My Intermittent Fasting Experience
This is the 7th installment of Kayla’s Quick Reads, a series of posts designed to be read from top to bottom in 5 minutes or less.
You can read the other posts in this series here.
Earlier this year, I decided to try intermittent fasting after feeling like I had hit a plateau with workouts and weight management. According to Wikipedia, intermittent fasting is an umbrella term for various eating diet plans that cycle between a period of fasting and non-fasting over a defined period. Intermittent fasting is under preliminary research to assess if it can produce weight loss comparable to long-term calorie restriction. I promise it sounds a lot scarier than it is. In fact, most of us already fast intermittently. I’m an avid 8 hours of sleep per night kinda girl, and I don’t eat until about an hour after I wake up. So my body was already accustomed to an 8.5-9 hour fasting period. By no means was this supposed to be a lifestyle change, just something to do to keep my body on its toes (and being able to write about it was just the cherry on top).By voluntarily submitting to an absence of food for long periods during the day, the body transitions from burning sugar for fuel to burning fat (source), and that ultimately leads to weight loss.
There are a few different kinds of intermittent fasting. There’s the 5:2, where you eat as usual five days per week and fast for two days. There’s the fasting for 24 hours 1-2x per week option, the alternate day fasting option (fasting every other day), and the 16/8 method, which is what I did. I fasted for 14-16 hours per day and had a “food window” of 8-10 hours per day.
The first few days were tough (as I expected) mainly because my body just wasn’t accustomed to it. I usually eat medium size meals for breakfast, lunch, and dinner and have small snacks between the meals. After my body adjusted, which took about 4 days, intermittent fasting became much easier and I wasn’t dying during the 14-16 hours where I wasn’t eating.
In terms of results, I wish that I could say that I lost weight but unfortunately, that wasn’t the case.
For whatever reason, intermittent fasting didn’t help me to drop pounds like it does for other people and that’s okay. I didn’t see any improvement in my overall energy, but I didn’t see a decline either. This was basically just an experiment! It was fun to try out something new and challenge my body to function a little differently.
Have you tried intermittent fasting or are you considering it?