I think a few weeks of consistency will get most people over the day-to-day cravings hump if they are making the change from a really poor diet with lots of crap.
It is one of those things you have to actually decide to do, then do it, then you’ll see how you feel afterwards. Settling into bad habits of any kind will distort your baseline comparison, meaning it’s easy to forget what feeling normal feels like and you come to believe that feeling like crap is your normal state of being.
Having cut out alcohol entirely since early February and more recently cutting out nearly all carbs for the last few months, I feel like I’ve finally gotten off of a roller coaster of sorts. I’m not 100 percent junk free with a few quest peanut butter cups here and there, some diet soda and a bit of processed cheese on some of my meat patties, but compared to most of my life I’m eating better than ever. I’m very level all day. I eat when I’m hungry and when I’m hungry it doesn’t bother me nearly as much as it used to.
As I’m writing this it has been about 27 hours since I’ve had any calories if you don’t count the small splash of light cream that went in my coffee this morning. I’m not ill and I didn’t intend to enter a fast. I had a big hibachi lunch of steak and grilled veggies (no rice) yesterday for lunch, didn’t really work out at all for the rest of the day, and just never got hungry enough to even want to go snack or eat. I woke up this morning feeling fine and I’m just going to keep it going for at least a few more hours, as this is probably the longest I’ve ever gone without eating, absent some kind of illness.
Of course, writing about not eating has made my stomach start growling, so I’ll probably just make some eggs with jalapeno peppers and cheese pretty soon. Today’s fast is basically a continuation of another pattern that has emerged, which is that I can often go much longer between meals without feeling anything at all really, especially if I don’t have a difficult workout that day.
They key to healthier eating for me has always been simple and delicious recipes. Becoming a master at searing ground beef and steak with a cast-iron or carbon steel pan has been my go-to meal that I still haven’t grown tired of in 44 years.
I’m not ready to go crush a heavy squat workout, set any new PR’s and I have no particular plan of fasting with any regularity, but eating lots of meat, eggs and cheese is something I’ve always been good at and stripping my diet down to these basics and a few low carb veggies has done nothing but improve my wellbeing so far.
In particular at age 44, I found that simply giving up on trying to time carbs around workouts has worked out better for me. I’m as strong as I’ll ever need to be and perfectly happy to maintain what I’ve built in that department. Prioritizing my diet, including cutting out alcohol and beer especially, and allowing my lifting to fall into orbit around that, rather than trying to pull my diet into orbit around my lifting, is working out much better for me.
Good luck. It’s all about getting all of your ducks in a row, even if every single one of them isn’t quite where it should be yet.
