A while back I posted about staying on track with healthy eating. I’ve been trying and failing at that for the past couple of years. So when a friend suggested Intermittent Fasting I thought this was something I could manage.
Intermittent fasting has been popularised by Dr Michael Mosely who came up with the approach after experimenting on himself with several dieting approaches. In a nutshell Intermittent Fasting involves restricting calorie intake (for me that’s around 600 calories) on two non consecutive days out of seven. Mosley stresses that this isn’t a licence to binge eat on the other five days. There is a handy app to help you work out your ideal calorie intake on your non fasting days and to track your progress. The Fast Beach app only tracks total calories per day and doesn’t help you to work those out from individual foods or recipes. You’ll need to use something like myfitnesspal to help with calculating the calories then enter them into the Fast Beach app.
So my plan is to fast Mondays and Thursdays and try and stick to around 2000 calories in the non fasting days. I’ll keep you posted!
Update after week one
Day one wasn’t so bad. I found having a hard and fast rule about food really helped – there are no grey areas to trip you up so decision making is easy. Especially with all the sugary goodies on offer around the office!
I had Bircher muesli for breakfast then nothing until dinner – which was brown rice and ratatouille. The rest of the family were eating vegetarian lasagne (one of my faves) and that was a little rough. I think I might have caved if my wife hadn’t reminded me what I was trying to achieve. I had periods of hunger but they always passed. Drinking lots of water which helped with the hunger pains
I knew what to expect on my second feting day – Thursday – which made it a little easier. Thursday is also a busy day for me so it was easy to distract myself whenever I felt hungry.
Overall I didn’t feel too bad and strangely I’m looking forward to my fasting days next week. My energy levels have been fine and I don’t think I’ve been particularly cranky – at least no more than usual.
One of the lessons I learned was not to drink too much coffee. I found this quite hard on my (empty) stomach. So Thursday I’ll be sticking to green tea and water!
Something I’d like to do better next week is to track calories on the non fasting days.
theheartcoach 