Bring it On!

This poor little blog is so neglected! Honestly, its not the only thing that gets neglected by me. That's partially due to us putting extra time into fixing our garage, and more due to the time I choose doing enjoyable things over doing things that should get done. For instance, I can sweep the house or paint. Painting wins, unless we have company coming. lol. I challenged myself to have more self-restraint for the month of October, with a planned non-keto meal on Halloween because its my favorite holiday and my sons love having a special dinner and pumpkin pie to celebrate. We used to go to my mother-in-law's house for a nice warm meal before the kids went out trick-or-treating. Now that my sons are in their early 20's and their grandma is no longer with us, a holiday meal is just the thing to make it feel special. I did pretty well in October. Whenever I initially switch from a period of lax weekends with higher carb eats, I have the mental aspect to contend with in the first few days of purposeful eating. There are all kinds of adjustments, from planning our family dinners around what I can make that fits both my family's pallettes and also keeping me on track. It also effects where my husband and I go out to eat, because some places, if they don't offer salads I end up with a burger patty on a bare plate and that's what it is, but its not the most gratifying meal. I always plan for this when I start a "clean eating" month, but it still takes a few days to adapt to having to focus on what I'm eating every day. My main goals were to keep my weekends cleaner, avoid bad oils, get back into regular strength training and get back on track with fasting. One thing I learned this time is that my success is so dependent on my belief. One day I would feel so empowered to yake back my health and I could see myself aging gracefully, and those days I knocked it out of the park with harder workouts and longer fasts. On those days, I welcomed the challenge because I knew it would lead to positive growth. But on days where I woke up with doubts, where my body felt old and stiff, and old achilles injury having me hobbling out of bed or stuffy sinuses, I told myself I am weak and could only muster 10 or 15 minutes of stretching or yoga, and those days I typically told myself I was feeling run down because I was not taking in enough calories, which led me to eat extra servings of cheese around 5PM. Because I try to fast after lunch until my 6AM breakfast, this messed up my fasting schedule, and I was inconsistent at best on those days. I wasn't eating because I was physically hungry, I was eating to make my brain feel better because it was whining that everyone else (IE my husband and kids) gets to eat whatever they want whenever they want and I have to restrict myself because I gain weight if I even look at a chip. To throw another wrench in the mix, over the summer my husband and I somehow got into the habit of going out to eat on Thursday night in addition to Friday night. It wasn't a big deal when I let my weekends be loose, but I had labored over making a fasting schedule which included not eating from noon Thursday until noon Friday, my once a week 24-hour fast. So guess what went out the window? Yep, my 24 hour fast. It doesn't work well on the weekends with our family meals,etc. So in October, I pushed that aside and just did my 18-hour fasts Monday through Thursday. Even then, I had days where I ate cheese during what should have been a fasting time. I told myself it was fine because it is a keto snack. But when I watch videos by Dr. Boz and Mindy Pelz and get a deeper understanding of metabolic health and insulin vs fasting, I know I am only hurting myself when I eat in my fasting window when I am not physically hungry. Still, I was better at fasting in October than I was during summer and early fall. I fell off the mark on the food around mid-month, and it was not really planned. We went out to eat at a place that has only a few options for me, actually couple salads or its a burger patty on a plate. I get pretty sick of salads when I eat clean. I chose the taco salad, a solid keto choice IF you don't eat the tortilla bowl. I was doing great eating the salad, then the owner kept coming around to see how we were doing and he asked me how my salad was. I felt like he was focusing on the fact that I hadn't eaten any of the shell. Out of courtesy, I decided to eat a small piece of the shell. It was so delicious, and I ended up devouring the whole thing. One slip-up is not a big deal. That weekend I had a mix of on-plan and off-plan eating, clean eating at lunch, mostly clean at dinner but with a handful of tortilla chips or a small side of rice. The week days still were clean. Then it came to Thursday of Halloween weekend and I was feeling lousy from getting my COVID vaccine so I pretty much ended my October challenge a day early and went all out Thursday with a burger and fries. All in all, there were a few times I ate bad oils and a few times I ate off-plan carbs. I am not sure of the link (oils vs carbs vs age and weather changes) but my joints all felt TERRIBLE on the weekends where I went off-plan. I know some people are sensitive to bad oils (vegetable, canola and seed oils) and get joint pain, and its is proven that carbs are inflammatory, so I don't know which made me feel bad. I will have to experiment. I have never had this strong of a response to either before. Then again, this was my first time avoiding oils for any period of time. One of our favorite restaurants serves hot fresh deep fried pork rinds, which are magnificently keto-approved and satisfies that need for a crunchy snack, and I often eat those with a naked burger patty or chicken breast. But I am learning that these oils can cause insulin resistance by clogging the liver which makes it store fat instead of breaking down and releasing insulin. And, the less estrogen you have, the more insulin resistant you get. So I figured cutting down on these oils is a good thing to try. Now I will experiment with eating low carb foods cooked in bad oils to see if that makes my joints hurt, then at a separate time I will try higher carb foods without the bad oils to see if they are the culprit. Will it always be a strong enough reason to keep me avoiding whatever the culprit is? Probably not, but I will only eat the offender(s) after careful consideration, and knowing the consequences. This week, I figured out that I can be flexible with my 24 hour fast, so I decided to switch to trying it on Monday. So it's Tuesday at 9:30 AM and my last meal was lunch yesterday at noon, and I will break my fast at lunch today. I was reluctant to do it this way because I typically do strength training on Tuesday mornings and figured I might need more food after a workout, but I actually feel pretty good. I always have so much positive energy after weight training. So this month, I will plan to stay mostly on track with keto and fasting, but I am considering adding a third day of strength training in place of yoga. I my own experiment, but I am realizing that how I direct my thoughts toward my body, then 'I can't" thinking vs "bring it on" thinking makes so so much of a difference!