I’ve Been Eating MORE for 21 DAYS… Here’s What's Happening

Good morning and welcome or welcome back to my channel. I am going to be taking you along for a full day of vegan eating on a maintenance build style phase. I've been on a bit of a new journey that I have been talking about with you for the last three weeks and if you haven't been caught up on them, check out those videos before you watch this one. But I'm gonna give you an update about where I am on this journey, on this build phase, how things are going and show you everything that I'm eating today. So today is the first day of school. So I just got my kids on the bus. I went for a walk with my dog, getting back into my normal routine. It just feels nice. Honestly, I had a really good summer with my kids and this was like that first summer where I was like not quite ready for them to go back, which was kind of a nice feeling. But they're back and we're just gonna keep on trucking forward. So I am hungry. So we're gonna eat breakfast before I get into the details. So the microwave just beeped. This is literally just shredded tromboncino, which is kind of like a zucchini. I grow them and they're massive. So I'm saving a lot of money by shredding these, freezing them and then using them in my oatmeal. So I started off with this. I microwave this first. If you're using frozen zucchini, microwave that first because it lets off a lot of water. And if you don't, you're gonna end up with more watery oatmeal than you want. So let's make my protein oatmeal. I also don't have any cold brew ready to go. So we're making an iced coffee, which is actually my priority. So I just ground up the coffee for that. I'm using the end of this bag of coffee. This is my sister's brand. You should check them out. My sister, my brother-in-law started this company. They do whole bean experimental coffee. So if you're like really into coffee, it's good. Look, I got a whole stash behind me. I just stocked up on some more and they have a really good one coming out for the end of summer. That's like a watermelon. I don't even know what it is. Hold on. They gave me a sneak peek of it before, but I haven't been able to try it yet because they told me that I had to wait because it's freshly roasted. I had to wait a couple days. So probably tomorrow or the next day. But this is a watermelon co-ferment. So I feel like this is the best way to end summer. I'm very excited to try it. You can smell the watermelon. It's pretty cool. But on a tangent, let's make coffee. This is 40 grams of coarsely ground coffee. I'm adding 400 grams of hot water. Gonna give that a little stir and then we're letting this sit for four minutes. And in the meantime, I need 200 grams of ice. And while we wait for that, let's make my oats. I've got earth chimp protein powder. I'm gonna do about 22-ish grams of that. Oats. Water. Frozen berries and cherries. And just microwave. Now let's finish our coffee. Ice it. Now we pour it over ice. Topped with soy milk. Delicious. As always, I'm topping this with a tablespoon of flax and some yogurt. This is soy yogurt. I just make it at home. This is basically the same breakfast I eat most days of the week. Every once in a while, I'll switch it up when I feel like I want something new. But generally, I just really enjoy this breakfast. And so I stick with it. Or a different version of it. Sometimes I'll switch up the fruit. Sometimes I'll switch up the protein. But it's just my favorite. Right now, at least. The oatmeal has been consumed. The coffee is being drunk. And I have my handy dandy notebook. So let's start talking about this build phase that I am in. Just a quick recap of what this is for me. So I've been taking the last three weeks. We just finished three complete weeks yesterday. And figuring out what my maintenance calories are. What's the most I can eat and maintain my weight essentially. Fuel my muscle growth. Because that is a goal. And just change my mindset. I've had the mindset of needing to eat to lose weight for so long at this point. Like I've been on this health journey for years. Because the way... I lost 70 pounds over an extended period of time. Like six years. And I feel like that is slow, sustainable. It's a healthy way to do it. But I still always have that mindset of I need to lose weight. What can I do to lose weight? And I needed to step back from that. I needed to just like not quit. I still am very health conscious. And I just wanted to try something different. I wanted to try to change my mindset so that I was not fixating on how can I get smaller. And more like I want to build muscle. So that when I do lean out, like it looks nice, right? My goal has been to eat. I've upped my calories. I've upped my fat during this phase. And I wanted to see if I could maintain. If I could fuel my workouts in a good way on a higher amount of calories. I'm only 5'1". And I was worried. I was worried. So I upped my calorie range to 1900 to 2000 calories a day. I increased my fat with that to 50-ish grams minimum a day. And that's because I wanted to fuel my hormonal health. I wanted to just, you know, I want to get my body functioning the best it can. And I have been eating on the low fat side of things for so long that my dietician recommended that I increase that. So we're playing this experiment and we're seeing what happens. I'm going to put my stats here from the last week. And then we'll put the averages for the last three weeks so that you can follow along with what I'm saying. So this week, I weighed in every single day. The average caloric intake ended up being 1894 calories. And my average weight ended up being 140.7. So over the last three weeks of doing this experiment, I went from, these are averages, 140.4 after the first week, 141.1 the second week, 140.7 the third week. That's all pretty stable to me. It feels like this is my true maintenance level. I feel like three weeks of solid information has given me a lot of data here. I think I can solidly eat around 1900 calories and not gain weight, which is pretty cool. So I'm not sure what is next for me here. If I am continuing on, I actually have a session with my dietician this afternoon. So we're going to see what she says and then I'll decide if I'm going to continue with this maintenance build phase or if I'm going to tweak a little bit. I haven't decided. And I'd like to see her opinion if she thinks that I should lower my range a little bit to try to cut again or if I should continue on. So instead of talking about the food and all that stuff right now, I want to talk a little bit about the mindset a little bit more. What I've learned these past three weeks of eating more fat is a lot actually. This has kind of been a really interesting and fun experiment. Not only do I get to eat more food and some days it felt like too much and other days I was hungry, which I feel like is a normal thing to happen, right? Every day is a little bit different with our hunger levels, but what I really learned is that when I have a little bit more flexibility here, even though I'm tracking, I had such a large range that my options were more open, I guess is a way to say it. And I wasn't so worried about fitting things into my day because naturally my hunger level basically matched with the calories allotted for the day. So I was never really having that many days, maybe like once where I felt hungry, but generally over the last three weeks, it's all been easy. It's just released a bit of mental weight for me because I wasn't constantly thinking about what am I going to eat next? Is it going to fit into my day? And the food noise was basically non-existent because I ate. If I got hungry again, I was like, I have plenty of calories. I'm going to eat a snack and then I would track it and then I would eat the next meal when I got hungry again, right? So it was a nice break to let me actually listen to my hunger cues. I can just really tune into if I'm hungry, I'm eating. If I'm not hungry, I'm not eating. And it was, it was nice. This was like a really good time of self-reflection of what kind of life do I want to live? Do I want to be thinking about food all the time? Like, no, I don't honestly, like I want to enjoy my food, but I also want it to be easy. I want it to be delicious. I want to be able to have a bagel once in a while, even if it's like a fiber bagel or something like those are still good. I like those, but I want to be able to eat some bread sometimes without having to be like, I just have to eat like whole food plant-based all the time. And I'm not talking down on whole food plant-based. I think whole food plant-based is the most healthy way to eat. But I also think for mental health, like including little things that you love once in a while is also important because it's not just about your physical health. It's also about your mental health. Right. And finding a level of finding a level of almost moderation where like you're primarily focusing on this whole foods. But then if you want to have a vegan brownie, if you want to have a bagel once in a while, if you want to have pasta, like you don't have to feel that guilt attached to that. If that makes sense, I feel like I'm rambling. We're going to move on with our day. So I'll let you know the outcome of my session later on. It's time for lunch. Just finished my workout time to get in some lunch. It's around one o'clock in the afternoon and I'm making something that I've been making on repeat lately. I just didn't feel like cooking. So something that I could just do on autopilot was perfect for today. So this is going to be a burger bowl. So I started with a base of vegetables. It's greens, tomatoes, onions, carrots, a jalapeno for my garden and a bunch of like homemade pickles that I made. So I have my veggies for my base and then we are topping it with air fried potatoes for the fry component. Here's the burger component. We're using the Morningstar Griller's Crumbles. I really enjoy these. They're quick. They're easy. I can just microwave a serving and toss it right onto my bowl. And then for a fat today, I had a little bit leftover Violife cheese. I don't really buy vegan cheese that often, but I'm trying to up my fat a little bit. And this was a nice treat. So I have a little bit of cheese that's going to go on this. And of course, topping it with ketchup and mustard. And that is lunch today. Potatoes. Not every meal, not every meal needs to be picture perfect, but it does need to be delicious in order for it to be sustainable. And this definitely hits that mark. I have a moment. So I'm going to talk about dinner because today is double dinner day, which basically means I'm making double the amount of dinner to deliver some to my brother-in-law and my sister because they're starting a new business. And we made a deal where I would deliver them dinner once a week to help them while they're roasting coffee, essentially. So they have day jobs, but at night they have to roast up their coffee for this new business that they opened. It's called Recalibrate Coffee Roasters. Giving them a little shout out, check them out. Their coffee is wonderful. I talked about them in the beginning, but I'm delivering them dinner tonight. So I did some prep yesterday because I know I have a really busy afternoon with my dietician call and the kids getting home from school. We just have a lot going on. So I wanted to make it so easy that I don't really actually have to do that much work. So let me show you what I prepped. What we have here is a very quick spread. This is what I'm sending to them. So I have another portion of this in my fridge. I have tofu feta, pickled onions, bean salad. This is on my blog. I just use all chickpeas in this one. And then I have this tomato jam. It's a spiced tomato jam and a vegan tzatziki. Vegan tzatziki is from my saucy ebook. You should definitely try that one. It's delicious. And if you can't guess, based off of what's there, we're doing a Mediterranean style bowl for dinner. So with that, I'm going to make some wheat berries as a grain to go with that. I'm going to do it in an instant pot so I can put it on while I'm on my call with my dietician, and then it'll be done by the time I get off. And then I'm also going to roast up some zucchini. And I think that's it. I might throw some greens and some fresh mint and stuff in there with that. But essentially, we're just making Mediterranean bowls. It's going to be easy. It's going to be fun to eat and delicious. And hopefully they love it. I just dropped off the dinner to my sister, and I just wanted a second of silence to be able to talk to you guys about this dietician meeting that I just had. So trying to keep this short and sweet. Basically, she gave me some options. She didn't tell me exactly what to do. She was like, if you want to cut, you could. But there's some value in continuing to increase my calories at this point since I am maintaining at what I am at because, and this is outside of my session today, but I've been doing a lot of research about reverse dieting and metabolic adaptation, and it's all very interesting. It's fun to experiment on myself and kind of see if this stuff works or not, essentially. In a very simplified way of what I understand, metabolic adaptation essentially is your body adapting to the environment that you give it. So if you are reducing your calories for an extended period of time, eventually your body is going to adapt to that and it's going to use what you're giving it. So you may cut calories and it may work, but if you stay at that lower level, at that deficit for months, years, then eventually your body adapts to that and that's your new baseline is how I'm understanding this. So you can do the same type of thing where your body adapts to it, but slowly increasing the calories to try to get your BMR up. And that's what I'm trying to do right now. So what she told me to do is to slowly increase my calories from where I'm at. So she wants me to up my calories by 200 calories every two weeks, continuing to monitor my weight and to see what happens with that. So when it starts to steadily climb, that means that I'm basically like where I need to be and maybe to go back to the former one. And so we're going to play around and we're going to see. So my average has been around 1,900 calories. So we're going to increase to a goal of 2,000 to 2,100 going forward. So my next check-in in a week will be at that level and we will see what has happened, which is kind of scary, kind of exciting to be able to eat a lot of food. And yeah, excited to have you on this journey with me, excited to be documenting it and to just like see how I'm feeling as it goes on, how it affects my workouts and how it reflects on the scale. So now time to go home and eat my dinner because I'm hungry. So here's the plate that I ate for dinner. I started with that wheat berry salad. It has Swiss chard, mint and lemon in it. Then the roasted zucchini, chickpea salad, the tofu feta. There was a lot in this bowl. Fresh tomatoes, topped it with the tzatziki and that spiced tomato jam, some spicy peppers. This was very fun to eat. And I ended my night with a dessert creamy. I needed a bit of calories and I wanted something sweet. So this is a sweet potato protein creamy that I made. I ended up adding in a bit of coconut cult and three of these cookies as an add-in. It was a very delicious. I enjoyed this a lot. I'll definitely use those little cookies as an add-in. They're low sugar, not too bad. And they added like a nice texture to the ice cream, which I really enjoyed. There is my macros for the day. If you are interested, thank you so much for watching and I'll see you at next week's check-in. Bye.