u/Ok-Complaint-37

I had been laid off in the beginning of September. It is a cut throat situation as my husband had been laid off three years ago and since then he was unable to return to work due to the market. I was the breadwinner. He does food delivery because he has electric car. Doing food delivery while having to buy gas is not really viable in terms of earning. In other words I am stressed.

ADF helped me to lose tons of weight and get in the best shape of my life. I picked up serious yoga and it intensified my physical strength and progress. But idiotic layoff presented a serious challenge as I started GETTING HUNGRY when normally I wouldn’t be. It was hard to fast. Especially before sleep. Cortisol at play.

I gained 3 pounds and i do not want to go there again.

I looked up online if ADF can help me with stress and found resounding NO. Internet tells me to “be kind to myself” and eat to suppress stress. I do not want to. Internet tells me that ADF is too much right now and it is okay to gain weight. I do not want to! I want to improve my health and not to decline. Counting calories is not my idea of balance. I hated it all my life and if anything there is stressful is that. Eating three full meals a day is the path to continuous hunger for me. So I am going to tap into ADF which was my lifeline before.

My husband who is in the same boat with me is practicing ADF successfully through stress. He does 3 fasting days a week and loses about 1-2 pounds a month.

What is your take on ADF while stressed?

It had been a long road for me modifying my behavior around eating. Learning to eat in sunlight as opposed to in a dark.

I came to lean weight through alternate day fasting and now I mainly maintain with OMAD.

Recently I experimented with eating breakfast meal which I had never ate in my life since I was a teen. I always preferred to eat later in a day to soothe nerves. ADF showed to me that I can make other decisions around food. So here I am doing OMAD at 7am for several days.

It is insanely easy as it saves so much time! And I can eat it in total quietness as nobody is around me at 7am!

If someone would tell me I will ever do this, I wouldn’t believe. But here I am. Anyone else?

I am not sure if it is connected but I started noticing that when I lost certain weight to my last weight push (I am 5lbs above my ideal weight), I started getting unusual bouts of anxiety. I am not sure it is connected to weight loss but it feels so.

I am curious if anyone experienced anything similar and your way out of it.

I hate being nervous and anxious. I am a passionate person but I am good at grounding myself usually. I wonder if a huge part of this grounding was medication with food…

I am not sure whether it is due to not having food to pacify myself or the fact that I am at a lower weight now. And I think it is more of a weight thing than I food thing because in the beginning of ADF, I fasted 3-4 days every week for six weeks straight and I wasn’t anxious. Anxiety started hitting me when I met my initial goal (123lbs). My ideal weight is 118lbs. I had to stop ADF for a while due to working with anxiety. It got much better!

What worked: lots of yin yoga (60-90min) a day broken down into three practices (morning, afternoon, before sleep) and tons of yardwork in 90-100 degree weather
(1 hour on work days and 3-4 hours on weekends). With that I ate OMAD often the same amount of calories as I ate during ADF. I felt I needed these calories but was concerned if I gain weight. I didn’t.

I stabilized, anxiety left for the most part and manifested as intense and precise traumatic reactions to a few triggers that would normally leave me unfazed. Since these were very well defined, I was able to unpack a whole bunch of unresolved trauma and move forward stronger than before. Still, those few episodes while healing were extremely uncomfortable and why now? I lived YEARS without them!

Anyway, I was finally ready to practice 2-3 rounds of ADF per week. Finished two rounds and found myself again messed up and ungrounded. So today I planned fasting day but had to reconsider. Ate, came home and started doing flow of useful things which typically keeps me grounded. It is working.

Still I feel wobbly in terms of inner balance. It almost feels like life escapes from my fingers, as if I am moving too slow, in vain. I know it is not true. But still. Such an unpleasant state to endure!

If you dealt with it, please share!

Two months ago my Oura journey had started and I would like to share what I find useful and why and what I find not useful and why.

1. It finally dawned on me that pretty much all fitness trackers are status quo based. If one is changing routine, habits, workouts, diet -

scores in the morning will be most likely misleading. Oura will see deviation from the baseline as something concerning. Readiness score will dwindle, Resilience will follow.

However, paying attention to Sleep is very helpful. Activity, Readiness, Stress, Resilience - not so much.

2. Data is still useful! It is interpretation of it which goes into scores will be useful only if one maintains status quo. In this case Oura probably can “detect” sudden decline. For people who are active and healthy and want to develop more health and strength through challenges and change - Oura opens opportunity for personal observation of data.

In my case, I observe that eating influences my resting heart rate more than activity load. I am currently observing this phenomenon and will be using data to finesse my eating. If I would follow Readiness and Stress scores prompts I would have to abandon eating altogether as it only elevates stress, lowers readiness and negatively affects resilience. Of course in real life if one stops eating, then resilience will go down. But what will become clear to me on the second day of fasting (I will have no energy and will be lightheaded), Oura will file as Restorative day which will strengthen my resolve for the future. Nothing could be further from truth!

3. AI (Advisor). It is a joke. I used it twice and was shocked when it reported to me incorrect trend of my Resilience. It told me that my Resilience had been improving when in fact it was dwindling. Once I corrected AI, it immediately agreed. But “trust” had been broken.

Food logging is another joke as Oura wants everyone to eat Greek yogurt with berries and nuts. I also saw mashed beans! It invalidates any meal which contains even a tiny piece of bakery, dessert, or anything processed. It also doesn’t care for amounts and volumes. At least I didn’t find this option. If one ate 10lbs of Greek Yogurt and berries, Oura “will not blink an eye”.

Summarizing this whole AI aspect, it supports my original observation of practicing discernment with the scores.

Overall, I like Oura. It trained me to see through the scores, to exercise my own truth, to stay grounded when it screams HIGH STRESS and know that what it files as high stress is 56bpm heart rate elevated after eating. Or 65bpm heart rate elevated after workout during cooling down period.

Again, my main point is to look at the data

I wonder if others observed difficulties maintaining ADF while getting out-of-routine stress?

I was successfully doing ADF for more than two months and it was becoming increasingly easy and easy even backed off doing 3-4 fasting days per week and was maintaining 2-3 days as I was approaching my goal weight.

But then life happened.

I got my first poison ivy encounter which rendered me barely sleeping at nights due to insane itch. During day time in addition to usual work, housekeeping, exercising, etc I was constantly cleaning closets and doing insane volumes of laundry every day getting all this poison ivy contamination out. This really pushed me to the edge after two weeks.

Then at work we had to host week long event for our guests with business dinners and such. While everything was very well planned and guests were amazing, still I lost my flexibility and my ability to plan my life.

At the end of that week I had to host family gathering at home which is a very happy event but it does involve lots of planning, cleaning, and then not being able to relax in usual way for at least a day.

These three stressors added to the usual stressors and demolished my ADF. I ate every day. I overate. I didn’t even like food I ate or overate! I was clearly losing it and overcompensating for something. It was extremely unpleasant experience of losing my balance.

I heard before from a few people that stress and fasting are not compatible and now I experienced it first hand. This night was the first night I was able to sleep somewhat normally. I hope I am on the mend.

This was a setback.

Recently one good person shared with me that they go for lunch to one nice organic store which has a great salad bar.

I typically eat in local Whole Foods and use their salad bar routinely.

To have an alternative, I investigated the lead about another organic store.

And the salad bar there was a typical Subway type of a bar where you need to ask a woman to please add to your container this and that. And I understood this is a no-go for me. Communication with the woman who is annoyed by customers to begin with, who cares less about my meal, who will absentmindedly adding too much of one thing and too little of another, who potentially will relieve her misery by scolding me and rejecting some of my asks, who will potentially try to push on me poor-selling ingredients so I would have to reject it, who will add too much of a wrong dressing and get annoyed if I ask her to remake my salad now… NO WAY.

The only place I appreciate the annoyed woman with attitude is in bakery section at Whole Foods. It prevents me from getting dessert A LOT.

Avoiding communication is sometimes a key ingredient of avoiding unnecessary food

This is another feature I am not sure about.

Today I tested metabolic health and logged yesterday’s meal. This is what Oura told me about my nutrition:

1. Hamburger
2. Leafy greens
3. Beets
4. Carrots
5. Cabbage crunch salad
6. Fruit tart

Until I added fruit tart, Oura was praising me on High Nutrition. After I added fruit tart, my nutrition score downgraded to limited. Oura screamed at me that instead of fruit tart on such a “stressful day” I should be eating Greek yogurt with a few berries and nuts.

I am not going into “stressful day” as it wasn’t stressful but that is beside the point.

I can’t agree that eating a dessert after eating a nutritious meal COMPLETELY ELIMINATED nutritional content of it and made it LIMITED.

So for test I added the following meal (I didn’t eat it):

1. Pizza
2. Chocolate bar
3. Chocolate parfait
4. Raspberry scone
5. Fruit tart
6. Chocolate mousse.

And sure enough Oura classified it as Limited nutrition. And also suggested me to eat stupid Greek Yogurt with berries and nuts. lol 😂

What did I learn from this?

1. Oura is not a good tool to rely on when it comes to metabolic health.

2. Oura supports sales of Greek Yogurt

I am 2.5 months in ADF and then am happy with my results. I reached my ideal weight 125lbs and I do want to go to 120lbs but it might be a bit ambitious.

I encountered an issue. Last few weeks I had a growing anxiety. I had been feeling constantly alert, and had unpleasant butterflies in my stomach at all times. I perceived everything as a potential threat for things to go wrong, I started having hard time falling asleep and I generally didn’t like what I am becoming.

At the same time I purchased Oura ring which measures daily stress. Sure enough it confirmed my high stress levels.

Meditation, reading, walking - nothing helped. What was going on?

I could not pinpoint unless my weight loss somehow played a role. I goggled weight loss and anxiety and came across quite a few accounts where people report elevated anxiety with weight loss.

I decided to minimise caffeine. Sure enough on ADF I was indulging in coffee all the time. Taking out coffee did not seem like something desirable but I was tired of this awful feeling.

Guess what? Anxiety is gone. Instead of coffee I am drinking Yogi Kava Stress Relief tea. Oura shows remarkable decrease in stress.

Does anyone experience elevated anxiety with weight loss?

I know. Different analytics. My Oura is only a few weeks old. It actually motivated me to start running in the mornings which I love.

Before I was using Apple Watch with Athlytic app and it didn’t motivate me to exercise as every time I would do it, it would tank my recovery scores. Basically it did look that the less I move, the less I do, the less I eat, the higher was my recovery scores. In April I practiced alternate day eating and my recovery scores were through the roof! I hardly exercised then too.

Now when I stopped fasting and eat every day (I do not overeat), picked up running - my numbers crushed on Apple Watch. Basically, it shows me fatigued status with severe overtraining (morning runs) and screams at me that I am at extremely high risk of injury.

Oura on the other hand shows exceptional resilience and three crowns almost every day.

Outside of trackers, I feel energized, confident, not fatigued at all. However I would like to scale down stress. My upbeat state can go down a notch so to speak.

Basically I am getting close to leaving my Apple Watch which measures only heart rate and compares it to my heart rate last month. I think I know why I am getting such dismal scores. It compares my energetic period to my fasting period and hence the disaster.

I guess, it is a rant of a person who wants tracker but doesn’t want to become a victim of calculations that are limited in nature.

I am confused about Stress feature. I am only one week in and it is already clear to me that my days are STRESSFUL.

Out of 7 days I had 1 balanced day, 1 restorative days and 5 stressful.

What causes stress as I noticed:
- long walks
- short walks
- time in the sun
- gardening
- interactions with most of people at work
- phone calls
- shopping
- driving
- going to the bookstore
- taking a shower
- cleaning
- drinking hot drinks

What creates short spurts of restorative time:
- sitting in my bed in the morning, reading
- laying in my bed after work without moving
- doing breathing exercises while reclining in my bed after work or any activity
- watching a family of groundhogs in my yard from the window.

Now, I specifically dedicated one day to build restorative time. It was day ruined as I had to vegetate to collect these 15 minutes increments. I succeeded, but this day exhausted a hell out of me. It was boring and I felt as if I am sick.

I did not try to ruin my evenings to build restorative time after that. I decided to accept stressful diagnosis.

I had a fantastic day today. It was actually very relaxing and pleasant. But of course it was STRESSFUL. Sure, it was sunny and I spent time outside. I did some light shopping strolling through the mall and picking up a pair of shorts and a T-shirt. I had nice delicious lunch, spent time with my cat, and sat at the beautiful lake listening to audiobook and watching birds. I walked barefoot on the grass. But yes, I was moving through the day. It was meditative and very restorative to me. I wish many days could be like that. It was MUCH BETTER than bed ridden “restorative” day I built on purpose.

I am confused because generally I feel my best when I am on the move. Staying in bed and doing breathing exercises is not fun and I am not sure it is good for health.

So what is the goal here? Is the goal to build ability to stay out of stress mode while going about life? Stay only engaged at work?