I’m not telling anyone irl so I wanted to put this energy here. I hope I will be able to post again in a few months with a success. Everyone’s progress pictures are so inspiring!
I’ve been trying IF for a few days but I wasn’t being strict enough with the window I was giving myself and I kept finding loopholes, so now I’m going to stick to a 1 hour eating window.
I have a lot of teas to help me through the fasts! My first goal is to stick to this for three months. I know it won’t be easy, but neither is being unhappy with my weight :P Good luck to all the people reading this on their own journey.
Sorry - I can’t clear the flair! So if I have you here - what time of day would you have your meal? I’m tossing up between breakfast and dinner.
I find dinner easier than breakfast on omad. Reason being is I rarely wake up hungry but know how bad the day would be if there was no more food till the next morning. I would eat about 6/7pm to give food time to digest. Any later than that and I can’t sleep as get too hot digesting an omad meal
It’s always tempting to try to squeeze every last drop of efficiency out of a weight loss intervention (in software engineering there’s the common saying that “premature optimization is the root of all evil” – I’m sure the same can be said for anything) though usually not worth the trouble. Over the long haul the cards are stacked up against us – lack of motivation, plenty of life stressors, addictive foods, society and culture geared toward over-consumption – and the best we can do is settle for the path that offers some benefit for the least perceived effort; the path that, while perhaps not the shortest, is the one that we can stay on almost on auto-pilot 6-7-8 times out of 10.
Personally I have late lunch, at a minimum, 70% of the time. It used to be the one meal that I would consistently have with my family growing up, so more or less an ingrained habit; it tends not to conflict with my daily schedule; and I’ve found it to encourage better food choices, unlike dinner, which I associate with pleasure first and foremost, frequently including things like alcohol or dessert. I don’t really care whether I remain “fasted” (what does that even mean – the first several hours are spent digesting anyway, thus arguably in a “fed” state) for 23 hours daily and “fed” for only one; my eating window routinely slides between 13:00 and 16:00, and the actual meal duration can range from half an hour up to two. What I do find practical and sensible to enforce, nonetheless, is the “single-sitting” principle: When I declare a meal “done”, be it rationally or via satiety, or leave the table, I do my best not to change my mind a minute or hour later – even if the most gourmet dish fell from the sky.