earlyTRE

Day 3 This is a quickie because I don't have much time this morning. Yesterday I weighed and was down .2 pounds. Busy day, and ended up eating a little more carby than usual, I think. I had salmon, eggs, and whole wheat toast for breakfast, a jamba juice smoothie for a snack, and thin crust pizza for dinner. At 7 pm when we got home and everyone else was eating, I found myself "needing" to eat more carby things, and ended up grazing on cereal, popchips, fruity snacks and a dark chocolate peanut butter cup or two up until 9pm. This experiment is making me realize that my diet seems very lacking in vegetables and actual real food. Perhaps I don't eat as "healthy" as I thought I did. Going to work on that.

Woke up this morning and weighed in: down .4 pounds, and was a little bit hungry around 7 am which normally I am not. The first few days of anything are always easy for me- I am concerned about giving up after that. Hence this blog. Hoping it will be the thing I need to keep me on track. I read that this way of eating took about 12 days for people to get used to in the experiments they did. Keeping that in mind. This evening was a little more challenging than yesterday, probably because of the workout I did, but I kept busy and bedtime came soon enough. My day looked like this: 7a:  coffee with half and half and a homemade banana muffin 8ish: LEKfit Define workout 9ish: green veggie juice, a scrambled egg with some cooked salmon added in and another 1/2 muffin 12pm: 3 rolled taquitos from evol, sour cream, dark chocolate pb cup and an iced coffee with chocolate syrup 430pm was the earliest I could manage dinner because we were so busy this afternoon running around. I al...

I've heard that to keep motivation going it's important to "know your why". Seems like good advice. So why do I want to lose weight? It's about more than fitting in, or self-image. Though I'd be lying if I said it wasn't at least partly about that. It honestly is a lot about vanity. Ok. I admit, I like wearing clothes that reflect my style, and right now, shopping isn't fun. There are a lot of cute yoga pants and activewear out there, but I'd love to be able to pick out just about anything and have it work, like once upon a time. I also want to look younger. I get it, this is not how I "should" think about things, this shouldn't matter, but I have two younger sisters that in the last few years have gotten in great shape and look better and younger than they did years earlier, and I'm jealous. They do not have kids, which admittedly, ages you faster than anything, but I want that for myself! I feel like the extra weight in ...

Today is the first day of this experiment. I'm not sure I should list my exact weight or the foods that I eat. I don't want to be triggering for anyone. I want to be clear that I don't expect myself to have a body that isn't mine. I'm not a tiny framed person. I have muscle and I don't expect myself to ever be a size zero, and I want to enjoy food and life. I don't think I or anyone can tell you what's best to eat for your body. My diet isn't "perfect" (you'll see!) and it never will be. I like pretty much everything, and while I try to go for unprocessed and pesticide-free foods as much as I can, I don't believe cutting out food groups is healthy unless a food truly doesn't agree with your body. I believe in having treats when you want them, and that there are no "bad" foods. Speaking as someone who has recovered from a disordered approach to eating, I don't think "cheat" days are a healthy concept. I ...

So far when I've tried this here and there before it works amazingly for weight loss but socially it's a little awkward and I do have a family who wants dinner, and I find it difficult not to want to eat with them. So those are the main challenges for me. One change I've made to help with this is I've started to have dinner ready at 3 or 4 pm, and I feed and eat with the kids at that time. It's not that crazy, really, considering the children eat at school at 1130, so by 3pm they really are hungry. If I give them snacks then, they eat a whole meal's worth anyway. With the early afternoon meal, I get to have all the cooking and cleaning finished in the early afternoon, instead of having to do it all in the rush between evening sports activities and bedtime. When they get home from their activities around 615, their dad eats his dinner from what I made earlier, and they have a snack. I actually think this is better for them, because they go to bed at 8 to 830....

Hi there. This is a blog about my experience with early time-restricted eating, ie not eating past 3 or 4 in the afternoon for 5 or so days a week. Why would anyone do this? Well, there's a lot of evidence to show that having a daily fasting period is really good for us, and it looks like keeping the eating window to earlier in the day is more beneficial than not eating in the morning and having a window from 12-8, for example. When the eating window is earlier in the day, we produce less cortisol in the evening (cortisol is great for laying down belly fat) and we have a greater amount of BDNF and other anti-aging factors. I'm simplifying, but this is what I have read in several recent studies. Beyond that, my own personal experience over the years has been when I eat less in the evenings, my weight tends to go down. More recently, I've experimented with eating all my calories before 4 pm and then eating all my calories in a more "normal" time window, say befo...