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Intermittent Fasting: How to diet with little struggle

February 18, 2016 at 7:09 am, Posted by NuPasta

Intermittent Fasting (related to 5:2 Diet, or Alternate Day Fasting) was popularized by the British physician Michael Mosley in 2012*. In essence, the method calls for two separate fast days in a week. On a fast day, you consume a quarter the calories you usually take in. On regular days, you eat what you normally do.

I tried Intermittent Fasting for 10 weeks and was impressed. Here are some of my thoughts.

Weight watching requires will-power. Regular weight watching programs imply will-power 24/7 and that continuous tension is hard to bear. Intermittent Fasting means you will only need to watch what you eat for a short period of time (Intermittent tension) making it more manageable. When I wake up on a fast day, I mentally tell myself “it is game day” and I am on game mode. I treat the calorie-watch like a sport…but just for that one day, knowing that when I wake up the next day I can relax the tension and eat normal again. I find this intermittent tension much more manageable.

There is a parallel development in long distance running. In recent years, it has become popular that you run for 10 minutes, walk for 1 minute, and repeat this cycle. The idea is that this breaks up the psychological and physical tension so the runner is overall more relaxed. With the 1 minute breaks, many runners run faster when they run and actually improve the overall time (run-walk combined).

On a separate blog I will give some figures related to Intermittent Fasting.

*This highly recommended one hour video produced by the BBC launched the new weight management method in England (http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xvdbtt_eat-fast-live-longer-hd_shortfilms).

Read Part II: Intermittent Fasting II: Numbers

Read Part III: Intermittent Fasting III: How hard is fast day?