Thursday, December 4, 2014

Thursday

I am struggling mightily with the temptation to succumb to despair. Monday night I had crap sleep. Tuesday night I had crap sleep that was slightly less crappy than Monday. Last night was only barely within the definition of the word "sleep". I went to bed after 9:20, took a little while (not long, maybe 20 minutes) to fall asleep, and woke, bright-eyed, overheated and ready for a new day, at 12:12. Somewhere in the neighborhood of 3:30, I drifted off a little, then woke up about every half hour between then and the alarm going off at 5:30.

I don't know how long I can sustain this kind of thing. It's not like I can take a nap or anything; what I get out of this is real, nasty, sleep deprivation. With all its concomitant evils - stress hormones over growth hormones, the lack of energy creating hunger, and anything else that might come along that I can't think of just now. Not to mention that I'm commuting with RedBull on mornings like this - and I'm thinking that infusing that weird chemical cocktail can't be a good long-term strategy. Hence the struggles with despair.

I decided yesterday to reintroduce a bit of deliberate IF into my life, starting with between breakfast and dinner. I was successful; ate nothing from leaving home until getting to a restaurant - my first bite was steak, I think, and quite delicious. I then ate from then until about 9 pm, and have had nothing today but heavy cream in my tea. I'm aiming at getting to dinner today, and then I will go back to my normal eating patterns with one key exception - I am going to try very hard to stop snacking and instead eat in time boxes of 1 hour max, 2 or 3 meals per day. It seems that ad-lib eating results in obese mice, and time-restricted feeding, even with intervals where ad-lib eating is permitted (e.g., on weekends), results in lean and fit mice. I know I'm not a mouse, but that seems to be fairly compelling. Certainly worth a try, anyway. And if it provides any short-term results, I'll do an IF day say, every couple of weeks. I don't plan on going into the "no breakfast or lunch" pattern on a daily basis as I sort of did about 2 years ago.

Tomorrow should be interesting, being work from home day, where I have free access to snack foods. I will aim to eat "lunch" (in addition to breakfast) and see what transpires.

I haven't added dinner to yesterday in my log yet, so I don't know how it shook out, but I hit Small ketosis at bedtime and lost 0.2 pounds overnight - 154.6 again this morning.

I think I'll stop now, while I'm ahead of the typos - a lot of backspacing going on this morning.

No comments:

Post a Comment