My Warrior Diet

[Rachel421]

ive read your posts and your discipline and structure were both inspirational and educating. keep monitoring your reactions to day time eating, you never know how fast you may decide to jump back in.  im a newbie, and not so strict with myself yet, still learning. but the two days i took off this week really impressed upon me how eating during the day puts my whole system out of wack.     in your case, even making your eating window 8 instead of 4 might be some kind of compromise.    good fortune and dont give up entirely, or on all the principles!

[Renegade]

Thanks for the kind words. I'll still be keeping an eye on the forum, as there are always lots of great topics popping up whether you follow a strict Warrior Diet or not. I've actually found it harder to give up the WD than start it in the first place, and look forward to getting back to late night eating when circumstances allow it.

[ishina]

I respect the way you have chosen to implement the Warrior Diet principles into your daily life even if you're not exactly practising the Warrior Diet.

I understand completely that it is difficult to stick to the extreme version of the Warrior Diet with little nutrition throughout the day and also for me, the Warrior Diet has to be adapted to the daily circumstances, one is facing. For me, this means a comparably larger meal in the afternoon, ususally a salad with avocado or a bowl of fruit + avocado but still not breakfast and the by far largest meal of the day during nighttime. It is not necessary to be a strict follower of Oris principles and going to extremes can oftenly lead to ideologic behaviour, which is extremely contraproductive to the spectrum of your vision of mind - you develop a filter that blurs your vision towards your ideology. As with everything, I recommend looking at the big picture, trying everything out and stick to what is practicable for your life - it is not Oris, but your very own. Live it the best you can.

Regards
ishina

[Renegade]

Week 22

Is the Warrior Diet lifestyle difficult to give up or what?! In a last desperate effort I’ve finally managed to get myself back on track. Looks like my last post wasn’t the end after all!

It only took one day of overeating in the afternoon for me to see that it wasn’t going to work. Although fitting my morning workout and recovery meal in before lunchtime wasn’t difficult, things seemed to go downhill pretty quickly after that. I planned it so that I could start eating early enough to fit in overeating before going to work, but not so early that I had to start my workout while I was still half asleep (I think it’s important to wait a while after you wake up before lifting anything heavy to help avoid injuries). It something looked like this:

07.00 Woke up and had a big glass of water, then a cup of tea
08.00-09.00 Joint Mobility/kettlebell workout, then had a shower
09:30-10:30 Had a recovery shake, prepared food for overeating and got ready for work
10:30-12.00 Ate my main meal
12:00 Went to work

Even in this best case scenario, everything felt like it had to be rushed. Although I was full, I didn’t think I’d eaten a days worth of calories, so I took a bowl of muesli and yoghurt with me to work to eat when I got there (around 12:30pm). I ate it as quickly as possible, which left me feeling stuffed and bloated (oats tend to make me feel this way in general). After a couple of hours my stomach had settled, but I still felt sluggish and didn’t want to eat any fruit throughout the rest of the day. However, by the time I got home at 9:00pm I was hungry again. I made a cheese and salad sandwich and had a cup of tea, and that was the end of my lunchtime overeating experiment.

At least eliminating this option gave me the incentive to push myself harder back onto the Warrior Diet. Seeing as the next two days (Sunday and Monday) were my days off, I knew I didn’t have to worry about fitting in around work, and jumped right back in where I had left off a month before. It was so easy, everything just fell back into place and I overate on both days from 6:00-10:00pm. I just had to find a way to do it during the week, the problems being that I’d have to wait until between 9:00-10:00pm to start overeating, and that the last time I started cooking and washing-up late after work I woke up my baby son sleeping in the next room, which in turn woke up my little girl. Let's just say it didn't put me in my wife's good books!

Waiting an extra 3-4 hours before overeating was only a problem in my mind and wasn’t going to kill me, I’d just have to get used to it. The other problem required a little bit of diplomacy, but I promised to make as little noise as humanly possible in the kitchen and see how things went (although the noisy kitchen extractor fan refuses to quieten down!). I couldn’t bear the thought of returning to eating frequent meals throughout the day, “drifting” between meals and eating when I wasn’t really hungry. Success was imperative!

That was a week ago, and everything’s gone better than I could have ever expected. I already feel like my batteries have been recharged! No more lethargy, loads of energy, my workouts are getting better again and eating later at night hasn’t bothered me at all. Maybe the last time I tried it was a bit too soon and I wasn’t ready for such a change in eating habits. Also, I think that I’m eating more complete meals this way as I can have freshly prepared food and not something made to fit into a lunchbox.

There have been a few moments when I’ve felt less than great, but I’ll go into this more next time.

It feels great to be back!

[Rachel421]

*nodding knowingly*  i knew it, once you feel how great it is to not eat during the day,,,you just cant go back,,happy that is   bravoooo!

[Renegade]

In my last post and at various points in this log I've mentioned times when I've felt less than great following the Warrior Diet. I guess since I first started it's ranged from "a little spaced out" to having terrible bouts of panic and anxiety. I was going to write a little about this in next weeks log entry, but decided to post it in the General Discussion forum to see if anyone can help. You can read it here:

http://www.defensenutrition.com/forum/index.php/topic,1525.0.html

I'd really appreciate any helpful advice,

Thanks.

[Renegade]

Just while I'm getting back into the swing of things, I thought I'd try and update my log every day this week. This is mainly to see how the medication I'm taking affects me (see link in last post). Today's menu looked like this:

08:00 Got up, drank 500ml water
08:30 100g plain yoghurt, a handful of frozen blueberries, cup of tea
10:00 Joint mobility and workout (around 45 minutes, max effort)
11:00 Recovery meal (25g rolled oats, 5g honey, 35g whey concentrate, 500ml water), multi-vits, medication#1
12:30 100g plain yoghurt, 25g whey concentrate
13:30 100g plain yoghurt, 25g whey concentrate, green tea
15:30 apple, black coffee
18:00 green tea
21:00 salad (cabbage, lettuce, carrot, cucumber, tomato) extra virgin olive oil and yoghurt/herb dressing
21:30 medium avocado, chicken and mixed veggie stir fry (garlic, ginger, brocolli, etc.), big bowl of miso and vegetable soup, pot of Pu-erh tea
22:00 120g raw almonds, 25g chocolate (86% cocoa)
22:30 100g yoghurt, 15g flax oil, small handfull frozen blueberries, 1 tsp manuka honey, multi-vits, medication#2 and water

I think that's it. Maybe I forgot something, but I don't think so. My workout was the best since I started training again this year. With my trip away at the end of last year and then getting sick, my last few workouts had been pretty disappointing, so today was great. I decided to take my "anti-psychotic" medicine after training, as yesterday I noticed I felt pretty slow after taking it. I think that's a great name for a medicine, makes me sound like a raging lunatic.

And no, my local supermarket hasn't suddenly started selling raw almonds. I brought a 1kg bag back with me from the UK, which have just about all gone now. I think I should have had a small snack during my break at 6:00pm, as I felt a bit light headed when I went back to work, but it wasn't too bad. Waiting until 9:00pm to start eating was a breeze.

A good day .

[Rachel421]

   excellent !  raging lunacy moves mountians, don't knock it.    we don't have panic attacks,,,,,we have POWER SURGESSSS. 

[Renegade]

Wednesday 4th February

07:30 Got up, drank 500ml water, small glass of milk
08:00 Cup of tea
09:00 Workout (around 20 minutes, light effort)
09:50 Recovery meal (25g rolled oats, 5g honey, 35g whey concentrate, 500ml water), multi-vits, medicine
11:00 100g plain yoghurt with a few frozen blueberries
12:00 100g plain yoghurt
15:30 orange, black coffee
18:00 salad (cabbage, lettuce, carrot, cucumber, tomato) lemon juice and yoghurt/herb dressing
18:15 medium avocado and 3 soft boiled eggs with a yoghurt/herb and oil dressing
18:30 chicken and mixed veggie stir fry, small salmon steak, spinach with sesame seeds, small omelet (1 egg), green tea
19:00 120g toasted almonds
19:30 Multi vitamin and medicine
21:40 25g chocolate (86% cocoa), 100g yoghurt, 15g flax oil, a few frozen blueberries, 1 tsp manuka honey, cup of tea

As you can see, due to a change in today's schedule I was able to start overeating from 6:00pm today, although I had to return to work an hour and a half later. This meant I could eat dinner with my family, and then have a few snacks when I got home later at 9:30pm.

Again, no problems today, although I did have a "funky" taste in my mouth all morning. I'm not sure whether this was from the dried herbs I added to the salad dressing last night, or to the fat content of the almonds I ate. I'll see how it is tomorrow.

[fotakou]

The funky taste is definitely because of the garlic!I have the same problem with garlic and onion!Dont worry,its one of the drawbacks of the healthy diet 

[Renegade]

Thursday 5th February

08:30 Got up, drank 500ml water
09:00 Cup of tea, banana (under-ripe ), multi vitamin and medicine
12:00 Cup of tea, small bowl of miso soup (contained vegetables, a little bit of chicken and tofu)
14:00 Cup of tea, 100g yoghurt, a few frozen blueberries, 1 tsp manuka honey
15:00 Cheese and tomato sandwich, big glass of water
18:00 Salad (cabbage, lettuce, cucumber, tomato, avocado) oil and yoghurt/herb dressing
18:15 Sashimi, breaded chicken (fried), miso soup (with mushrooms and tofu), rice, green tea
19:30 Finished eating, took multi vitamin and medicine
21:00 25g chocolate (86% cocoa), 100g yoghurt, 15g flax oil, a few frozen blueberries, 1 tsp manuka honey, cup of decaf coffee

I'm not sure what happened today, but I think that it's probably due to the medication I'm taking. My body felt like a lead weight all day, and I was constantly thirsty. By mid-day I was also hungry, and the youghurt snacks I've been having didn't seem to help. I decided it wasn't worth fighting and so I made myself a sandwich, and actually felt a lot better after that. I probably drank too much tea, but was drinking glasses of water throughout the day to keep myself hydrated.

I was lucky enough to finish work unusually early today, but seeing as I was in such a lethargic state I left the cooking to my wife, hence the Japanese style dishes and fried food that wouldn't usually make it onto my plate. Still, it tasted great and made a nice change. I also opted for rice today instead of almonds, as it complemented the rest of my meal better. I finished my evening meals with 120g of almonds (raw and toasted) on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday this week. Maybe that was another reason for the food cravings around mid-day. Switching from carbs to fats for 3 days certainly didn't make me feel any different, but maybe I need to try for longer.

[Renegade]

Friday 6th February

08:00 Got up, drank 500ml water, cup of tea
09:00 Workout (30 minutes, medium effort)
09:30 Recovery meal (25g rolled oats, 5g honey, 35g whey concentrate, 500ml water), banana, multi-vits, medicine
11:00 100g yoghurt, a few frozen blueberries
12:00 Omelet (2 eggs, a little cheese), stir fried veggies, green tea
15:30 Orange, black coffee
19:00 Salad (lettuce, cucumber, tomato, avocado) flax oil and yoghurt/herb dressing, 3 soft boiled eggs
19:15 Mackerel steak, broccoli, stir fried veggies (cabbage, beansprouts, shiitake mushrooms, carrot, oyster sauce), green tea
19:45 Took multi vitamin and medicine
20:30 120g raw almonds, 25g chocolate (86% cocoa)
22:00 100g yoghurt, 1 tsp manuka honey, cup of decaf coffee

OK, you spotted it, the omelet at lunchtime. Again, I think this hunger in the day is due to the medication I'm taking (a bit like getting the munchies!). I ate an extra banana on top of my recovery meal to see if this would help, but it didn't really do much. I know Ori says poached and boiled eggs are OK to eat occasionally during the day, but as everyone else was having omelet for lunch I thought I'd have the same. Plus I got killer results from today's workout, so I can count it as an extra recovery meal . I'll try and keep on top of things a bit better tomorrow.

Also, as I had my fill of rice with yesterday's meal, I can't blame it on the fact that I haven't been eating as many carbs as usual. In fact, I didn't want to eat carbs at all today, so I went back to eating raw almonds tonight. As for meal timings, after all the complaining about not being able to fit overeating in with my recent schedule, I've been able to eat earlier than expected almost every day this week. It always seems to happen like this. Still, better this way than the opposite, planning to eat early and then not being able to eat until late. 

And perhaps most importantly, I'm feeling better than I have in a long while. There are still a few signs of anxiety now and again, but nothing like the state of panic I got myself in last week.

[Renegade]

Saturday 7th February

Another unusual day, although I don't think I've had many usual ones recently to judge it by!

07:00 Got up, drank 500ml water
08:00 Cup of tea
09:00 Orange, water, multi-vits, medicine
11:30 Quarter of a pineapple
13:30 Apple, dried soy beans, black coffee
15:45 Cheese and bread
19:00 Cup of coffee (with milk)
20:45 2 oranges
21:00 Two big bowls of miso soup with pork and vegetables
21:15 Sauteed bok choy with ginger, garlic and sesame, 4 egg omelet, mabo tofu (tofu sauteed with ground pork and chili), rice, green tea
22:00 Took multi vitamin and medicine
Probably have some more tea later.

I tried to stick to eating only fruits for as long as possible during undereating today, as I didn't workout in the morning and didn't need any recovery meals. In the afternoon a friend visited me at work, and noticed that I really wasn't paying attention to what he was saying and couldn't concentrate. I'd say this was because I didn't eat enough to balance out the effects of the medicine I had taken in the morning, so I had an apple and a coffee, and also a handful of dried soybeans (there's a traditional festival at the start of February where everyone's supposed to eat dried soybeans, so there was a bag left lying on the desk that someone had given me for my daughter). I still felt really drowsy a couple of hours later, and thought I should eat something else, but hadn't taken anything else with me to work. So, I resorted to buying a small bread roll with cheese from the bakery around the corner ). I felt better almost immediately, then went the rest of the day with no problems.

I was surprised to find in the evening that I wasn't really hungry, but decided to go ahead with overeating anyway. However, when I got home I was shocked to find that the fridge was bare, with no salad at all and just a few scraps of vegetables left. I had to make do with 2 oranges to start my meal, then put the rest of what I could find in a pan and cook it up (the soup and other tofu dishes were things that my wife had alreday prepared earlier, definately not AED but I wasn't going to turn it down given the circumstances). It actually worked out well, although I really had to force myself to eat the rice. Nuts are so much easier, I'm really starting to think high fat days are the way forward (although costly).

It looks like while I'm taking medicine in the morning I really need something in my stomach during the day. Not much, but more than the odd bit of fruit just to stop me from getting too drowsy. Hopefully a cup of yoghurt with berries or a couple of eggs and a salad around lunchtime will do the trick whilst keeping within the Warrior Diet guidelines (not like the bread I had today, the omelet yesterday and the sandwich the day before ).

[Renegade]

Week 23

Sunday 8th February

At last, an almost perfect day of eating:

08:00 Got up, drank 500ml water, cup of tea
09:00 Orange, another cup of tea, multi-vitamin
10:30 Workout (around 1 hour, hard effort)
12:00 Recovery meal (25g rolled oats, 5g honey, 35g whey concentrate, 500ml water), medicine
13:00 100g plain yoghurt, 25g whey concentrate
14:00 100g plain yoghurt, 25g whey concentrate
18:00 Tangerine, cup of tea
19:00 Going to start overeating. Lots of salad and good stuff to make up for last night!

I say almost perfect, as it looks good on paper, but I have to say I think I'd have felt better if I'd eaten something more substantial in the afternoon. I went to the supermarket to do the shopping at around 3pm, and although I was neither hungry nor physically tired, my brain had already decided it had had enough and I was pretty much spinning. Strangely, after finishing my workout today I think I felt the best I've felt in a long time, energized and in a really positive mood. Shame it didn't last for the rest of the day .

For me at the moment, the Warrior Diet's a somewhat difficult balancing act. I can do things by the book and feel less than 100% later in the day (probably more like 50-60%), or eat something during the day and keep my mind in gear (at the risk of losing some of the benefits of undereating). I think it's a sensible trade off, at least for the time being. After all, I'll still be undereating until mid-day, and eating the same healthy foods later on when I have my main meal at night.

I'm going to try eating a light lunch tomorrow, even if I'm not hungry at the time, which will hopefully stop my concentration from plummeting later on in the afternoon. Also, if I eat a portion of protein and veggies mid-day, I won't have to eat myself beyond feeling stuffed in the evening, as I did last night. If the result is that I don't feel any different to the way I do now, then I'll have to try something else.

[Renegade]

Weeks 24-25

The past two weeks I've been trying to optimize my daily diet by tweaking what and when I eat during the undereating phase. I finished reading the Anti-Estrogenic Diet, and that's influenced things quite a bit (although I needed a dictionary at hand to try and make any sense of the last chapter!).

Basically, I found that if I had a small meal in the afternoon then I felt much better in general, especially if I'd been training in the morning. The "have a recovery meal every hour" advice given in the book doesn't seem to anything for me apart from waste my precious (i.e. expensive) whey concentrate! However, if I went slightly overboard and ate that little bit too much it put me in that sleepy "I feel like doing nothing" mode. My upper limit seems to be a couple of eggs, a small bowl of soup and a green salad. Throw in an avocado or have another egg or two and that's too much. I'd be lazing about on the sofa trying not to think about going to work.

Although this small meal seemed to help me get through the day more easily at first, I think it was more a mental boost than a physical one. Two weeks later and I'm now starting to notice that even after eating, I still feel much the same as I did in the first place. For example, even though I ate my small meal at lunchtime today, I found myself feelng anxious and pretty low again once I got to work. Has the initial novelty worn off? Now I'm now thinking about going in the opposite direction and eating nothing except for my main post workout recovery shake, then fasting completely until overeating to see what happens. My proposed plan for tomorrow looks like this (Saturday 21st Feb):

Wake-up: Drink 1 litre of filtered water
09:30: Cup of black coffee
10:00: Workout (28kg kettlebell press ladders, 32kg swings, weighted pull-ups), 1 litre of water
11:00: Recovery shake:- 400ml whole milk, 25g whey concentrate, 5g honey
~lots of water
16:00: Black coffee
~lots of water
20:30: Overeating

In my eyes, this has to be the way foreard. Sinking into a spiral of eating more and more during the day in a search of that perfect balance for undereating is starting to seem like a lost cause. I've mentioned before in another thread that when I first came on this forum a year ago I read someone say that Ori only suggested undereating rather than fasting to appeal to a larger audience. I thought this was a bit extreme back then, but now I'm starting to see the sense in it. I've read other articles on this way of eating, all from supposedly reliable studies and sources, and all avoid food completely until the evening meal (although some of them also suggest that you refrain from exercise during the fast, using it as a cleanse to do on a quiet day just once a week).

The other thing I've been wanting to do is have a go at the initial Phases 1 and 2 of AED, but there are a couple of social events planned for the next week which would probably ruin the whole thing, so I'm going to wait until they're out of the way. As the majority of my food isn't certified organic, my reason for doing the phases is to optimize my body's ability to utilize fat fuels rather than concentrate on washing out estrogenic chemicals. I spent all of last week eating nuts instead of carbs, and felt much lighter at the end of overeating than when I ate rice or oats. I've found a source of raw almonds on the internet, and while they're still expensive, I should be able to manage 3 or 4 high fat nights per week.

If I get the time tomorrow night I'll post quickly again to say how the fasting went.