I'm trying a new thing. Yes, again. This time it's intermittent fasting. You basically choose a "feeding window" each day and only eat during that time. I've chosen 4pm-midnight. This fits in with my natural tendency to pig out before bed anyway, something I've never been able to control, so I figure why not control myself around that?
This is day 8. So far it's actually going really well. One nice feature of this approach is that you can eat whatever you'd normally eat during the feeding time. Because your stomach is only so big, you don't eat twice what you'd normally eat. Researchers find people generally only eat 10-15% more, so when combined with not eating the other half of the day, you end up in a 30-40% overall reduction.
Technically I'm not strictly fasting since I allow tea with milk and sugar. Without the sugar that would be fine, but I know myself and I know that constant denial will blow up in my face. I considered it this morning and it was unthinkable. But still, the few calories in a cup of tea shouldn't throw me off my game, and besides I was drinking it anyway before.
The effect on cravings has been interesting. Last night, I had Chinese food. Later I had a craving for chips, but it passed and didn't come back. Usually when I deny my cravings, they're back 20 minutes later, and keep coming back until I give in or go to bed (or they give up and turn into different cravings... "Fine, you won't give me chips? Maybe you just can't find chips. Cake! I want cake!").
But I think what appeals to me most, and makes me feel differently about it than other things I've tried, is that it actually works with what I do naturally, and just modifies my other time around it. I've never had trouble controlling myself and eating healthy throughout the day, but night time has always been my downfall. That's definitely indicating more of a chemical thing I think, since that seems to be hormone related rather than boredom or some kind of psychological trauma, both of which would be semi-persistent (I'm as bored during the day as I am at night if I don't go to school).
Obviously the health people who promote IF also recommend that when you do feed, you consume healthy foods. That goes without saying. But if I had that kind of self control in the first place, I wouldn't need the fasting! Luckily, lots of other proponents of IF say that it doesn't really matter... You can still lose weight and slim down by fasting during the majority of the day, and also get these benefits in terms of insulin resistance and human growth factor whatever. Obviously the healthy eating just makes you, you know, healthier.
And I do want to also get healthier, not just lose weight. It's no fun feeling like crap all the time. So I'm still going to try to get myself off junk food all together. I look at this as being more of a way to manage that. I may or may not need IF the rest of my life, depending on whether or not I can break the addiction to SOS. And I guess that's sorta what got me interested in it, because I knew I wasn't going to the True North Health Centre to do a 40-day fast, but it seemed there must be shorter fasts you could do at home. And then I learned that you can do much shorter daily fasts and get pretty much the same benefits as doing longer fasts a couple times a year. In fact, because it's not sporadic, I wouldn't be surprised if it's even more beneficial. I mean, you build muscle by repeatedly lifting small weights and making small tears in your muscle... not by occasionally lifting massive weights and tearing your muscles right apart!
And while I hate "this is how our ancestors ate" arguments, I can be dead certain that this is a lot more how my ancestors ate than what I was doing previously, i.e. gorging myself all day every day, or even eating normally all day and then only gorging myself at night. The results are pretty obvious that I'm not meant to eat this way!! And it stands to reason that whole plant foods are more healthful than animal products, to say nothing of junk food. So to that end, I'm also going to shoot for plant-based at least every other day. That way I won't go crazy out of my mind missing things like pizza and chinese food, but I'll be eating really well the vast majority of the time.
