SAP TechEd events are known for their extraordinary tasty food and beverage. There is a variety of snacks, excellent food for lunch and dinner, culinary specialties prepared according to regional recipes and of course sweets. You can grab street and fast food when you are on the run but also take the time and sit down to enjoy the taste. For every diet, you will find the right food. And at the evening parties, there are usually even more international culinary specialties.
A side-effect is, that you might gain a little weight. Usually, this is not the problem. IMHO the three or four days shouldn’t matter if you have a healthy life at the rest of the year. But according to my experience, this is not the case for many people in the IT business. We are working too long, stay too long at our computers and are exposed to stress at work. Many of us are on the road and have to eat quickly or at different times a day. Some of us have chocolate and other sweet in their offices and enjoy occasional “sugar highs”.
And this is where the problem starts. As a consequence, I chose to get a more healthy life-style and Intermittent fasting worked for me well. This is an umbrella term for different variants. Some people are fasting on some special days a week where I prefer to eat only in a different time slot – say 6 hours a day. Since I travel a lot I found out that during working days sometimes an 8-hour time slot is more feasible. And the rest 16 to 18 hours a day I only drink water or tea. For me, this turns out to be no real restriction unless I eat sweets. Sweet cause “sugar highs” and they cause ravenous appetite. So I also gave up sweets. This is not so difficult, too, because after a while the sense of taste changes and no I found sweetened food and beverage in most cases much too sweet. For me, this kind of diet works. Without it, I tend to eat outside meals and even some snacks late at night. And it seems to me that the mind is calmer with “sugar highs”.
I have to admit that I was skeptical at first because intermitted fasting seems to be very trendy and many people created a hype. So please don’t understand me wrong: I am no “intermitted fasting” evangelist. I am only want to lose some weight.
Now I have the challenge that I want to continue this kind of diet during SAP TechEd. I think I will eat my first meal at noon and eat in a six or maybe eight-hour time frame. As usual, I will abstain from sweets and sweet food.
These are my plans for the next week. So what do you think? Are you also on a diet? What is your strategy? I would love to hear from it.
