30 Days of Writing,Day 10: On Intermittent Fasting

I’ve been intermittent fasting over the last month or so, and the results have been dramatic: I’ve lost 10 pounds in the last 6 weeks.

Disclaimer: I’m not a doctor, so try this at your own risk!

This is done without losing fitness as I can somehow bike faster, and I’ve been doing some core exercises: I actually feel stronger, despite the weight loss!

My intermittent fasting schedule varies from day to day, but I try to keep my eating window within 6-8 hours: during most days, I start breaking my fast at 2-2:30pm, and eat my last meal at around 8-8:30 pm.

It’s highly impractical to eat 3 meals in that short time frame, so what usually happens is that I just eat 2 meals (lunch and dinner), which somehow saves me the time I spend to prepare and eat that third meal.

While it was absolutely brutal during the first few days, I had one powerful thought that keeps me going: “You won’t die.” (Just look it up online, but the world record for fasting is 382 days, so think about that the next time you tell yourself that you’ll die if you don’t get food.)

It’s a great way of looking at the big picture: the only thing that’s really standing between you and losing weight is the discomfort of hunger.

In order to get started with intermittent fasting, you’ll need a great system to make sure that it’s easy to follow the schedule: make it really hard to eat in the fasting window (in our case, we have very few food in the house at a given time), and make it really easy to eat in the eating window (I’m not a foodie, so I just east the same few meals over and over).

Overall, I’d say the past month’s experiment has been a success-I think I’ll be practicing intermittent fasting for the rest of my life!