Zero After Seven: Week One

Week One: Diet Number Two - Zero After Seven

The Rule: Zero Caloric intake after 7 pm each night. All food and drink (except water) to be consumed before 7 pm at night.

The Theory: Is that your body processes a lot of weight loss in REM sleep and you always wake up lighter than when you go to sleep etc... so if you eat in the evening what you are doing is queuing up food and energy to be burned off and depending on your snacking habits (mine were significant) you can loose weight more efficiently this way by burning off the days food rather than the excess you put in at night.

Week one is not proving to be hard, but it does require some vigilance to combat habit rather than desire. I'm not hungry in the evening but I have urges to go and get a snack because I am in the habit of doing so. Watching movies, TV or working on the computer are often accompanied by snacks and breaking that pattern is the hard part - it's not hunger driving that.

Interestingly I am still very, very low on sugar consumption so that is helping keep the weight loss going anyway, so I'm not really sure how effective this is but it seems to me to be a good habit to get into - getting rid of ill timed caloric intake.

There is a fascinating book on the subject of your body's daily rhythms I read a year or three ago that looks at this (and other) rhythm patterns and how to manage them to your advantage (science not belief - it looks at the chemical patterns of activity and consumption and peak efficiency times for the body).


Sex, Sleep, Eat, Drink, Dream
By Jennifer Ackerman

On the subject of low sugar intake - yesterday I was shouted a hot chocolate from Hard Luck Cafe downstairs at the office, and it was rich, creamy and thick and absolutely fantastic.

However

I felt sick for 2 hours or so afterwards. After 5 or more weeks without a heavy sugar diet the first real overdose of sugar was an awful experience I cannot see myself repeating. I had set my target at less than 80 grams a day, I'm less than 30 most days - I cannot stand the results of putting that much sugar back in my system.

Still loosing weight - 115.9 last time I weighed myself a couple of days ago.