Bike Rides and Intermittent Fasting

In addition to tracking calories in a free fitness app on my smartphone, I'm also attempting intermittent fasting again as a means to more effective weight loss. I'm not a conventional dieter. I mainly focus on eating whole food fruits and veggies, but I like to treat myself to junkier food sometimes, as long as it's vegan. So, I need to apply tools and interventions to my diet to ensure I don't overeat. Cutting out refined oil and sugar for the most part has definitely made this easier. Still, I'm a good cook and it's easy to eat more helpings than I should of my kickass recipes...like this African Sweet Potato Peanut Stew that I'll be throwing together for the vegan Thanksgiving celebration at home with my wife today.

My virtual cycling buddy and rock-n-roll bandmate AquaMunkee turned me on to another smartphone app called Fastic, which focuses on intermittent fasting (IF). The way IF works is that you only eat within a fixed time window each day, say between 10 AM and 8 PM (10 hour non-fasting window), allowing your body to rest and metabolize during the other 14 hours of the day (a fair amount of which is sleep). The Fastic app lets you customize your fasting window and sends you reminders to eat during the non-fasting time and drink plenty of water throughout the day. In theory, your body enters ketosis at some point during the fasting period, causing it to burn fat stores for energy. You can set a really strict fasting period, like 19 hours (with just a 5 hour eating window). I decided to be more moderate in my fasting, initially, doing a 14/10 or a 16/8 depending on the day. I typically don't eat breakfast anyway, and if I do it's usually later in the morning (a perk of autonomous self employment is being able to start work later in the day), and I like to eat a big dinner. So, I just need to finish dinner by 8 or 9 PM, depending on when I started fasting that day. If I am able to squeeze in an hour or so of virtual smart cycling during the day (another perk of autonomous self employment), I can earn myself a hefty calorie quota to expend on food and snacks in the non-fasting period each day. So far, it's been a good system, though I have only been at it about four days now. Per usual, it takes a fortnight to really evaluate the efficacy of a new health and wellness intervention.

Today, my fasting window will end when I'm about halfway through a scheduled virtual bike race on the Rouvy smart cycling app. As such, I'll keep some Larabars with me on the ride to scarf down when I'm able to (on a downhill). That calorie burst should propel me to a personal best in the bike race (I don't give a sh!t about winning...just finishing).

Anyway, sorry if you read this whole post. Just rambling some thoughts in my effort to do something productive, rather than be sucked into the social media scrolling sinkhole. I'm considering implementing another social media fast through the end of the year to keep me focused on my goals, whatever they may be.

The End.