I decided that this year I’ll make another effort to bring my body weight down to something that I’m happier with. At 6’1 I’m aiming to drop 22lbs to get to 170lbs within the upper half of my ideal BMI, which I think is right for me.

I attempted this last year but I was on a diet that removed all forms of carbs and I found this very difficult to maintain. The cravings were very strong, it gave me digestion problems and overall I felt like utter crap during the whole attempt so I decided this was not for me. So this year I am taking a different approach.

This time I will be following a programme of intermittent fasting whereby I forego calorie intake for a period of 24 hours, 1-2 times per week, as promoted by one of the key publications on intermittent fasting EatStopEat by Brad Pilon. During fasts I drink water, tea or coffee (without milk and sugar) but at all other times I eat and drink normally, in fact, in the book Pilon recommends maintaining a healthy balanced diet but to explicitly not worry about what you’re eating so you can enjoy your food while still dieting, helping you to keep going.

From my layman’s point-of-view, the theory seems sound. Pilon references a large range of scientific studies on the effects of fasting but most interesting to me was the basic premise that fasting is our evolutionary norm, we are unique in our species’ history in that we have constant easy access to food but our bodies are still attuned to periods of fasting, which is why we are so good at storing excess energy as fat.

Today I am on fast #2, I completed fast #1 on Monday 30th January and so far my experiences have been quite interesting.

Instead of feeling lethargic from a lack of food, as I would expect, I felt quite the opposite. I was energetic for the whole day, more so than usual even with no post-lunch lull I maintained productivity at a critical time while I was working hard on my university assignment.

At the end of the day I weighed myself and I had lost 6lbs since the last record on Wii Fit two days earlier! Pilon tells you to expect this, without digestion you retain less water, there is also less mass in my digestive system, but some part of this is fat loss which I’ve been using up for energy.

I broke my fast with a small glass of orange juice and a light dinner of scampi and salad. I didn’t feel like hitting the fridge hard and this was enough to keep me satisfied. After eating, I noticed that my fingers felt like they could melt steel, it was like I’d just warmed them in front of a fire after a bare-fist snowball fight! I later found the reason for this in the FAQ section of EatStopEat. During fasting, blood is diverted to fat stores leaving less for extremities. After I ate that evening more blood was available to flow into my fingers and so they warmed up rapidly. Knowing this now, on fast #2 I have noticed my fingers do feel colder than normal so I will see if the effect happens again tonight.

Today is my first fast while at work, so I’m countering some well rehearsed routines of breaking for lunch. However, I’ve found that without being led by my stomach, I didn’t feel like breaking for lunch at a strict time, instead I just took a break when it was convenient for my work. This change shows me how much my daily routine is crafted around my eating schedule, probably not for the best either.

Pilon pitches EatStopEat as a lifestyle more than a diet. If you eat sensibly anyway, as I do, you don’t change what you eat but you work fasts into your weekly schedule when they have minimal impact on your day. So if you plan to meet friends for lunch, perhaps schedule it for another day, or start after lunch. I prefer dinner-to-dinner, so I have dinner, skip breakfast and lunch, then start eating again the following dinner time. So you still eat every day which is good for me because I love food, cooking dinner is fun for me, and anything that gets in the way of this is going to be hard to keep up with.

My initial experiences have been very positive; I will continue and report back on my progress as I go on.

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