40 Day Detox

So Ramadan has begun. Good luck to all of you who’ll be fasting this month. Hope you get what you want out of it, maybe even a detox of your own. You may prefer to read my blog posts after breaking your fasts… 

Mmmm... food

My weight dropped 0.4kg today to 70.5kg. But despite the change in training regime of exercising after eating, my fat percentage still rose and my body muscle decreased again. It’s really messing with my head! It’s like trying to deal with Google Search Engine Results Pages when you optimise your webpage for specific key terms and expect to be seen higher but Google responds with fluctuations, sometimes placing you at the top and sometimes you’re webpage is completely off the radar. It’s very frustrating and disheartening. But I shall persevere. 

Fit Day Control Panel

I have had more consistent results before when using an online diet journal (like Fit Day) where you record and track every single item and portion of food you eat in the day. But I’m avoiding this as it can be very time consuming to do. Today and tomorrow are rest days for me. But for the next few days after the break I will try to reduce my food portion sizes and spread my eating throughout the day rather than three large meals and see if that makes any difference. If I still see no results I may well have to resort to signing up with a diet journal after all. 

I started my day with a double lime hot drink. No honey this time to reduce the calories. For breakfast I had my fromage frais, muesli fresh fruit and nuts mix. But this time I reduced the portion. I limited it to five tablespoons of fromage frais, five of each berry and grape and five almonds. I then covered the bowl with a thin layer of muesli and then drizzled some honey on too. Today’s portion looked about a third of yesterday’s portion. Eaten slowly, chewed thoroughly, it proved to be as satisfying as yesterday’s breakfast. 

I may have managed to initially fool my stomach, however after about an hour it was hungry for more so I snacked on pistachio nuts while getting on with stuff. 

After a couple of hours I was hungry for a meal again so I filled a small plate with black-eyed beans and roast vegetables. Using a smaller plate rather than a large plate is a technique to help reduce your portion size when eating. I then ate it slowly, chewed thoroughly, and savoured each moment, feeling the textures of each food in my mouth, taking time to taste what I was eating and appreciating the aroma (another technique for eating less and really appreciating food as a blessing). I ate only half of this small plate of food and decided to leave the rest for later. 

My favourite beans, black-eyed beans with rice

I was researching proteins from plant sources when I came across some very useful information about complementary proteins. When you eat meat you get all the amino acids your body needs. When you eat quinoa or dairy products the same thing is true. However if you are eating legumes, nuts or grains, eating either of them on their own will not provide your body with all the amino acids the body needs as some contain some amino acids while lacking others. For this reason it is important to combine them together. For example the black-eyed beans I had should have be complimented with rice. Some more examples of complimentary vegetarian proteins: beans and tortillas; peanut butter sandwich; macaroni and cheese; tofu with rice; hummus with pita bread; chickpeas and rice. 

On the subject of rice I found out another interesting fact. Brown rice digests more slowly than white rice. However white basmati rice digests slower than brown rice. So which rice is healthier: brown or basmati? That depends on your perspective. Though white basmati rice has a lower GI than brown rice it is more processed and is thus cleansed of the nutrients found in brown rice. So if keeping blood sugar levels low is more important to you, for example you are a diabetic, then white basmati rice may well be the better option than normal brown rice. If getting more nutrients for your calories is important to you then brown rice is the way to go. However the best of both worlds would be wholemeal basmati rice. 

There is a theory that our bodies feel hungry because they crave nutrients. If you provide the body with all the nutrients it needs it no longer expresses itself through the pangs of hunger. If you eat highly processed foods, you’re getting less nutrients and therefore you feel hungry quickly and you eat more until you get all the nutrients your body needs. Eating nutritiously, the proponents of this theory suggest, leads to eating less.

I have been considering the possibility that I have been over doing my resistance training and not giving my muscles time to recover in between each workout. So I have decided to take a two day break. Today I will do my walk and a brief cardio workout but no resistance training. While tomorrow I will do neither. 

I beat my double lap around Valentines Park record again by 52 seconds and made it in 1 hour 43 seconds. Trying to beat my lap time is getting harder and harder. I have to try and keep focused on each step. As it’s an hour long it’s very easy to find myself daydreaming or lost deep in philosophical thought which leads me to forget what I am doing and I end up slowing down. It was raining today but I still did my workout. Though I wish I hadn’t worn my glasses. It was like driving in thick rain without any windscreen wipers. 

On my return, as my workout hadn’t been as intense as if I had also done my resistance training I mixed the juice of two apples with two carrots. Having a full glass of apple juice would have probably contained too much sugar. Mixing it with carrot made it less potent and therefore less likely to exceed what my muscles needed immediately. It actually tasted really nice. I had my post workout protein shake with flax seed oil as usual. 

A little later I ate the rest of the vegetables and black-eyed beans but this time accompanied by brown rice so that I got a fuller range of amino acids in one meal. I snacked on pine nuts during the evening and drank herbal naturally caffeine-free tea. 

Towards the end of the night I did a ten minute stationary bike ride on my wife’s indoor bike while I filled the tub. I figured I could do with relaxing my muscles after almost a whole week of exercise. As I am only using natural toxic-free products on my skin during this detox, I didn’t use my Radox bath therapy bubble bath. I didn’t have a natural alternative so soaked myself in plain water. After about 30 minutes it was clear that it wasn’t as relaxing as when I have used Radox in the past. Radox really does contribute to making you feel a lot more relaxed.

Finally I had some cottage cheese for a dose of slowly digesting protein and went to bed.