Alternate Day Fasting

For a couple of weeks I fasted on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, which is considered a form of alternate day fasting or intermittent fasting. I think it was a little harder than a straight only water fast, lemon juice fast, or even fruit smoothie fast. At least with those other fasts, a person can ignore food. With an alternate day fast, I still had to plan for the next day's meals.

The first day is usually the worst for most fasts, I just made sure to drink water or coffee whenever I started to feel hunger pangs. It wasn't too difficult, except when people were trying to tempt me with doughnuts or chocolate.

I still exercised on fast days, but it was during the time I was laid up with an injury so couldn't run. It was easier to exercise more on those days because I didn't have to spend time packing breakfast and lunch, or plan an evening meal.

Those two weeks I did calisthenics like crunches, pushups, and tricep dips, or bicycled in the mornings. Right after work I did kickboxing, aerobics, or went to the gym on days I had off.

Normally, my husband and I sometimes do a spring fast to reset ourselves, and get out of bad eating habits we may have developed. It's a way of cleansing ourselves of food addictions. My reasoning is, if I'm not eating saturated fats, red meat, and sugar than I am in essence cleansing my body of those things. We usually embark on fasts for health purposes.

But this time around, it was something I was doing on my own and purely for weight loss reasons. I'm still pretty heavy for my height, and I want to avoid injuries associated with being overweight. Especially, since I want to be able to ramp up my mileage and speed during runs.

As an aside, I wanted to talk about intermittent fasting. It usually refers to eating at only a set time of day. It's a smaller window of time to eat, so it limits the number of calories a person consumes in a day. I know people who just eat once a day as just they way they live, it's not for dieting purposes. But that would be considered a form of intermittent fasting.