Other than about 6 weeks of Keto a couple years ago, and a few training diets more than half a life ago, I’ve never really dieted. That said, for over a year and a half now, I’ve tried to practice time restricted eating (also called Intermittent Fasting) five days a week – Sunday to Thursday night.
I have only been doing 14 hours fasting and much of that was sleeping. What it primarily does is restrict my unhealthy snacking after dinner, and delays breakfast, which I’ve never enjoyed preparing and eating.
Covid has messed up my schedule, summer made it worse. My good eating habits that I developed with restricting my eating window have all disappeared. So, along with my wife, we’ve decided to set a strict 5-hour window for eating for the next few weeks. We have only water, and a morning black coffee during our 19 hour no-eating restriction. When school starts I will move to 16-8, increasing my eating window to 8 hours.
It was weird to start this on a holiday to Kelowna. It limited our schedule of wine and cider tasting tours, but we filled our days with hikes and visits to the beach, and neither of us struggled with hunger after day 2. The only oddity was doing a long drive with no snacks.
There is a lot of research being done on the benefits of time restricted eating. I won’t go into it now, but I will say that it has three really positive affects for me:
1. It cuts out unhealthy snacking.
2. It stops me from getting ‘hangry’ – angry when I’m hungry. My sugar levels seem to stay in check and food (or lack of it) doesn’t come with mood swings.
3. It eliminates breakfast, which I don’t enjoy eating. (Breakfast is breaking the night’s fast, it’s not a morning meal time… technically I’m having breakfast whenever I choose to start eating after sleeping.)
I’m less than a week in, and I’m not sure this 5-hour eating window will be enough when I start pushing myself on my morning workouts again… but I’m really happy to have restarted my time restricted eating.
