The Most Decadent Intermittent Fasting
If you want to be losing weight, when are you losing that weight starts being an important question. If there is zero time in a day when you are losing weight, then you won’t lose weight. If the process is not running then the process is not running.
That’s where intermittent fasting comes in. You have a set period of time when you are not eating anything, and so you are burning some amount of stored fat in that time. If you do this every day, this means that there is some time every day during which you are burning fat. Over the course of a month, this adds up.
There are people who say that intermittent fasting does not matter — calories in / calories out is all that matters. I don’t really buy that. If you keep giving your body something new to burn, you are starting up a system, and thrashing whatever fat-burning process would have been running. And then for the people that just do low calories — often the way they do that is by having just one meal a day, or black coffee and breakfast and then lunch as a way of cutting out all the dinner calories — and that leads to really serious intermittent fasting just structurally, so they are doing calories in / calories out plus intermittent fasting.
I find that intermittent fasting can be very effective, and one of the easiest habits to maintain for a long time. Not eating late at night helps you sleep, and so there are additional benefits to it along with losing weight. The issue is when you get stressed, or work late at night, or are stressed and forget to eat earlier and so have to eat later.
But if you have an “opener” and a “closer” it is a lot easier — if you know what you are starting your day with and closing your day with. For me lately it’s been black coffee in the morning, then a walk, then a nurri protein shake, and then I close the day with a nurri protein shake. I am lucky in that I generally love milk and given these are augmented protein milk I just love them also. If it wasn’t a protein shake I’d just be drinking plain milk, but the macros in these are better (150 calories, 30g protein).
If you know what you are opening and closing with, even when you are stressed you stick to it, because it’s a habit and it’s fun.
After you are closed, you don’t have to be austere in your fasting. You can actually be extremely decadent, and that makes it a lot easier.
A good way to do intermittent fasting is to have drinks on hand that you like a lot, so that you are still hanging out drinking tasty things, but those things do not break your fast. You can even have a whole set of rituals that you do in fancy, different cups. You can have a flight of sparkling water!
In the morning this can be black coffee. If you have some black coffee, then go on a walk, this does a lot for the whole fasting thing because now you are doing a fasted low-impact workout, which is great for the metabolism.
In the evenings, you can have all kinds of decaf teas, and you can have as many as you want. You can also have as many flavored waters as you want.
The point is instead of the evenings being nothing and just being void of non-eating, it’s a whole continuing aesthetic space that feels like continuous joy and snacking. It’s just a myriad of zero-calorie drinks. You still get to have the “events” of eating.
The way this would work is when you are eating your “last thing,” you pretty consciously consider it as your “last thing” of the day, and enjoy it, and then mentally close yourself off from food and go into a drinks mode. And the drinks mode is fun!