I have been Intermittent Fasting 60-70% of the time since last summer. While I wasn’t religious about it, I did find that it was something useful for me.
Honestly, fasting is a discipline that I think is very important. It’s something that we do in my faith in order to focus on something other than food and comfort, learn self denial, and institute discipline in our lives.
I think fasting is an important practice to incorporate because our current society teaches people to use food as comfort, distraction, self-medication, and also as a measure of virtue.
Fasting allows you to examine your relationship with food and it allows you to experience hunger.
Why do we need to experience hunger?
As Geneen Roth says, if you don’t know what it is like to feel hunger, then you won’t know what it is feel satisfied. You’ll think being satisfied means being stuffed to the gills and so you’ll chronically overeat.
Many of us don’t allow ourselves to feel hungry because it is so uncomfortable and because food makes us feel good.
When it’s time to change…
Lately I have been feeling low energy. I haven’t had the mojo for my workouts and my daily life. I felt like I have been dragging. The real clue was when I noticed myself snacking far too much in the afternoon.
I had the sneaking suspicion that I was underfed needed to eat more and so I decided to stop the intermittent fasting and go back to eating Breakfast in the Morning. I immediately felt a difference in my energy levels and my snacking stopped.
I believe that like everything else in nature we have cycles and that is different for everyone depending on where they are.
Depending on your convictions (See Disclaimer below) There are times when your body may require more animal protein and then there are cycles where you may need a more plant based diet.
Disclaimer: If you’re a proud vegan, vegetarian, keto, or whatever, then this doesn’t apply to you. Keep doing whatever it is that you’re called to.
The point is that you need to learn to listen to your body and honor her when she tells you that it’s time for change.
I am getting ready to start a new training program. It’s another Nicole Wilkins challenge and I am really excited about it because it’s one that I’ve wanted to do for a while but she didn’t offer it last year. It’s the 45 Day Buns N Guns challenge!!
It’s true that with any Nicole Wilkins challenges I need to be well fed in order to be able to keep up with the intense workouts and recovery in the form of food and rest is also important. So for this particular training cycle I know that eating more is going to be necessary!
My current workouts are Total Body training from Alwyn Cosgrove’s Strong Program about 3-4 (more like 3) times per week with some cardio workouts here and there. With the rainy season along with being busy, I’ve also done home workouts with some of my old DVD’s. My main goal has been to get the workouts in at least 3 times per week.
I had already decided to stop the intermittent fasting when I got the email about the Nicole Wilkins challenge and it was confirmation to me that we need to learn to listen to our bodies and not be afraid to change things up as needed!
So excited to be journaling about the challenge when we get started!!
Stay Tuned!
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