Firstly, I am not a fan of weighing and measuring my food on a daily basis day in and day out. Unless you are a performance athlete training for a specific goal and dialing in your food to that point is what it takes, I think it is normally not worth the effort and generally leads to more obsession about food than is mentally healthy. I've tracked some food in the past when I was starting out on my new way of eating (WOE) - I picked up calling it that because I'm not on a diet (verb), I just changed my diet (noun) and WOE resolves the confusion between the two nicely. Measuring and tracking for a week or two when starting out is a great way to get used to what a general amount of food looks like and what it corresponds to calorie and nutrient-wise.
Out of curiosity I decided to input my lunch (really breakfast, since it was the first meal of the day for me) into DailyBurn today to get a decently close estimate of just how many calories I'm eating in what's become my current favorite breakfast:
- 6 large eggs (generally 4-6)
- ~1/3 lb of breakfast sausage or bacon (sausage today)
- cooked in 3-4 tbsp of coconut oil
- 1 large avocado (either 1/2 or a whole, today was a whole one)
- optionally top with cheese (no cheese today)
http://dailyburn.com/nutrition?user=473369
FAT (g): 157.7 (or 78.3%)
PRO (g): 71.6 (or 15.81%)
CHO (g): 26.7 (or 5.89%)
Meals like this (Calories) are why I usually only eat twice a day! Obviously this is a bit of a skewed look in terms of the percentages of the macronutrients - I eat most of my carbs from fruit and veggies later in the day and stack on some extra protein at dinner.
The more salient point (for this post, anyway) is that it is EASY EASY EASY to incorporate intermittent fasting (IF) and generally sporadic eating habits when you chow down on something like this kind of meal. Fat and protein make you full and keep you that way - I ended up doing a 15 hour fast between dinner last night and this meal without any worries or hunger issues up until about 30 minutes before I ate (and even then it was more of a 'oh hey I'm kind of hungry' rather than 'I'm starving!' hunger issue). Some days I will go from dinner to dinner for an even longer fast - again with no issues.
IF has all kinds of awesome benefits which I won't expound upon here, but can easily be researched (or provide me some fodder for another post later, haha!). The trick, for me, is to make sure that I don't actually end up under-eating and seeing my performance drag simply due to a lack of Calories. Fasting is good, fasting to the point of overriding its benefits is not.
