Intuitive Fasting — The Eating Pattern That Works For Me

As I mentioned in the post where I outline how I finally beat yo-yo dieting, I’ve tried many diets over the years. None of them worked long-term because I was approaching the whole thing incorrectly; I needed to end the war with my body first before I could find an eating pattern that truly worked for me. I would not have been able to get to the place I am at today without that work of introspection first, so I highly encourage you to check out that post before reading this one.

That being said, there was one style of eating i tried that I noticed I actually liked: intermittent fasting (IF). When I did it before though I always ran into the problem of starting a reasonable IF protocol but slowly making it more and more strict when I would hit a wall. This was inevitable since I always felt fat regardless of what I weighed or what I looked like. Eventually, I’d give up on it altogether and go back to the drawing board, usually only after regaining all the weight I had lost and then some though, of course.

So learn from my mistake: don’t choose an eating pattern based on your emotional baggage, you’ll face plant and end up worse off than you were before. A sure sign that you’re doing this is if you’re following a plan that’s too rigid, too restrictive, one that takes up a lot of real estate in your mind or increases your neuroticism. If you don’t see yourself doing it for the rest of your life there’s no point in doing it at all. Drop it now. As I mentioned in my Health Basics post, focusing on providing the inputs your body needs to thrive is what’s most important. If you want to throw in a dinner out or dessert from time to time that’s cool too.

Why Intermittent Fasting?

Intermittent fasting (and fasting in general) have a ton of benefits for the body, most of them due to the hormetic response of the mild stress. If you want to learn more about them I’d recommend you pick up Jason Fung’s book The Complete Guide To Fasting. Besides all the anti-inflammatory, cellular repair, and anti-aging benefits you get from fasting, the main thing for me is that I actually feel good when I’m in the middle of a fast. The long-term health benefits are great, but I know for me to do be able to do it long-term it has to be immediately gratifying (see my habits post to learn why) and that is why I decided to include it in my eating plan. Experiment with it and give your body time to adjust, I suspect you’ll intuitively feel the positive effects working on your body as well.

I fast everyday, usually until around 1PM or 2PM and then have dinner around 8PM. This isn’t a strict eating window: if I get hungry at 11AM I’ll eat, if I’m out with friends and we get a late night snack I’ll definitely eat. I try to ensure I eat enough in my 2 meals so that I don’t get hungry in between meals, but if I want a snack I’ll eat something too. I try to do my most intensive mental work while I’m fasted to take advantage of the sharpness I feel, and sometimes I’m so in the zone that I won’t get hungry until even later. Basically, I allowed my body the time to get accustomed to the fasted state and I just eat when I get hungry. Since I did the work upfront, I am able to tell now when I’m actually hungry or when something triggered a craving. I can still choose to eat something then if I want to, but a lot of times that realization alone makes the craving dissipate as quickly as it came. I can also more easily tell when I’ve had enough and can comfortably leave some food for later.

How to Get Started With Intermittent Fasting

Once you do that work of introspection for yourself as well, if you decide you also want to incorporate some sort of fasting routine into your lifestyle you can do so by taking the following steps, taking as much time as you need between each so you don’t ever feel deprived or hungry:

• If you’re currently eating 3 meals a day + snacks, try to eat enough at each meal so that you don’t feel hungry in between meals for a snack
  • I find that leaning towards lower carbohydrate and higher fat + protein meals helps with this but it might be different for you. For instance, my dad includes a bowl of oatmeal as part of his first meal and finds this keeps him satisfied for longer than if he didn’t
• Once you’re eating 3 square meals a day, begin to push your first meal to later. If you always eat at 8, wait until 8:30. Then push it to 9, 10, 11, etc. in whatever increments feel comfortable until it’s so close to your second meal that you just end up skipping it altogether
  • Note: a lot of people naturally don’t feel hungry in the morning. If you do, there’s a chance you’ve just conditioned your body to expect food and it releases the corresponding hunger hormones in preparation for your usual breakfast time. The good news is that your hormones will adapt over time to your new eating pattern
• Once you’re at 2 meals per day see if you can squeeze the eating window more. Most people start with 8/16, where your eating window is 8 hours. So for example you could eat your first meal at 11 and your last meal at 7
• I’d recommend you don’t go stricter than two meals per day. You can experiment with other protocols though like throwing in a 24 hour fast (my favorite is dinner to dinner) once or twice a week or trying more prolonged fasting a few times a year (I like to do a 3-day fast once per quarter, Jason Fung talks a lot about this). The priority is to make sure you’re eating enough to meet your body’s nutritional needs while taking advantage of the hormonal effects of fasting
• While you’re fasting, add some sea salt to your water. A lot of time the “hunger” you feel while fasting is your body lacking electrolytes. I know it sounds gross but trust me, if your body is craving electrolytes this will actually taste pretty damn good

Fasting might not work for you as well as it did for me, but I encourage you to try it out at least. The benefits it provides are too good to pass up on altogether. Luckily I also found that it allows enough flexibility that I can just eat what’s in front of me until satisfied without worrying about overeating for the day and generally without thinking about it too much; it gets me closer to that state of pure presence I’m looking for.

Bonus: Mindful Eating Tips and Tricks

When’s the last time you took a piece of food and really enjoyed every bite of it? I’m talking about that melt-in-your-mouth, finger-licking, mouth-watering, flavor-overload sensory experience. You know, like how you ate when you were 4. Try it out and let me know how it goes. What you’ll likely notice is that when very mindfully eating something hyper-palatable (and after you’re able to push past all the judgement and toxic mental chatter), the first bite will always taste incredible, the second bite slightly less so but still great, the third even less, and so on. This realization has caused me to leave half my dessert for later just so I can repeat that mouthgasmic experience again. This would’ve never happened before when I was in a war against my body.

In addition to focusing on really eating mindfully, you’re going to want to have a few tricks up your sleeve to account for how your brain and body work and so you can tweak your environment accordingly (see my post on mastering your habits for more on this). You gotta have these because even our culture works against us here: the French report that they stop eating when they no longer feel hungry, not when they’re full, whereas Americans stop when they finish their plate. Check out the book Mindless Eating by Brian Wansink for more on this but I’ll outline the best tips here. With these tips try to pick the top 3 that you can effortlessly follow without any feeling of deprivation:

• Use our tendency to finish the plate to your advantage: when serving yourself, dish out 20% less than you normally would
  • It’s likely that such a small difference will fall under the radar (that’s the point), but if you’re still hungry you can always have more
• Opt for 20% more vegetables on your plate or adopt the “half-plate” rule
  • We use volume more than anything to dictate when we’ve eaten enough; you tend to want to eat the same amount for dinner than you did last night. Increasing the volume of your meals with veggies is a win-win-win
• Keep in mind that you will eat more if you eat from a bigger container, plate, glass, etc. and pour more from a bigger box/container
  • Use smaller plates and tall skinny glasses
    • Short wider glasses means more is poured than tall skinny ones, and even bartenders fall for this illusion (that’s why they have to count their pours)
  • People who are given large popcorn buckets at the movie theater eat more than those given medium buckets, even if they just ate before
• Create friction with highly palatable foods by putting them somewhere hard to reach. See more on this in my Habits post
• Reduce the number of sides you eat (why do you think you eat so much at a holiday dinner or at a buffet?)
• Serve yourself and leave serving dishes in the kitchen. The act of physically getting up to get seconds creates a buffer so you can more mindfully decide if you’re still hungry or not
• Slow down your eating by:
  • Putting your fork down after each bite
  • Eating with your non-dominant hand (I love this one. Pro tip: make sure to set up a splash guard for others in your vicinity)
• Avoid distracted eating. No TV, no radio, no reading magazines. Just you + the food
  • Okay fine, if you are going to eat in front of the TV (it’s okay, we all do it) pre-plan your servings so you have to physically get up if you want more
• Never eat straight from the box or the container, serve yourself a portion and put it away.
• Going with the above, the size of the package = the serving size. If you buy a shareable bag of M&M’s or a Halloween size bag of M&M’s you’re gonna want to finish the package. Same with a 12oz can of soda vs. a 64oz Big Gulp
  • You’ll likely feel just as satisfied when you finish the smaller package than you would with the larger one, especially if you savor each bite
  • If you buy something that isn’t individually portioned, use ziplock bags to portion it out yourself (this trick works great with your kids or husbands too)

Conclusion

This is an outline of what works for me. You’re a different person, so it might not work for you the same way. That’s okay. We’re all just stumbling around trying to figure things out right? Try it out for a month or two and reassess, if it doesn’t feel right then no harm in dropping it.

The most important component here is how it feels. But that also entails unpacking the baggage you have around food and your body first so you know your feelings are pointing you in the right direction and it’s not just a reaction to an emotional wound. You can’t beat your body into submission and expect success. The process of fat accumulation for hard times is something that is baked into our DNA and a key component the survival of our species, so putting yourself through harder times in an attempt to lose the fat is a war you’re always going to lose. To reuse the metaphor of the rider and the elephant from my habits post, you (the rider) may not understand the elephant (any part of your mind/body that’s beyond your conscious control) but you have to learn to work with it. After experimenting with a few different things I learned that my elephant happens to like fasting, so that’s what I’m going to do.

Thanks for reading!