Prepping for the fast

Alright! So now that all the of the scientific and boring stuff is out of the way, I can talk about how I prepped for the fast. People might think that its not a big deal and that they can start a diet the next day without any issue.

What people don't realize is that it is extremely hard to just drop all the food that you once were eating and to tell your body that this is what you are going to do for the next couple of days. But if you gradually change the way that you eat, your body won't feel so "upset" once the dieting process starts.

For starters, I cut out coffee. I used to drink about 4 cups of coffee with cream and sugar everyday. I needed that little pick me up in the mornings, hoping it would carry over into the afternoon. Every once in a while I might have a cup on Saturday morning with breakfast but I stopped drinking it everyday. I started that about a couple months ago and let me tell you. It sucked! I had the worst caffeine withdrawals and just felt like I wanted to die. But after about a week, the headaches went away and I could actually sleep better at night.

The next thing I did was limit the amount of sugar I was ingesting. I made sure that I was taking the recommended maximum amount of sugar (sometimes less), which is 20g of sugar for women and 25g for men, daily . If you do the simple math, there is 4 calories per 1g of sugar. So when you look at the food labels, you want to think about how many grams of sugar you are taking per serving (I always forget that some have multiple servings). 

With that, I lowered my daily calorie intake to 1200-1500 a day. The type of lifestyle I live is pretty active and you would think that I would need more to sustain myself. Luckily I was thrown into a 2 week class that required me to sit at a computer from 9-5 with an hour lunch break. Remember what I said about people having access to too much food and not giving themselves the time to work it off? If we take 3000-5000 calories a day and then sit in a classroom with no exercise, we are allowing our body to store tons of fat and we wonder why we cant lose weight. The amount of calories I was taking was enough to fit that low-exercise routine without starving myself.  

Last but not least, water. I HATE drinking water. I love drinking juice and the occasional soda. I would maybe have 16 oz A DAY. Sounds horrible right? Well I started to force myself to drink a liter or more of water a day. I needed to start flushing out the toxins in my body as well as hydrating. After a week or so, my body was used to the amount of water I was taking and actually craved more!

If you go to Reboot With Joe's Website and scroll down to the "Getting Ready" portion, you can see some of the things you need to do to help make the rebooting process a little easier. I didn't hit much of the topics on there such as reduce meat or dairy intake, but I tried to do the other things that seemed a little easier .