This past week was a biggie for Holidays!  Christmas and New Year’s Eve all in one!  Lots of celebration; and I’ve made it quite clear that food is a central part of celebration to me.  They’re hand-in-hand!  Because of all the celebrations, I wasn’t 100% at hitting my 18 hour goal daily.

Because we have a celebration on Christmas Eve (which is of course the day before Christmas Day), I am unwilling to do a down day leading up to an Up Day on Christmas!  What does this mean?  I simply have a shorter fast in between Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.  Was I bothered? Absolutely not!

I enjoyed both days, both sets of food and I rest easy knowing the occasional shift isn’t going to end my success.  I am able to enjoy the occasional shift from my normal schedule because I have learned to embrace flexibility in my fasting lifestyle.  Plus, I trust that what I do on the normal basis is more important the the occasional shift.

My fast (exact details shown below) on Christmas was only about 15 hours.  I didn’t even expect to get this much of a fast, but my kids slept in until 8:30 on Christmas morning!  (Truly, this was a shock, I have a 6 year old!!  My 11 and 12 year old actually were the first to wake).

This gift of sleep meant everything, including the breakfast coffee cake started later than I figured.  No sweat, I enjoyed black coffee during the gifts and eventually, the blueberry lemon coffee cake was done.  I had a giant piece to open my window.  It was so good.  My husband, Matt, prepared it the day before and had it ready to bake in the morning.

The rest of my eating window was full of meatballs, cheese, mashed potato bowls (think KFC copycats) and a Christmas cookie or two.  All-in-all, my eating window was just shy of 8 hours.  I was full (in belly and heart!) and ready to fast on.

One gift we got for Christmas was refillable popcorn buckets.  So we broke those in to see Avatar 2.  Not exactly my type of movie, but I like to go to the movies (or anywhere, I like to be ‘out!’). I don’t always get concessions, but did this day.  No regrets.- except it was how I opened my window.  That wasn’t the best idea and the movie was so long.  I will avoid opening my eating window with movie theater popcorn and root beer in the future.  From now on, I’ll break it with more substance.

My longest fast of the week was leading up to NYE!  We didn’t do anything fancy, just games and snacks with my kiddos at home.  But even without fancy, we still had a good time.  I was just sure to get in one more long fast before the year ended.  For food we had pizza (kids’ request) and we each picked a snack to have on our island for the evening.  You can see our choices in this grocery haul.

I hope you enjoyed this past week too.