Growing up I always had a ridiculous metabolism. I was the lanky streak of nothing at school, I could eat anything I wanted and it never made a difference. Hell, there were times where I attempted to put on weight as I disliked the way I looked but I just could not do it.
I’m a really relaxed person when it comes to body shapes. I don’t care if someone is thin or fat as long as they are happy, but the one thing that always annoyed me is people that complained about their weight as if they didn’t have some form of control over it. Yeah, there are exceptions to this but, in general, we can all control our own weight through our diet and our activities. The thing that always confused me was overweight people who were unhappy about it yet did nothing. You don’t become fat overnight so you get plenty of warning signs along the way to do something about it if you so wish. If you choose not to that is fine but don’t then moan about it.
So over the last 18 months or so I’ve put on a decent amount of weight, particularly since I finished work in September of last year to be a stay-at-home dad for ten months (best thing I’ve ever done by the way). That has inspired some changes in my diet but perhaps the biggest inspiration has been my joint pain.
Ever since having a very large growth spurt as a kid I have had issues with my knees. I’ve been in and out of physiotherapy, I’ve spent large periods of life wearing knee supports to try and ease the pain, I’ve spent time stood in motorway slip roads when the pain from prolonged driving has gotten too much. My GP told me “If you make it to 50 without having at least one knee replaced it would be a miracle”. The last two months especially the pain has become really bad, every car journey is painful and followed by a period of stiffness (fnar), each time I kneel down to pick up Lizzie it hurts, and every time I get up off the sofa or out of bed I strain.
A football blogger I follow mentioned recently that he had spent the last 4 months on a sugar-free diet and was talking about all the health benefits. I did a bit of reading and discovered that one of the big benefits of cutting sugar from your diet is supposedly a reduction in joint pain for those suffering from arthritis and other similar issues. So I decided to take a shot to see if it could help kick start my metabolism and give me some relief from the pain in my knees.
I’m 7 days in at present and so far it’s actually been pretty easy. The first two days of cutting sugar out caused some really horrible headaches but I woke up on the fourth day feeling really good. I’ve not removed sugar entirely from my diet but I’ve removed all artificially added sugars so it’s only natural sugar from fruit in my diet. There are a few items I’ve been eating this week which still contain some small amounts of added sugar with the main one being bread. I’ve switched from normal white bread to an extremely low sugar seeded bread and my daily diet is now taking in roughly 3-4% of the recommended daily allowance of sugar.
There have been occasional cravings but mostly for sweet drinks. The desire for a cold milkshake on the hotter days was quite strong. Last night after a dinner of chicken breast in a tomato sauce with new potatoes I did have a brief craving for some kind of sweet dessert but that quickly passed.
So in terms of food, it’s been a process of removing as much sugar from my diet as possible with an emphasis on added sugars. There’s also a bit of portion control going on in reducing the size of meals and reducing snacking during the day. This week I’ve mostly stuck to breakfast between 10 am and midday, a small snack around 3 pm and then a meal between 6-7pm.
That leads on to the other part of this process, intermittent fasting. The goal with intermittent fasting is to reduce the period of time during the day that you take in food so that your body has longer to digest those foods and also to reduce the amount of night-time eating you do. At the minute I’m aiming to reach a point where I do all my eating for the day between 11am and 7pm. As I write this it is currently 11:26 am and I last ate at 8:39 pm last night. That means I’ve been fasting for almost 15 hours and I honestly don’t feel hungry at all as yet.
Over the past 7 days I have fasted for 80 hours and 35 minutes with only 1 hour of eating after sunset each day. This is a big improvement as I used to be a big snack eater and would almost always have something edible to hand throughout the day from getting up at around 6 am through until going to sleep around 1 am. I was especially bad at eating my main meal of the day very late in the night, usually between 10-11 pm.
As I see all of this as an exercise in personal control rather than a strict diet I don’t feel under any pressure at all and I think once I’m settled in properly I may consider being a little less strict on weekends to allow for some treats but for now I’m actually quite happy as I am. The one thing that is a little hard is that my two favourite foods are pasta and pizza both of which are, in general, pretty high in added sugar. I have also heard there is a good range of sugar-free ice creams available but so far a search through some of the local supermarkets has found nothing. It’s all good though as this is a good excuse to further my recent attempts at learning to cook and make more meals.
So the big question I suppose should be how much weight have I lost in this first week? Well, the truth is that I do not have a clue. We don’t own a set of scales in the house. I feel good though and that’s what really matters. I’m happy with myself for sticking to it so far, I don’t particularly crave anything that I’ve removed from my diet. My knees so far don’t feel much better but I wouldn’t expect that to be an immediate change, it will be worth coming back in a month or two to see if that has improved.
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