Last Sunday I was ready to take the plunge.

I had been waiting for the perfect day to fast. That day never showed up.

There was always something. Lunch I had to go to. Kids I had to take care of. Appointments I couldn’t miss. Or of course my Thursday Zumba class.You can’t fast and exercise, right?

On Sunday I realized that there would never be a perfect day for a fast. I felt bloated, dehydrated and fat from a dinner party the night before.

So I made up my mind. I would start my weight loss fast after dinner that night.

The idea is to consume as few calories are possible from after dinner on day until dinner the next. By water fasting for 24 hours I will lower my total calorie intake even if I don’t change my normal diet.

We’ll see if it works. I’m going to drink only water and tea during my fast. Anything with no calories works but I wouldn’t recommend diet sodas since they typically make you more hungry. Coffee would work.

Doubts were going through my mind:

Would I get really hungry?

Would I feel to weak to take care of the things I had to do?

Would I get a head ache?

Would I transform into the worst version of myself?

Would I make it?

I couldn’t help being a little concerned since I would have 3 kids at home all afternoon. The I decided that it would be ok. After all the house is full of food and if the fast really didn’t work out I could always eat something.

So I did it. I plunged in.

Here is the log I wrote during the  24-hours:

6.15 pm Finished dinner, I’m full. No more food for 24-hours.

8.30pm Having a cup of herbal tea, still full

10:30p Find myself looking around for food despite the fact that I am feeling full. Maybe it’s time to go to bed….

Midnight Starting to feel hungry. Bringing a bottle of water to bed. I’ll probably wake up starving.

7:30am Tired (as always) but for that I have myself and a book to blame. I ‘m not hungry, surprisingly. I feel pretty good actually. Time to get up and make breakfast, for the kids that is..

9:30am Wow, that was an efficient morning. You do have a lot of extra time when you don’t eat breakfast. All the kids are off to school and I’m going to make myself a pot of green tea. Starting to get hungry.

10:45am Had 2 cups of green decaf and my hunger is gone. I think I’ll have some herbal peppermint tea for dessert while finish my personal footprint for a class I’m taking.

11:15am With a pleasant peppermint taste in my mouth I’m taking off to pick-up 1 preschooler and 2 kindergartners. Then I’ll have to make them lunch. That will be interesting. By the way my ecological footprint is 2.58.

12:15pm Came home from elementary school to find my husband had made soup for himself and the kids. Grateful that I didn’t have to make lunch. That soup smelled so good. Feel like I have to watch what my hands are up to. While I was chatting to my husband over yet another cup of tea and I saw my hand reaching out for a piece of cheese. Oops. Then when I put the milk back in the fridge it almost reached out for a piece of bell pepper. And those clementines are really shiny. I’m not really hungry. I’m not longing for food. It’s just the habit of putting food in my mouth that I need to watch.

2:00pm Not very hungry but I wouldn’t mind eating.

2:15pm 4 hours to go. Maybe it’s time to start preparing dinner..?

2:50pm I think I want freshly bake bread tonight. I’d better get started.

4:15pm Back home after 2nd grade pick-up. I have tons of energy, don’t know what to do with it.

4:30 I just made a crazy decision. I’m going to join the rest of the family to the gym. They all have swim lessons and I think that I’m going to do some fitness. I’m not a fitness person I tired to make myself go last spring but after a couple of times I stopped, as always.

5:05 Prepared some dinner for myself to have after fitness. A small salad with prosciutto and my bread rolls. The rolls will be ready in 5 min. It smells like heaven in here.

5:50pm On the elliptic, hungry, what did I get myself into? (yes I brought my iPhone)

6pm Feeling great, warm up done ready for the machines.

6:45pm Sitting with my meal in front of me. I feel fantastic!
Fitness was great. I used low weights. I blame the fast for that decision but to be perfectly honest since I hadn’t done any fitness for 10 months… The food taste great! Now I’m going to play with my kids in the pool.

8:10pm Back home. I feel fantastic!

Next morning I woke up feeling awesome. I had extra energy for 48 hours after I finished the fast. I’m pretty sure I ate less during those days too. It was as if I did less pointless eating. Instead I appreciated what I put in my mouth.

I’m really surprised that I got an energy kick instead of a down. I must admit that normally I get very impatient and pretty horrible when I’m hungry. That didn’t happen at all. I never felt as if I had a blood sugar low. I never felt bad. I never felt like I couldn’t go on.

You have so much time on your hands when you don’t have to worry about food.

You don’t spend any money. At least not on food and drinks. I did use a fair amount of tea bags but that won’t add up to much.

Intermittent fasting is a really cool thing. I’m going to do this again because I want to lose weight but I really don’t feel like dieting.

Image by: http://www.flickr.com/photos/whatshername/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

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 How can it be surprising that kids will behave better in school if they have a quiet lunch?

An environment were children eat as fast as they can so that they can run out for recess is just bad.

They need a quite moment to sit down and enjoy their food just like everyone else.

In this NewYork Times article  Play, Then Eat: Shift May Bring Gains at School they intview teachers and principals from schools that changed the schedule so the kids have recess first and then lunch.

By the end of the year, nurse visits had dropped 40 percent, with fewer headaches and stomachaches. One child told school workers that he was happy he didn’t throw up anymore at recess.

  Throw up at recess!

“We saved 15 minutes every day,” Dr. Hartley continued, “because kids could play, then go into the cafeteria and eat and cool down, and come back to the classroom and start academic work immediately.”

 I really can not understand that this come as a surprise.  It seams like we organize school after convenience rather than after our childrens needs.

Also I think that we have our food culture to blame.
Food has gotten such a low priority in our lives.  We don’t take the time to cook a proper meal. We don’t take the time to have breakfast. We don’t take the time to sit down and have a family dinner.

Our priorities form our kids and have large impact on thier lives.  How will they eat when they grow up?

Freeze dried astronaut food on the go, perhaps?

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I made this bread yesterday as I was on a 24-hour fast. If you’re not used to making bread from scratch you should really give it a try.

It is:

1. easy
2. healthier that store bread
3. cheaper that buying
4. the smell that spreads in the house is heavenly

I fasted yesterday to cut down calories and lose weight . The fast gave me such an energy kick I just had to bake. This is the bread I had for dinner as I ended my fast. Yum.

I never bother with how breads look. It’s the taste that matters. Here it is was my kids who made the rolls and I think they did a pretty good job.

Ingredients:

• 2 cups lukewarm water
• 1,5 teaspoon granulated yeast
• 1 cup unsalted butter
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1 tablespoons syrup (please chose one without HFCS)
• 3 medium sized carrots
• 2 cup whole wheat flour
• 3,5 cups unbleached all purpose flour
• 2 tablespoons flax seeds (optional)

Add yeast to the water.

Melt butter.

Peel and grate carrots.

Add all dry in a bowl.

Add all other ingredients (except flax seeds)  and mix until the dough is smooth.

Set aside for 40 min.

Split the dough in 15 pieces and make 15 bread rolls.

Put them next to each other on a cookie sheet or oven pan covered with parchment paper.

Set aside for 45 min.

Use a pastry brush to add a little water then sprinkle over the flax seeds.

Bake at 350F (175 C) for 20 min.

When they are done take them apart carefully and let them cool on a rack.

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A beer, a snickers… Does it really matter?

You’ll be surprised to see how those extra calories adds up.

That tiny little snickers or brownie that you think would not matter at all. That one adds up a full 8 pounds in just 3 months.

What do you treat yourself to:

• 1 glass of wine a day
• 1 beer a day
• 1 coke a day (0.5 l)
• 1 brownie a day
• 1 snickers a day
• 1 bag of pretzels a day (120g)
• 1 bag of potato chips a day (200g)

Check this out!

Here is a graph showing how that extra treat effects your weight.

The red graph is for a starting point of 160 pounds. This is how fat you’ll be in 3 months.

The gray graph is for a starting point of 190 pounds.

Compared to potato chips my beer a day doesn’t seem so bad. But do I really want to gain 4 pounds in 3 months? That is 16 pounds a year. Yikes!

And by the way…poor cat.

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The couch potato lifestyle is hitting back.

What happens to us when we turn on the TV? Our total focus turns to this attention grabbing machine and..oops 4 hours fly by.

4 hours of your precious time.

4 hours that shortens your life span A LOT.

An Australian research, that was just published, found that the more TV you watch the sooner you will die.

The people who watched TV for 4 hours a day had a 80% higher risk of dying from heart disease than the people who watched less than 2 hours.

That is statistics that you don’t want to play with.

Of course it’s not the TV that is bad. It’s the sitting still without using your muscles. The same thing goes for sitting still in an office, in the car or on a plane. There are few things that make you as passive as the TV. A plane of course but very few people travel as a passenger on a plane for 4 hours a day.

I guess I’ll have to look for exercises while sitting down.

After showing these stats to my husband, we decided to pull the plug on the cable. We’ll see what the kids have to say about that..

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The amount of diets and weight loss programs out there is just blowing my mind.

How on earth are you supposed to know where to start?

For me personally many diets are just too demanding. I need to LIVE!

We’re all different in how much efforts we are willing to put into our diet. That’s why I was happy to see this article that helps you make a reality check on whether or not a diet will work for you. There is a diet out there for everyone. You just need to find it!

By Brad Pilon, MS

URL: www.eatstopeat.com

If you and I went to the local magazine stand and scanned the covers of the fitness magazines we would find dozens of ‘weight loss’ rules.

In fact we could spend the rest of the week reading magazines about the latest greatest weight loss tricks many of which may actually work for someone. But realistically there’s just no way you could actually follow ALL of them. So how do you know which ones are right for you?

The easy answer is you have to decide which rules fit best for YOUR life and then try to stick to just one or two that will make the most sense for you and have the most benefit.

This may be the first time in your life you become a scientist, and your experiment is you. Here’s what you do…

Browse any of the popular magazines, blogs, websites or anywhere you like to get fitness information. Read up on the diet and weight loss tips and tricks, these could be simple changes like not drinking calories, or a bigger philosophy like limiting the amount of carbs that you eat.

Make a top 10 list of diet strategies you’d like to try, and that sound doable to you. At this point add one new diet strategy to your life for two weeks. Record your bodyweight at the beginning of the two weeks and again at the end. If you haven’t lost any weight this strategy doesn’t work (for you). Discard it and move on to the next one.

This is the simplest way to tell if something will work for YOU. If the strategy you picked sounds like a good idea but seems too difficult for you to manage then it’s simply not a good fit for you in this stage of your life. If it worked for your friend but not for you that’s ok, there will be one that works just for you, this is why you make a top 10 list and try each of them, one at a time.

Let’s suppose you find one that works over a two week period and you don’t want to stop. That’s fine, just add the next one in the list, if you can handle more than one strategy at once more power to you and you’ll probably lose fat even faster. My guess is that sticking to more than one or two rules will be almost impossible, so it will be pretty easy to tell which strategy is really working.

For me the simpler the diet is the better, (which is the main premise behind Eat Stop Eat).

Even when you are following the Eat Stop Eat lifestyle you can still use the top 10-diet rule as a way to guide how you eat on your ‘eat days’.

The top 10 diet rule experiment is the fastest way to find dietary habits that work for you – after all you’ll never know until you try.

****
Brad Pilon is a nutrition professional with over eight years experience working in the nutritional supplement industry specializing in clinical research management and new product development. Brad has completed graduate studies in nutritional sciences specializing in the use of short term fasting for weight loss.

His trademarked book Eat Stop Eat has been featured on national television and helped thousands of men and women around the world lose fat without sacrificing the foods they love. For more information on Eat Stop Eat, visit www.eatstopeat.com

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I can’t help myself. I really enjoy sweets and cookies. At least if they’re well made.

The sneaky chef  promotes tricking your kids and husband by hiding healthy stuff in their favorite food.

Why only trick them? I’m perfectly happy to trick myself with the foods I like. Here is a recipe with healthy chocolate chip cookies with white beans. Not only does the recipe cut down on fat and flour it adds one if the best foods: beans.

Beans in cookies?

Yeah, I promise you won’t know the difference.

I make mini versions of these cookies,  inspired by one of  The sneaky chef’s recipes, stuff them in the freezer and take the out one at the time. Prefect treat for me or for the kids lunch boxes.

Healthy Chocolate Chip Cookies

- 1 cup all-purpose flour
- 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
- 1/2 teaspoon salt
- 8 tablespoons unsalted butter
- 1/4 cup sugar
- 1/4 cup brown sugar, packed
- 2 egg yolks
- 1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
- 1/4 cup pureed white beans
- 1/2 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips

> Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Remove butter from refrigerator to let soften.

> In a large bowl, whisk together flour, baking soda, and salt. Set aside.

> In the bowl of an electric mixer, beat butter and both sugars until creamy. Beat in egg yolks, vanilla, and pureed white beans. Add dry ingredients and mix on low speed. Stir in chocolate chips.

> Make small cookies by dropping heaping teaspoonfuls, spaced about an inch apart, onto parchment- lined baking sheets.

> Bake for 16 to 18 minutes or until golden brown. Let cool on a metal rack.

> Store cookies in airtight container at room temperature.

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A couple of days ago we stopped at a cold, windy beach on Captiva Island, Florida.

It was freezing. Everyone was cold except my youngest son. He was running around playing in the strong winds. Full of energy as always.

As I stood there shivering from cold it struck me that I too would feel warm and full if energy if I ran around like crazy.

The next minute I was running after him up and down the sandy beach. It was awesome.

The same night as I had started packing after a great holiday vacation I heard someone laughing so hard I almost wondered if he was alright.

It was my oldest son. He was laughing at the same TV show he been laughing at the night before. It was Americas Funnies Home Videos. I laugh when I watch that show but no were near as much as he does.

I figured I had to try it. So I joined him we laughed, hard, together.

That night I knew what me New Years resolution should be.

To spend more time learning from my kids.

To run around like crazy and to laugh out loud at even the silliest things.

Why should I always be the teacher when they obviously have a lot more fun than I do? This year that is going to change. More fun with the small things in 2010!

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