Some background, I’m from the UK, 23 year old, 6’3 and 32st (448lb or 203kg). Recently I decided enough was enough. After several failed attempts to lose weight I decided to get some therapy about over eating and try something new.
One of the things I came across was IF. Now believe it or not I’ve never been a breakfast eater, I managed to get to an extreme weight through excessive meals and snacking so I found the move to a 16:8 easier than most. Over the last 5 years I’ve gone through periods of losing lots of weight in a couple of months and then falling off the wagon.
This time is different, I’m posting here in the hopes that a generous stranger will hold me accountable to my promise to finally lose all my excess weight. It just seems to me like not eating for 16 hours is not enough to change my life and It’s more important what I eat than when I eat.
Hey brother I had an issue with overeating too just out of habit and laziness on my end just made it worse.
To keep it simple, I use myfitnesspal.com and the app they have and it let’s me track what I eat, but more importantly what I’d recommend is creating how you want your food log to look.
Like the saying goes failure to plan is a plan to fail, you can use the app to put together how you want your meals to be for the day ahead, that way you can hold yourself accountable and see progress and that is something that will motivate to improve more and get more progress and stuff.
It’s all learn as you go kinds stuff but you’ll get it. Stay hydrated and stay strong
Yes, for a lot of people 16 hours of not eating is not enough by itself. If you were doing that anyway and still able to get to your current weight, what you eat and how often you eat is probably going to be way more important than 16 hour fasting. For what it’s worth, 16 hours is like the bare minimum of fasting, and I don’t think you get most of the actual benefits of fasting until you do longer fasts. With 16:8, you will reduce insulin, but it is easy to overeat during the feeding window and if you do so, you will likely never get to any significant fat burning since 16 hours will not be long enough to burn through all the food and glycogen in your body. I would recommend working up to OMAD or longer fasts.
Welcome. I can highly recommend reading The Obesity Code by Dr Jason Fung. It has really helped me to understand my own relationship with food and also how our bodies actually process our food.
Now that I know the mechanics I am making much better food choices and can actually stay on track long term and sustainably.