The short answer to this is that I don’t think it is for me.

The longer answer is it’s not for me if I want to continue working out in the mornings, doing things that mean I don’t get home until between 8 and 10 pm and dancing for hours on one or two days at weekends.

And I do want to continue to do these things.

These things are the things that make up a large portion of my life.

This is what happened… I tried it as I described  here  Intermittent fasting experiment, and here  a new thing. I was adapting to it, I was even getting used to training fasted first thing in the morning. I kept it up during my holiday, even on days where I went on walks in the morning and the like.

It had its advantages, I was drinking much more water, I was snacking much less  late into the evening and I remembered that being hungry is not necessarily a bad thing.

I mean…it is a bad thing if it is for long periods of time and because of lack of food or starvation or some such thing.

What I mean is, we are allowed to be hungry when coming up to a meal. That is the point of the meal after all, to keep us fueled and stop us being hungry. In the world of readily available snack foods we tend to forget that we won’t die from hunger for quite a long time and feeling slightly peckish 1/2 an hour before meal time doesn’t need a snack to keep us going…

SO…just when I thought it was all going well, dancing season started. The first day of dance and the kick off to the season proper is Rochester Sweeps festival which we danced at on 5th May this year. I knew I’d need food but didn’t really organise myself properly so ended up with minimal breakfast, by lunchtime, my legs were shaking and I could barely move them. I ate lunch, but by the end of the day I was broken! I had somewhere along the lines, totally run out of energy!

Sunday saw us dancing in the forest as part of a horror movie. Yes…literally, we were asked to participate in filming a movie. It was fun and reasonably hard work and I tried again with the fast but It didn’t really work…again I totally ran out of energy. I persevered until Wednesday. After a disastrous PT session on Tuesday where I could barely do anything I decided that enough was enough and I should go back to eating more regularly like a normal person.

So my new policy, is the same as the old policy. Eat regularly, workout and dance with enough energy and fuel,  and keep an eye on the intake so I am not eating more than I use.

This coupled with generally but not obsessively eating healthily was my original approach way back when I started this. It worked then, it should work now.

I consider this a successful experiment mind you, I did what I needed to when it comes to taking back control over what I was eating (mostly…) and I have discovered that I am most definitely a breakfast person. I am absolutely sure that IF will work for some people, and I still consider that it is a valid way of planning and scheduling your meals, as long as you have the flexibility to plan your workouts/ activities around your eating schedule so you don’t run out of energy because that ultimately leads to overeating…

Now, just because this post is about food, and I haven’t put a picture in for a while, here is a picture of some food we cooked in the van while we were away…