I wrote this post originally in OMAD which allows link submissions. Here's the album of pictures that was in the original submission.
2 oz cooked ground sausage
7.5 oz braised skin on chicken
1 oz mushrooms
3.5 oz Bell peppers
3.3 oz bratwurst
2 eggs over hard
2 oz 50/50 blend
1 oz carrot
1.3 oz tomato
1.4 oz Ken's lite blue cheese dressing
8.5 oz strawberries
The chicken was the last of a batch of sous vide thighs that I tried to crisp up in the pan. The chicken was going to overcook if I crisped up the skin though, so it came out of the pan not very crispy. The sausage was just flattened and browned in a pan. In the sausage fat, I browned some mushrooms and bell peppers. Then I added the some of the chicken liquid from the sous vide bag and reduced it to a sauce for the vegetables. The rest of the liquid was used to make a similar sauce for the brat, which I browned in a little bit of vegetable oil. The egg was fried over hard in a little bit of vegetable oil.
The salad was just packaged 50/50 blend with carrots, tomatoes, and bell peppers with blue cheese dressing.
The strawberries are strawberries.
I'm about a month into my diet of OMAD/18:6. Some days I only eat one big meal, other days I eat a small "breakfast" in the late afternoon and follow it up by a larger "dinner" around 9. It just depends on what I'm doing and how much work I feel like putting into cooking that day.
I flew to my current city in November 2019 after separating from the Navy. I was at my peak weight of 260 lbs. My depression and anxiety were at their worst. I was also working through a few back/hip/knee injuries that had not been treated until January. I was crashing on a friend's couch until November to save rent money so I didn't cook a lot. In December I was staying on my sister's spare bed, but we cooked together a good amount. Through the holidays I traveled to visit family and ate out more than I had home cooked meals. During that time my weight was unchanged until I moved into my own apartment and started IF.
I started IF in general on Jan. 10th. I was at 255 lbs. Today I am at 240 lbs (and have been for a few days).
In the months of September, October, and November, I spent over $2000 on restaurants, takeout, and uber eats. In the month of December, I spent $560. In the month of January I spent $150, and so far in the month of February I've spent $25.
My activity was moderate, but I didn't do anything more intense than walking, very slow jogging, and the daily stretches my physical therapist instructed me to do. I walked at least 1 mile on over 90% of days, and most days I walked about 2 miles. I jogged for about a half a mile 5 or 6 times.
I intentionally did not track my calories when I started IF. I wanted to focus on consistently eating more home prepared meals and doing my best to stick to my fasting hours. My goal for volume of food was simply to eat just enough to not feel hungry at the end of my feeding window.
Once I was confident in my ability to do that, I started estimating my calories every day, but still not setting any goal of daily calories. That estimation was just quick mental math on packages, quick estimation of weights and volumes, and googling calorie counts for generic equivalents.
During that time frame I estimated that I was eating about 2500 calories a day. Based on my weight and activity level (recorded by a samsung smartwatch and my google fit app synced together with an app called Health Sync), during that time I burned an averaged of about 2500 calories a day. I'm not surprised that they were the same because of my food volume goal. I started counting calories more precisely with a kitchen scale 5 days ago. I've eaten an average of 2000 calories since then, but it definitely wasn't consistent. Some days I was eating closer to 1700, some days I was eating closer to 2400. I still haven't set a daily calorie goal, and I am still eating just enough to not feel hungry.
Now that we got all the numbers out of the way, I guess you could say I've seen an amazing amount of progress. I never thought I would see these kinds of changes in such a short amount of time. IF has allowed me to tolerate hunger instead of avoiding it at all costs. It's much easier to focus on what you eat when you only have to expend that focus one or two times a day.
I've saved thousands of dollars on food, which is extremely important because my VA disability claim hasn't been reviewed yet and it might be a while before I can start school and get the GI bill income. I've saved myself so much headache worrying about money. While I was spending $2500 in 4 months on food, I was too anxious to get my budget updated because I knew the number was going to be big. It's only by looking back through debit card transaction history that I was able to calculate those numbers. These days my budget has been updated since early Jan and that means I'm able to know for sure how many months I have of living expenses saved up instead of guessing.
I think the reason why I was eating less when I started estimating my food intake was because I was measuring it. I view this as a self-growth version of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. Some days I ate more than enough to "just feel not hungry". More often than not, those nights were the nights that I did some rough math in my head, and coming to the conclusion that "yeah, I have enough calories left in my day to eat that." (As an aside, I wanted to point out that the line of thinking I just described should have been viewed as a failure! My goal was to eat until I wasn't hungry, not eat until I reached an arbitrary number of calories. I should have caught myself deviating from my goals and sticking to them.)
As I gradually became more and more accurate with my estimations, and later with my kitchen scale, I had a lot less uncertainty about my eating trends, and I made more educated eating decisions. By not setting a calorie goal I allowed myself let my appetite dictate my food intake.
I do want to say that not everyone should expect the results that I have had. I'm fortunate enough to have medical care that I don't have to pay for. Not everyone in the US can afford to get their injuries looked at by a physical therapist. I also went to culinary school when I was much younger, so I am an adept home cook. That also means that I already owned all the kitchen equipment I would ever need. Not everyone in a similar situation could afford to buy all the kitchenware that I own (which is a lot). Lastly I can afford a cool smart watch to help me be fairly accurate with my activity tracking with very little effort. Not everyone can afford that.
However I wrote this wall of text up because I think many of you out there can learn something from it. I look forward to learning more and sharing what I've learned.
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source https://www.reddit.com/r/loseit/comments/f7qafx/i_documented_what_i_learned_in_the_last_42_days/
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