In my week 2 recap, I made the following comment regarding my body measurements:
There is less of a noticeable change here, but that is about what I expected after only 2 weeks. In addition, I had a very unhealthy couple of days in terms of diet leading up to the measurements. I will try to post more on this tomorrow…
Well it’s a couple of days late, but here it is! I wanted to take this opportunity to provide an update regarding the dietary liberties I took this past weekend and my China Town lunch-binge. I noticed that after the first week when I took the time to write my goal for week 2 (not miss a single workout) it was much easier for me to follow through because I knew that if I didn’t, I would have to report (with embarrassment) to all of you! By putting pen-to-paper (or rather, fingers-to-keyboard) today, I hope to be creating a similar source of accountability for my diet going forward.
With that in mind, this weeks goal is simple: stick to my diet plan! But first, lets quickly recap the modifications I have made to the Insanity diet plan.
In terms of food, I am subtracting all dairy and gluten products and severely limiting the amount of fruit I am eating. The goal here is to keep my metabolism under a state of ketosis where it will use fat as its primary food source. If you are curious about keto, this is a great place to start. The first section on the benefits of ketosis is a good, of particular interest to me are points 1C, 1D and 1E.
In terms of meal frequency, I would be going from the five meals per day laid out in the nutrition guide to only two, and keeping them between the hours of 2pm and 8pm (intermittent fasting, or IF). Sounds a bit crazy, right? After all, it’s often stated that eating a bunch of small meals in a day is better for you metabolism than just a couple of big meals… Or is it? That’s right folks, this is more of an old wives tale, and in fact IF has been shown to have positive effects on both fat loss and lean mass gain at the same time (for those that are curious about IF, I would start here).
Lastly, I planned to set aside a ‘cheat day’ every week. The idea here was that if I knew I would be able to go out for a few beers (or maybe have some bread, chocolate, etc.) when the weekend rolled around I wouldn’t spend the whole week thinking about the foods I couldn’t have. After making this decision, I did a bit of further reading, and it turns out this is a common modification to a standard ketogenic diet when an individual is also performing intense workouts. It is referred to as a cyclical ketogenic diet (CKD) and its primary purpose is to replenish glycogen stores in the liver to provide a further energy boost for high intensity training throughout the week. The wikipedia article linked above does a pretty good job of summing up CKD.
With that out of the way, it’s time to get on to the original point of this writing. After a solid week of eating, I let my diet fall to shambles over the weekend.
It started on Friday night. I went out with some friends and on top of the handful of drink I also ate a nice portion of papas rellenas (stuffed mashed potato balls), yucas rellenas (stuffed mashed cassava balls) and camotes rellenos (stuffed mashed sweet potato balls). Talk about starch overload!
It continued on Saturday. After how I had spent my Friday night, I reasoned that it wouldn’t be too bad to let loose a bit on Saturday as well. During the day I ate a rather large bag of veggie chips (despite a healthy sounding name, I can assure you they are not) and also a pretty big chocolate bar (maybe not that bad, ~80% cocoa and I suspect less sugar than the veggie chips). I am sure there was more but a week later I am having difficulty recalling. And to top it all off, on Saturday night I ended up going for some beers and drinking a six pack or so…
On Sunday, the nutrition actually wasn’t that bad. The problem on this day was volume. Let me explain: I have had more than a few people tell me that I have to get to know central Lima before leaving, so I figured this day was as good of a day as any. After spending some time checking out the area, we went over to China town for lunch where I proceeded to eat obscenely sized portions of fried wontons, pork dumplings, shrimp dumplings, fried rice, wonton soup, duck and some sort of noodle dish loaded with veggies and meat. And let’s not forget the (apparent) favorite beverage of Peru, Inca Kola (bubblegum flavored sugar-water, anyone? It is delicious though…).
Not wanting to stop there, I made sure to grab a pastry stuffed with dulce de leche on the way out the door. And it gets better! On the way back to the car, the rest of the crew decided they wanted some dessert after all, so we stopped for them to get some cremoladas (think icey, slushy fruit drink). When I saw they had guanabana (pictured on the right) I naturally decided a second dessert was in order. Oh, and one last thing… Maybe about two hours later I decided it was time for dinner and ate all of the Chinese leftovers.
This brings us to Monday, the day of the fit test, where I saw some significant performance gains after only 2 week but no real change in body composition or appearance. To sum up, I believe this was in large part to me having too much fun over the weekend. I don’t regret it in the least bit, but I do want to make sure it doesn’t happen again.
And this is where you come in – by writing this (much longer than I expected) note I hope to keep myself in check over the remaining 6 weeks. And so far it seems to be working… That is to say, just thinking about what I would be writing has kept me in check for the past few days. In fact, from here on I would like to do at least one diet related update per week in addition to a weekly recap. The fact is, there is a lot more I would have like to include today such as my previous experiences with CKD and the rapid weight loss it brought about. But I think I have gotten a bit carried away as it is so it will have to wait until next time…
On that note, I think I will let you go. Check back tomorrow for my week 3 recap. Can you believe I am almost done with with the first month? It feels like I just got started yesterday. I have been doing a bit of reading over at /r/insanityworkout and I am getting a bit apprehensive about month two. It sounds like a lot of people are really getting worked over when they get started on the second month. I guess only time will tell.
Until next time!
