intermittent fasting + food combining

I fell in love with food combining when I realized how great it is in reducing bloating throughout the day. Food combining isn’t necessarily a “diet” but it is a lifestyle change. It basically revolves around how you eat certain foods and what you eat with them. I also like to follow a pretty loose interpretation of intermittent fasting, where I’m only eating for around 8 hours a day, starting around 11:30am and ending around 7:30pm. I say loose because sometimes I love a good midnight snack or some mornings I wake up hungry at 7 am.

One major rule of food combining is to eat your fruit first thing in the morning on an empty stomach. I like to have my fruit at around 11:30 and then drink lots of water for the next 30 minutes before I eat anything else. This is so important to do because fruit digests so quickly so if you eat it any later in the day, it will just sit in your stomach on top of everything else that takes longer to digest and cause bloating. My all time favorite fruit is watermelon and it’s the perfect summer ” pre-breakfast”. I am not usually a breakfast eater other than my fruit but if I’m headed to teach or to a work out class, I’ll reach towards some greek yogurt and granola or an english muffin with peanut butter (not food combining but still super yummy). Both are high in protein so they help to hold me over until lunch.

Another important rule of food combining is to either eat a protein with a veggie or a starch with a veggie but don’t mix a starch and a protein. Because both starches and proteins take long to digest, mixing them together leads to that really sluggish and tired feeling. Mixing them with a vegetable separately helps to speed up digestion and help you feel lighter and less bloated. For lunch I love to do a huge salad with lots of greens and veggies. Because its almost summer, so many great veggies like zucchini and tomatoes are in season so I love piling them on my salad. This day I decided to put grilled chicken on my salad but sometimes I’ll also put some baked salmon. My all time favorite dinner is lemon salmon with steamed broccoli. It really fills me up but doesn’t leave me bloated heading to bed.

I can’t stress enough just how important water is as well. I like to drink at least 100 oz of water a day. I find that by drinking water not only does it help my moods but I also have the clearest skin because of it. Water doesn’t seem appealing to a lot of people but adding lemon or cucumbers can actually help make it taste better. I also love treating myself to a cute water bottle because it makes drinking so much water in a day fun. I find that because I drink so much water, I never really have to reach for a snack during the day. I am usually full enough from meal to meal that I rarely will reach for something else.

I always like to treat myself to a dessert if I ate pretty healthy for the first half of the day. I’m a sucker for Golden Oreos or B5aby Goldfish. I don’t often treat myself but I love to indulge when I know that I’ve been eating so well. I like to finish my day off with some sort of tea. My two favorite kinds are green tea and mint tea. Both are great for digestion and help me really detox my body after a full day of eating!

When I initially looked in to food combining, I was like oh that will never work. I was so happy when it actually did. Making simple choices in eating can really help bloating and that overly full feeling. For so long I had been just not feeling good about myself after I ate because I was just always so bloated. Once I actually took the time to try this new way of eating, I realized that I can have such a better relationship with food and eating healthy. I feel like dieting and living a “healthy” lifestyle is all about what makes you feel good. The way I eat in a day might not be exactly for you or what you should do but food combining is definitely something to research if you had some of the similar problems I had.