Intermittent Fasting: It Works!
I went from 207 lbs at the end of 2017 to 188 lbs today. I have never found a diet more intuitive in its benefits or easier to follow.
Kicking Sugar to the Curb
2017 started with the same goal as years prior: get in shape! And in most years the high of a New Year's resolution would wear off by week three. This year was different. It started with the decision to skip sugar in coffee. This would be attempt number 1,034.
You see, I was drinking 3–4 cups everyday with 4–6 packets of sugar in each cup! Thats a lot of sugar and I knew I had to stop. But hey, it was Sugar in the Raw, so it must have been healthy 🙄.
Surprisingly, after a month and half I got used to it and I didn’t miss the sugar. What helped was shifting my mindset to seeing sugar as unhealthy. Or, maybe it was sheer will power. By the time March rolled around my weight was around 198 lbs. A good 9 lbs could be attributed to my sugar addiction. This was just the motivation I needed to keeping improving my health. Something was working.
Plateau
I stayed the course and also reduced dessert consumption to special occasions. I even added workouts 3 times a week. But by May it was clear this wasn’t enough. I plateaued at 198. Increasingly discouraged, I looked for a new and more manageable diet.
I have tried Atkins before with great success but it is hard with a young family. Paleo is interesting but requires a lot of effort and fails the young family manageability test for me. Our will power reservoir is likely limited and the best way to manage it is by drawing as little from it as possible.
Intermittent Fasting (IF) struck me as the perfect diet. It was easy to implement and aligned with my existing habits. I was already someone who ate breakfast more for social reasons than hunger and I could go long periods without eating. I just needed to formalize this into a regular system.
Intermittent Fasting
On IF you eat normally but you have extended periods with no food. Typically this would be 18–24 hrs including sleep. If your last meal ended at 8pm and you were doing an 18hr fast, you would eat your next meal at 2pm the next day. There are all kinds of variation on this including people who will fast for upto 3 days. Some people like Herschel Walker only eats one meal a day everyday! Perpetually fasted yet shredded.

The most common formula that I’ve seen is the 5:2 split which is where I started. You eat normally most days except 2. This doesn’t have to be two consecutive days. You can drink as much water and coffee as you want — sans sugar. Many proponents argue against the use of cream in coffee, but I have had no problems.
You want to ease into this if you are totally new to fasting. I would recommend starting by skipping breakfast and eating a lite natural snack like nuts for lunch. Avoid anything with sugar including fruits. For me, by week 3 I had no problems waiting till dinner for my first meal.
As of late August, I’m down to 188. That's another 10 lbs and close to my target of 185. 2011 is the last time I was anywhere near this range. I have a lot more energy and mental focus. Even with the recent failure of my startup, I feel quite optimistic and positive. My pants size went from 38 to a comfortable 34. Had I known this experiment would work so well I would have joined a proper gym and kept track of physical strength improvements.
Not sure if this good, but I can sprint uphill (100m elevation) 130 meters in 24 seconds. Yes, it is the very convenient street in front of my house. It takes very little willpower to go out and run up my own street 😆. This is great considering that I wouldn’t have even bothered trying last year.

The Latest Fad
You might be thinking this another fad diet. Maybe so. But what got me thinking otherwise was the idea that most people only got access to 3 meals a day after industrialization.

Even still, predictable access to food was only possible after the invention of agriculture 10,000 years ago. Meanwhile, Homo Sapiens have been roaming the earth for at least 300,000 years. Not to mention the millions of years of evolution from primate to Man. You don’t have to be a scientist to correctly guess that we are adapted to caloric variability. What are the odds early Man had access to 3 meals a day? You already know the answer.
Beyond the commonsensical adaptation argument are the increasingly scientifically backed studies. This is from my favorite twitter follow on fitness:
You can read more about the science all over the internet. You’ll find claims about improved cognitive abilities, lowered risk of type 2 diabetes, and even anti-ageing benefits. Many of the results shown in IF are also found in calorie restriction diets. In fact, the basic mechanics are the same. The big difference being that on Intermittent Fasting you only feel hungry sometimes whereas restricting calories everyday will leave you feeling miserable.
Still, this might be a fad and Homo Erectus had 3 square meals everyday. Who knows. Those guys had a much longer run than us at 2 million years.
I’m posting this publicly to help me stay on track and as an example of one diet that seems to be working. Everyone is different and your results may vary.
