Fuhh, I’ve survived and that has nothing to do with another day without coronavirus. I’ve survived my first 6 days of my new how our Snack Executive calls it “fad diet”. Partially, true but a long story short last Sunday I started my new experiment with moral support from The Jar Healthy Vending team which is known as intermittent fasting. If you consider yourself a member of our pro-healthy lifestyle club than you’ve probably heard about this type of fasting.
Intermittent fasting is a currently trendy method of dieting which in simple words means having the cycled periods of fasting and eating. Scientists say that this method can help to increase your metabolism by up to 14% which would then result in your weight loss, especially that you body would learn the times when you eat and the times when you fast. There many options if you chose to go for this type of a diet with those three being the main ones:
8/16
Will try to explain the most popular and tell you more on the one I chose. So, let’s start from the basics which is the method called 8/16. What does this actually mean? It is related to periods that you choose to eat and periods that you choose to fast. Just so you know it means 16 hours – FAST and 8 hours – EAT. Not vice versa guys, I wish it would be that easy. It does not matter much which hours you decide to fast or eat but what matter as in any healthy diet is consistency. If you’ve set the plan for you where you eat from 10 am to 6 pm, it means that there is no 9pm glass of wine. Even if it is a liquid it does have sugars and calories in eat. The only drinks you can have apart from water on you fast periods are tea and black coffee with no added sugar.
5:2
Second method people use on intermittent fasting is called 5:2 diet. In this case, the difference is that you eat normally for 5 days per week, but you only consume 500-600 calories on 2 other days. Don’t forget that the day are non-consecutive, so no need to starve yourself and then fill yourself up with tons of greasy food.
Eat-stop-eat
This is where the real fasting comes in place, where you actually voluntarily saying ‘no’ to food, alcohol and soft drinks for a day or two. In practice that would mean no food from you today’s dinner to you tomorrow’s dinner. This method is definitely used by more intermediate and advanced practitioners of intermittent fasting rather than beginners.
My experience
Time to share my personal experience with intermittent fasting. As you probably already guessed I decided to start my fasting journey with what they call the easiest one for beginners: 8/16 plan. As a tech savvy I downloaded one of those fasting apps and went straight in.
I had my first fasting period last Sunday so it’s been about 6 days of my experiment so far. I can say that the first day was the hardest so far as I used to eat early before starting this diet. Now my eating time is from 10am to 6pm which perfectly suits with my work schedule from 11am to 7pm. I have my breakfast at home and then both lunch and dinner at work. As I come back quite late, I usually just have a tea and go to watch a movie or some new series.
In means of weight loss, I have seen a drop of one kg in this 6 days but this is quite a normal weekly change for my body so I cannot say I’ve seen much progress so far. What it definitely does is training you how to be consistent about what you do. This can be a keystone consistency habit that hopefully will help other small habits like going to the gym arise.
I will keep you posted on my progress in two weeks and wish me luck to resist some after 6pm glasses of wine.