For those of who follow me on Twitter might know I started Intermittent Fasting (IF) last year, approximately in August.

I started Intermittent Fasting because I wanted to lose weight. The Numbers page even talks about the target weight I want to achieve. While I haven’t reached the target goal as of yet IF did bring out a lot of positive changes in me.

Once I started intermittent fasting, I quickly lost 2KGs in a week and that motivated me to continue with the diet. Until that point, I tried a bunch of diet plans including Keto but nothing worked. While Keto, if you check on Youtube, works for most of the white people out there, it didn’t work for me for cultural reasons. First and foremost, it’s really difficult to socialize and be on a Keto diet in India. It just isn’t possible. Sourcing Keto diet is another big challenge. Working 14-15 hours a day requires you to outsource most of the mundane tasks like cooking food and I just couldn’t figure out how to get it outsourced. Keto was just way too much work for me.

I started off with a 16:8 IF plan where I would skip breakfast, and while initially it was difficult, my body quickly adjusted to the lifestyle change. I say lifestyle because I’ve come to realize a diet isn’t something that you do a few weeks and then get back to your normal eating habits. You have to stick to the new lifestyle as your body and diet too requires maintenance.

Change in lifestyle

After consistently following 16:8 diet for seven months, I’ve decided to storm it out a little. Last week I attempted my first 19:5 where you fast for 19 hours and have an eating window of 5 hours. Why do I want to attempt it? Because I needed a new challenge.

I’m so used to the 16:8 diet, I don’t feel hunger pangs at all now, except for days when I’m taking a red-eye flight. We are creatures of habit, it becomes easy if you do it enough number of times. The last time I checked my weight, I’m still at 62KGs but at this point, this is no longer about losing weight. In fact, I’ve lost fat around my stomach but I haven’t lost weight. Go figure 🤷‍♀️

The more I read about how our body functions, the more I’m convinced that we are overeating. Our body doesn’t really require the number of meals that we eat. The energy resource that we don’t need gets converted into fat as reserve resource and we keep adding to that reserve resource all the time instead of just refueling it.

Coming back to my 19:5 diet, it was incredibly difficult. Once I crossed the 16-hour point, my body decided to give up and started roly-polying like a 7-year-old for a toy. It helped that I had scheduled concalls with clients at work to divert my attention. I decided to do one this Saturday as well, but just couldn’t as I didn’t really have any distractions. I gave up an hour after the 16 hours fasting period. I’m sure, my body will come around and I don’t want to stress it out a lot and might increase the fasting window slow and steady over a period of time.

Have you tried Intermittent Fasting?