I’m a 41yo male and I was in great shape before the pandemic. I’m trying to lose some of the weight I’ve gained. Any advice is appreciated!
To get momentarily pedantic, intermittent fasting isn’t a diet, it’s just a restriction of when you consume food.
Do you find you don’t really care about eating not long after you wake up? or find yourself forcing it down because you feel “expected” to eat in the early hours of the morning? Consider just not eating, and hold out until noon-ish when you’d normally have lunch.
Personally, I tend to eat between 2pm and 10pm and some times I end up going till after 3pm before I break my fasting, so it’s not like I ever feel obligated to eat something at 2:01pm.
Find a window that you think you could stick to. A popular one, like what I’m using is 16:8, so 16 hours of fasting, including sleep time, and 8 hours of available time to eat things.
Others do 18:6, 20:4, etc. Some people do 5 days “normal” eating, and 2 days of 25% of their normal caloric intake for a couple days. Lots of options to meet your needs, and you don’t need to stick to the same hours every day.
Some just start skipping meals and eliminate all snacking between meals.
Some prepare the body in advance for a while, by reducing carbs and processed food types.
I would check out the first few episodes of a podcast called The Fasting Method, to quickly get the basic info covered.