Every now and again I’m randomly exposed to information that I may have heard of before but didn’t really know much about. Usually it’s by means of a podcast. I was listening to Rogan the other day and the topic of intermittent fasting came up, and since I’ve been wanting to get my eating back under control following the holidays in a way that is relatively easy to manage without having to make a lot of decisions, I’m thinking this might be a good thing to try.

To do it as Rogan suggests, it’s 16 hour fasting periods, so you get an 8 hour window to eat daily. From the bit of extra reading I’ve done, it sounds like 16 hours is considered to be the shortest fasting period. I also noted that a drink with under 50 calories seems to be allowable during a fasting period, though that’s unlikely to affect me as I don’t use sugar or milk in coffee / tea, and so anything I’d drink outside the eating window would be free of calories.

So, the basic idea is to eat your first meal of the day based on when you want to eat dinner. So if I want to eat dinner at 7 PM, I probably am going to eat my first meal at noon, because with an 8 hour window starting at noon, at 8 PM I can no longer eat anything.

I presume that it’s best not to change-up the window too often – especially if you’re wanting to move it earlier – because that’s going to make you have a shorter than 16 hour fasting period, but I haven’t really done any reading about it.

I’ll have some sort of common sense rules that I follow during the week as well… no sugary things like candy / sodas, probably no alcohol during the week – then on the weekends open it up a bit, but stick to the window – and see how things go. This might be just a thing I do for the rest of January, but if it seems to be going well, I’ll likely continue another month. Otherwise I’ll be back on slow carb, which I had been planning to do this month prior to deciding to experiment with intermittent fasting.