I prefer food seasoned without sauces, but I'll sauté vegetables in a little olive oil, and occasionally I'll eat margarine or butter. That's it in a nutshell.
Progress
I'm down about 3 pounds in the past couple of weeks (depending on the day, I've been down as much as 5 pounds during that time [edit: 6.2 pounds down from my recorded starting weight after my second weekly fast]). I've already fallen off the wagon a couple of times, when I've been really tired from work and/or we've ordered in, but so far I've decided not to worry too much about it, especially now that a weekly fast is part of the routine — which, again, isn't an excuse to abandon mindfulness. A couple of evening indulgences in a row shot my weight up a few pounds a week and a half ago, probably from filling up my glycogen stores and causing my body to take up the water weight that goes along with that. My first fast reversed that gain, and we'll see tomorrow if my second fast has compensated for my inability to hold back when we ordered takeout this past week, and for the Thanksgiving dinner that we had yesterday.
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