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Sustainable approach is just something that you are able to keep up in the long run. A crash diet is not sustainable, for example; like if you did 500 calories per day every day you would soon have to stop, or if you decided that going from being completely sedentary to working out for 4 hours every day is your chosen approach, that would also not be sustainable.
Your choice of intermittent fasting is actually super sustainable because it’s flexible - doing some days as OMAD, some days as 18:6 would be a good way to ease in. Sustainable is just whatever process works for you that you can keep up in the long run 😊
I take it to mean that you should manage your expectations.
Motivation is a depletable resource and therefore it is a lot easier to be successful in any kind of endeavour over the short term than over longer time frames. This is why psychological approaches to weight loss generally involve small achievable goals that do not require a lot of motivation to achieve. As you develop new habits, new objectives are introduced. This is what I would describe as a sustainable approach.
It’s true that many people have been successful in losing weight by intermittent fasting. But you can bet that like any other weight loss program, there are far more failures than successes. Although I am an advocate of intermittent fasting because it is helpful in reversing insulin resistance, my personal belief is that making sudden drastic changes is setting yourself up for failure (I don’t mean you specifically). I recommend that people start really small by simply sticking to three meals per day with zero snacking in between for some weeks. For many people even that is too difficult to achieve. With that in hand, I suggest trying a 12:12 window for some time - still without snacking.
Unfortunately, most people are impatient and jump right into omad. They may be able to do it for a while because at first they have a large pool of motivation to draw from. But I suspect after a few weeks, the number of people sticking to it starts dropping like flies.
I realize this has become a bit of a rant and goes beyond your initial questions. But what the heck, I’ve been wanting to say this for a while.
Anyways good luck to you! Sounds like you’re on a good path so far.