30 Day Trials - Day 7

Today is the last day of the first week of my trial, and so far it's been pretty easy, although trying to fit everything in can sometimes be a challenge, especially when Hailey's at work all day or away. Today is also Haileys last day at work for 2 weeks, so it should now be even easier to stick to a schedule.

Last night I went to bed at 22:30 which still wasn't early enough, considering how tired I was, but I was up and about at 05:30, 15 minutes early. I put my alarm on 15 minutes earlier because I had a lot to do to this morning and I needed a bit more time. I wrote some posts for my blogs this morning and did some promotional work, then got ready to take Natalie to Nursery.

This morning is the morning after my fast and the first time I had eaten for about 20 hours, I started off with some grapes and then a bowl of cereal. I don't think I feel any benefits from the fast, but to be honest I didn't really expect there to be, I think you need more than 1 day for there to be any benefit. The next time I do a fast I think I will try it for 3 days, I'm not sure when this will be yet.

After work I practised my guitar for 20 minutes before going for a jog, the next time I go for a jog I'm going to try and increase the length of the jogging intervals to 1 minute 30 seconds.

So that's it the first week over and the best thing about it? The extra time I have to work on my blogs and do other projects that I wouldn't normally have time to do because I would be in bed asleep. Hopefully I will start to see the benefits of exercising more as the weeks go by, I've already lost 3 pounds this week and the jogging is getting a bit easier.

30 Day Trials - Day 6

I didn't go to bed until 1:30 again last night so when I woke up at 05:45, I was shattered, I still go up straight away but it was hard. For some reason I find it very hard to go to bed early even when I'm feeling tired, especially at the weekend. After getting up I went downstairs to do some more work on my blogs and do some reading, I started to feel better straight away.

Today is the day that I experimented with fasting (see my previous post), so there is nothing to report food wise, I just drank plenty of water all day. I spent my day looking after Natalie as Hailey was away on a trip again, so I didn't get much else done.

After Natalie had gone to bed I spent 30 minutes on the guitar and then did an hours workout using Hailey's DVD. All in all not much to report today, its all been fairly plain sailing so far, the fasting was pretty easy, so I think I will try a longer fast at some point, I will write another post when I decide to do it.

Tomorrow will probably be my last daily post on the 30 day trials as there is very little different to report each day. I will switch to a weekly summary after tomorrow with the odd update here and there if anything out of the ordinary happens, instead I will be concentrating on writing posts about other personal development topics.

Fasting

Last night I was having a read of Steve Pavlinas's Forum and I found a number of threads on fasting and its health benefits. There appears to be a number of ways to fast, but the 2 I mostly read about were water only and juice fasting. Water only fasting, is just that you only drink water during the fast and nothing else, where as juice fasting is only drinking water and juiced fruit and vegetables, no solids. Apparently fasting allows the body to rid itself of toxins and heal itself, the theory is that because the body doesn't have to use energy digesting food it can use that energy to heal instead. Fasting is supposed to leave you feeling energised, invigorated and clear headed, this is probably because your not taking in any additives or sugar etc that can affect your physiology.

I decided to give fasting a try, just for 1 day to see how it goes, I settled on a water only fast as I thought it would be easier on short notice than buying loads of fruit and veg and juicing it up. I started today, the last food I had was about 22:00 last night, so at the time of writing this it's been just over 24 hours without food. To be honest today's been pretty easy, I've only felt hungry a couple of times and not for very long. The hardest thing about the fast is breaking the habit of eating, a few times even though I wasn't hungry I wanted to eat anyway.

As I write this I'm starting to feel hungry, I think I'll go to bed in a minute and I'll have something to eat tomorrow morning.