Intermittent Fasting

I first discovered intermittent fasting around 20 years ago, although back then I had no idea what it was called, or even that it actually had a name. I simply found that my body was happier if it wasn’t being stuffed with food from morning to night.
In those days, my intermittent fasting took the form of breakfast and dinner, with nothing in between. My body responded well to this routine, and it also had the benefit of freeing up a chunk of time in the middle of the day when I would otherwise have been preparing and eating lunch.
However, it ran totally counter to the advice of the “experts”, who said that eating small meals throughout the day was the way to go. The younger me was a bit more inclined to listen to “experts” than the older, more cynical me is, so I gave up my two meals a day routine and tried to cram in the six small meals they wanted me to eat.

SIX SMALL MEALS DID NOT WORK FOR ME!

Firstly, it meant that virtually my whole day was taken up with food. I love cooking, but this was ridiculous.
Secondly, I found it almost impossible to make a small meal interesting. There is simply not enough scope for ingredients. I either had to cook a larger meal, divide it in half and reheat the second half later – not very appetizing and doesn’t work for everything – or settle for bland.
In practical terms, I ended up eating six larger meals, which was definitely not what the doctor ordered for weight loss.
So in the end I gave up and retreated to the “standard” three meals a day. A few times over the years I tried the two-meal regime, but it never seemed to work the same, and always life got in the way and I ended up back with three meals a day.
Now I have resumed an intermittent fasting lifestyle, but different from my previous one. I have now totally dismissed the “experts” insistence that breakfast is essential (after all, these are the same “experts” who told us that we had to be low fat everything, and look where that got us.) I really don’t feel like food first thing in the morning, and I don’t see the point of eating just because I “should.” My first meal is now around 1pm. I might have a small snack around 3pm, then dinner is timed to finish no later than 7pm. That means that I am fasting for around 18 hours each day. However, it takes between 8 and 12 hours for the body to digest each meal, so that means that my body is in a fasted state for between 6 and 10 hours.

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