Back to the basics again with the second half of my health,fitness and weight loss grand project / experimenting with OMAD and TWOMAD patterns of eating.
Although, as I write, i’m taking a deep thought pause and rest from my diet and training regime but that’s more in the way of taking a deep breath before launching out at the crux in a difficult climb or coming off the edge of the high diving board to plunge into the water below – and staying tight and disciplined to hit the water in a straight line.
Weak analogies aside, what’s going on this month is that first, we have a few intense weeks taken up with Jackie’s chemotherapy treatment and secondly that i’m having a balls to the wall month in terms of my approach and actual intensity of action in my diet and exercise regimes. The title of this week’s health and fitness blog post comes directly from the use of OMAD : one meal per day, which is one of the ways touted to reduce overall calories consumed while focusing the person’s mind on eating really well (qualitatively) in that one meal. It also gives a daily fasting and eating window of something in the order of 23 : 1, essentially intermittent fasting every day as well. That works well with doctor Peter Attia’s model of there being 3 dietary levers to pull on as it pulls on at least two and maybe even all three.
My One Mad Month is closely modeled on what I did right at the start : I went immediately to a highly disciplined eating mode and made an absolute rule about walking every day that I was able to stick to. Within a few weeks of starting out I also found out about the few things I was still doing that were holding me up, corrected those and made my first SMART plan. What i’m doing this time around is planning the main theme of the first month and then creating a new SMART plan for each weekly cycle of diet and exercise – even down to the sets and reps for each free weights exercise.
The more I thought about writing a post about somewhere iv’e been before the more I thought to write it as a diary, especially with the things going on in the background so : This draft post will have to sit here for the whole month but it’ll be interesting when I re read everything iv’e done – or not !
Week minus 1.
It’s Monday and the first day of Jackie’s chemotherapy treatment at the hospital that she works at. She’s off sick of course and is most likely to be so for the next 3 months at least. What that meant for today was her driving us to the hospital and probably me driving home – I don’t understand the layout of the site or it’s parking as it’s changed out of all recognition since I worked there myself.
The first days were extremely tiring because we were expecting to be there for just a couple of hours but that turned into a 6 hour marathon on day 1 and a four hour wait to even start treatment on day 2 because the drugs hadn’t been made up so I spent several hours just wandering around the hospital rather disconsolately, bored out of my head.
The early drive to the hospital meant an early first walk and a breakfast that will carry me through the day without resorting to the snacks that have crept in again and I suspect are one of the causes of my weight loss stall. For this week, in fact for the whole month, i’m going back to the simplicity of starting the day with a poached egg on a slice of decent sourdough toast. What has gone from my usual diet is having own mix of overnight oats : while very enthusiastic about a way of eating oats as fiber iv’e become a lot less so when I realized that the first thing they do is to make me very hungry until I have some protein later in the day. The second reason is that I was always a bit suspect about the so called research and it was only when I twigged that the claim of being much better than the control had to be read for what it is – the control being white bread.
So, for week minus one i’m trying to have only an early breakfast that does contain protein and then nothing else until we have our evening meal. I suspect that there’s a good reduction in calories with not having snacks at all and halfway through the week I was beginning to wonder if that small change was all I needed to help me break my weight loss plateau.
Towards the end of week minus one I began to wonder if I needed a Plan B regarding my ambitious idea of using the gym across the road from the hospital. My failing knee got a lot worse such that I was even beginning to wonder whether I could get through my usual morning and evening walks plus a whole load of useless walking around the hospital – aside from the stairs it doesn’t have any hills compared to home.
As I write, it’s Friday of the first week, we’ve both got a lot more used to the routine of going up to the day case unit where Jackie has her chemotherapy while I wear a slow groove between the main hospital building and the coffee shop next to the multi story car park. I thought it might be useful, if only for me, to record what my thought of the week is and do that for the whole of the first mad month.
This week my thought for the week was about reintroducing my zero discipline routine but in my case zero discipline doesn’t mean no discipline but rather it means zero excuses discipline which actually means no biscuits and cakes (zero does mean zero), no snacks of any kind and no excuses to skip a walk because I don’t feel like it that day or that particular hour. I would much rather I could have a biscuit or an excellent slice of shortbread at our favorite cafe but then Jackie would much rather she didn’t have to have chemotherapy and is putting up with it superbly !
Week one of OMAD.
Last week we had to go to the hospital every day although Jackie gave me Friday off for good behaviour – actually it was because she was tolerating treatment well and didn’t need me to drive her home afterwards. This week she goes into a 2 month stage of having one of the drugs once per week ; that;s one main medicine and everything else that has to be taken with it. Haematolgy is one of those specialties that I know very little about ; I barely even know the basic physiology of how bone marrow works let alone the various conditions, how they are treated and what the usual medicines are doing.
While the whole idea for this month is based around just having one main meal per day it actually started with a Two-mad or two meal day starter. I actually got to practice a bit in week minus one as I did my best to stick to breakfast and dinner only with a complete absence of the calorie dense snacks that I think are the main culprit in my weight loss stall. I’m very cautious about making any claims now but I think that my small dietary change in simply not having snacks is already having an effect – I also note that I seem to have had a fluid dump and it’s always difficult to know what counts as my actual, rather than estimated, dry weight.
Thoughts for the week : week one.
I’ll jump in with my not so profound thoughts of the week early this week because it will roll over into next week : i’ll write up the results and thoughts of my first week of OMAD either as part of week two or even later in the month when I hopefully have something to show for it.
Ok : lets try that again shall we ?
The first week of daily chemotherapy done and then the first long weekly session behind us and we thought it was all going along swimmingly ! then, when I came back from my post dinner walk Jackie spiked a high temperature and felt really unwell so we drove back to the hospital’s A&E department where she was triaged and stuck in a cubicle/treatment room overnight and was given the first doses of intravenous antibiotics while I drove home some time after one in the morning.
OMAD week’s one and two then.
I suddenly realized, after watching many videos about Ketovore diets and intermittent fasting, that I needed to explain what i’m doing with my interpretation of a one meal per day routine. The chief culprit here is the otherwise sensible Dr Alex, whom when he was talking about OMAD diets went immediately into an assumption that what people would do is to ram all of their calorific intake into that one meal ; most people that actually practice OMAD don’t seem to be doing that so where he gets that idea from I don’t know.
I get a similar idea from the Carb Addiction Doctor – Robert Cywes – although in his case it’s a completely opposite view that when we are talking about a Ketogenic diet it’s a bit meaningless until we say what kind of Ketovore diet we are practicing.
By One Meal per Day I mean one meal, usually taken in the evening and it’s a meal of just one main dish except that I often have a taster/starter or a portion of dessert but never both. I don’t say anything about food type or calorie content as I know what normal portion size looks like for us and we’re both omnivorous in that we eat most things except anything we don’t have a taste for. The only real experiment here is that what I have as a starter is something like I often had as a snack – currently that’s either protein in the form of a chicken thigh or a flatbread wrap made up with salad leaves, slaw or whatever jumps out of the fridge at me. Once per week but only once per week I treat myself to a Bacon Bap with my coffee when we do our weekly food shop.
The thoughts for the week then.
This week/s iv’e been reflecting on something that my GP said and which was very similar to a similar thing said, in a different way, by the Carb Addiction Doctor : be kind to myself/stop judging myself and beating myself up – also that being so goal orientated might be a really bad bad way of thinking. Why my GP said what she said ; you need to be kind to yourself, was after I was discharged from hospital following my strokes. It largely went past me – in one ear and out the other – but then I was probably going into Mr angry and depressed mode at that time ; it makes a lot more sense now and i’ll add to that thought after I recount what Dr Rob Cywes said in a recent video.
What Dr Cywes said about the goal of achieving weight loss is that having that as a goal is in itself the wrong way to think about health and it would be more effective to trust the process once we’ve made the necessary changes to umprove our health. He added that a much better approach is to accept and enjoy the moments when we are doing something that is right or a beneficial change. I find that I was already saying “just trust the process” when my weight loss stalled and yet I was still slowly losing belly fat.
In broad brush terms what booth clinical doctors said is very much along the lines of Dr Jordan Peterson’s rule no 2 from his earlier book : 12 rules for life, which says ; Treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping. That seems to me to be a very useful rule and absolutely my thought for the week if not the whole experiment.
OMAD, weeks three and four.
I thought this was going to be a hard routine and yet here I am four weeks later and just about to start on the other half of my planned experiment – a TWOMAD or two meals per day routine. Sometime during the last couple of weeks I weighed in at a hair over 91 Kg and it’s looking good for me to make my weight for surgery : although completely arbitrary i’d decided on a round 90 Kg being a better starting weight for my new knee even though my eventual aim is in the low 80’s at minimum but iv’e got months to achieve that even within my 20 month project.
Iv’e found that a one meal routine works so well for me, mainly I think due to it’s simplicity, that I might only try a two meal routine for a couple of weeks and then adopt the one main per day as my long term approach to eating, I happen to think that with me it’s been the long fasting window each day – 23 hours – and the reduction of calories and insulin signalling that has done the trick as at the same time iv’e had to reduce my volume of walking to the bare minimum that I feel I can get away with.
It I have any thoughts at the end of my OMAD experiment it’s to be increasingly skeptical about the noise of information being thrown at us by so called experts – even the one whom mean well. I’m now not so sure that there is such a thing that we might be able to call a proper human diet and there certainly isn’t a universal and perfect one although there are many questionably awful ones. It might be as psychiatrist Georgia Ede says – that the basics in terms of actual nutrition are what everyone needs but after that there is maybe a lot of individual choices to make and fine tuning to be done.
My best wishes to Y’awl – especially if you are also trying to work out a PHD.
