Okay so has anyone used any apps to help log food or to set reminder times, does journaling help? I get the concept of IF but seem to never keep a time or know what I should eat. How many cals I should or should not be consuming, is it easier to fast being fat adapted. I stress about it so much I feel like it’s turning into an ed and it’s still not successful. Any tips or calculators or sites appreciated.
I’m happy to help out. It can be overwhelming.
Tracking:I use MyFitnessPal to log everything I eat. It’s free and you don’t need premium. There are others too like Fatsecret. You may get to a point where you are better at remembering calories and approximate serving size and stop tracking, but getting a good handle on what you are eating is important. I find the app helps with that. Eating above your recommended calories to maintain your weight, will cause weight gain period.
What is your recommended calories? MyFitnessPal will calculate that for you based on age, sex, current weight, your goal etc. That will get you in the ballpark. There are more detailed ones, but it’s pretty close.
What about exercise?I would recommend not eating all the calories you think you burn when exercising. Sometimes we think we burn a lot more than reality. Some people use this as an excuse to eat more. Of course it does influence your total daily caloric needs, however most weight loss is diet.
Fasting:Fasting essentially causes your body to burn through glucose in your blood and what is stored elsewhere in your body. To get fat adapted so to speak, requires your body to run out of glucose storage and switch to ketones for energy. There are other metabolic systems in the background that benefit from reduced caloric intake, especially reduced carbohydrates - an important one is insulin (YouTube Jason Fung). Fasting gives your body more time to deplete the glucose stores, therefore burning ketones much sooner. Ketones made from fat. If you are already following a diet where you are burning ketones regularly, then yes you will enter this state more quickly when fasting, or continue in this state with fasting. That said, in the span of a week, if you still ate over your calories, you will not lose that week.
Other issues:For woman, some influence in your cycle may influence in a lesser degree your weight loss. But the trend should still be downward week over week, even with stalls or temporary gains, just stick to your plan.
Some others may jump in with more tips.
I use Fastic app to track fasting times and weight. I really like it, except they keep trying to get me to upgrade and I have no reason to. I did some calorie counting early on for calibration with MyFitnessPal but now I just focus on not eating more than I need, stop when I’m satisfied.
Fitbit is my jam. Tracks my calories burned a day and adjusts it to my allotted food intake. More active day=more food intake. You can set your calorie deficit based on how many pounds you want to lose per week. I log all my food and you can scan barcodes to quickly find everything.
I track my fasting with fasting Tracker. I used zero in the past. Both great.
I also have a smart scale. Transfers my weight to the fitbit app to help me keep track of weight lost. I have a renpho scale but I’m sure there are others.