After a positive end to the whole30, which I carried on for several extra days, I had planned to implement a sort of 5 days on, 2 days off approach to clean eating. Eat well Sunday-Thursday, ‘treat’ myself on Friday and Saturday. This worked as planned at the beginning of the weekend, when I gorged on sweets and pizza on Friday (and quite a lot of alcohol) but the problem came on Sunday when I was supposed to get back on track. Not only did I fail to plan properly on the Sunday, but this carried on into Monday (when I had indian takeaway) and Tuesday (when I had a mood crash so severe I ended up off work and having a panic attack).
I’m not sure if it was a culmination of various different factors (including general exhaustion after spending all Friday night boogying) but it may be that I can’t handle a 5 on 2 off approach, and need to do all or nothing. My concern is that if that’s the case, I’m going to end up with “nothing” and I’ll be a lardy arse again in no time.
On the flip side, reintroducing carbs appears to have done wonders for my running / workouts. I managed a 10k run in 1:01:38 on Friday morning which is the sort of distance/time I was aiming for when I got injured the first time last year. I then beat that on Tuesday morning doing approx 12km in the same time (I thought it was 14km originally, which was a little surprising(!) but turns out the GPS trace was all over the place). I’m back to lifting at 11.5kg on the dumbbell after having to drop back mid-whole30, and have introduced an extra set into the mix.
I finally managed to justify purchasing weight plates for my barbell bar (Happy Mother’s Day to me!) & they arrived this week, so I’ll be trialling them later. Very exciting (I know, I’m a dork)!
19 Mar at 5:50 am
From my experience with finding the right way to eat, I’ve come to find that doing cheat days or weekends etc… just leads to binge eating and failure to plan for the following clean days. Believe it or not, what has worked wonders is the “moderation” idea…where everything is in moderation and I try and eat healthy the majority of the time. IIFYM.com is my life saviour. I can eat a healthy lasagne for lunch and a delicious chicken curry for dinner before then proceeding to eat a peanut butter cup or something similar for dessert.
My body has responded really well to just eating a balanced diet that yes, does include some refined sugar every now and again. I have cut out the majority of refined sugar from my diet but every now and again I will eat a chocolate bar (or 10 when I’m riding the crimson wave).
Carbs are your friend, also!! hehe, don’t get rid of carbs!!! They help keep you running. They only become bad when you start to devour carbs that are not complex and instead are fast burning. They disappear too quickly!
But nice work on your run time! That is super quick :)