Yesterday was kind of a strange day. Once I finished my daily blog post, my brain was rather unfocused. I didn’t have a lot of motivation and seemed to find myself lying on the couch staring at my phone a lot. The entire day was overcast with scattered showers, and that sort of weather tends to have a significant effect on me: I have no energy, motivation, and everything hurts.

I also had no self-discipline at all yesterday, especially with regard to eating. Intermittent fasting is not so much about what you eat but when you eat. You have to be very regimented about when you eat and when you don’t; you can’t just “graze” throughout the day. But that’s exactly what I did. I didn’t indulge in anything terrible for me (my “grazing” was confined to the fruit and cheese I’d purchased from Whole Foods the day before), but still there was no significant fasting period during the entire day.

Of course I gained weight. I ate a lot of red grapes and mandarin oranges (I love the sweetness of both), some gouda cheese, and, yes, I did have a couple of pieces of warm buttered naan (just because it was there). This was all in addition to the yogurt and blueberries I had for breakfast and the bunless cheeseburger I had for lunch. All told, it was a lot of food. Again, its consumption was stretched out through the day, which would seem like a good thing, but I would have been better off consuming it all at once in terms of insulin response. One big meal would have resulted in one spike of insulin, while the many small meals resulted in many spikes. The caloric consumption would have been the same, but the effect on insulin would have been vastly different with just one meal consumed.

Of course, I couldn’t have eaten all the food in one meal; it was just too much food. And I never planned to consume so much of it by grazing. I guess I didn’t really have any plan at all for eating yesterday, which resulted in a lot of mindless eating. The fact that I wasn’t terribly motivated (and, as a result, not terribly busy) likely had a huge impact on my eating. One of the keys to intermittent fasting is that you’ve got to stay busy. You can’t allow yourself time to think about food or time to be bored because you’re going to eat if you’re not doing anything else.

I know that much of what I ate yesterday will eventually be “eliminated” because there was a lot of water and fiber in the fruit, but I’ve got to be more vigilant. I’m likely going to end up with a net loss of 10 pounds over the past two weeks, and most of that was lost during the first week. I’ve got to have a specific eating plan for every day and do my best not to stray from it. And I’ve got to stay busy.