Disclaimer:

Do not try intermittent fasting if you are

• a pregnant woman
• a breastfeeding woman
• underweight person
• a child under 18 years old
• has a medical condition that requires consultation with a doctor

And so it begins

In this post I want to report some interesting consequences of trying to follow Intermittent Fasting regimen to become slimmer and healthier.

For about 10 years, I’ve weighted about 90 kg (198 lb). In 2018 I’ve tried to follow the low carb diet promoted in the The 4-Hour Body book by Tim Ferris, but without any success. Since then I felt no urgency to lose weight and become a slimmer person, but I wanted to do it eventually.

A mere happenstance caused me to discover Intermittent Fasting approach. It turns out that our family doctor advised my wife to read Fast. Feast. Repeat book by Gin Stephens to lower high blood sugar level. I’ve ordered the book on Amazon at my wife request. But to my surprise she didn’t read it. Since I value books a lot and also do not want to waste money on unread books, I decided to give that book a try. Boy, was I surprised. The book was interesting to read and it contained just enough information on the benefits of intermittent fasting and advice on how to start. Gin suggest to try 28-Day FAST Start method to get used to fasting. Indeed, that was the approach I’ve tried. As I write this post, it is the 26th day of the that approach to fasting. In accordance with her advise I am following this regimen

Days	Fasting hours	Eating window hours	Meal type and count
1 – 7	16	8	lunch, dinner
8 – 14	17	7	lunch, dinner
15 – 21	18	6	lunch, dinner
22 – 28	19	5	snack or lunch, dinner

Where:

• Fasting Hours stands for how many hours I do not eat anything except for drinking water, black coffee (no milk or sugar) or tea (no milk or sugar).
• Eating window hours stands for the hours where I have two meals. I try, quite successfully, not to have any snacks between the meals.
• Meal type and count is self-explanatory.

Below I provide some initial results for past four weeks, and the projection for the fifth week that starts on Monday, July 11th.

Where projected values are in Italics.

Week	Fast hours	Eating window hours	Weight	Fat percentage	Waits	Waist to height ratio	BMI
1	16	8	90.6 kg (199.7 lb)	30 %	N/A	N/A	27
2	17	7	87.6 kg (191.8 lb)	28.7 %	100 cm	0.55	26.4
3	18	6	86.6 kg (190.9 lb)	28.3 %	99 cm	0.54	26.1
4	19	5	85.1 kg (187.6 lb)	27.7 %	98 cm	0.54	25.7
5	19	5	84.1 kg	27 %	97 cm	0.53	25.4

Good resources to reference

Gin mentioned in her book a number of valuable resources to reference. I recommend you to check

• Jason Fung, MD website and his book The Obesity Code. I read it and it provides more scientific details of why fasting works and how it works to treat obesity and Type 2 Diabetes. He also authored another book which is quite colorful and interesting at the same time: The Complete Guide to Fasting.
• Prof. Mark Mattson is one of the founding fathers of Intermittent Fasting research and has written recently The Intermittent Fasting Revolution book.