I tried Intermittent Fasting for 30 days - here's what I learned

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Feb 15

It’s a trend, but I’ve been wanting to try it for awhile - Intermittent Fasting. I decided to try the 16/8 method for 30 days to see if it would help improve my sleep and help ease my snacking habits. Here’s how it worked out...

01 WHAT IS INTERMITTENT FASTING?

IF is where you eat for a set period of time and then fast (don’t eat) for the remaining time. There are multiple methods of doing this, but the most popular and the one I did in this challenge is the 16/8 (aka the Leangains protocol) - you fast for 16 hours and eat for 8, usually skipping breakfast.

Before we get too deep into this, I want to clear up some misconceptions about eating habits. If you skip a meal, your body will not enter “starvation mode” and eat excess fat or muscle. That’s not how biology works. If you try Intermittent fasting and eat the exact same amount of calories as you do now, you’re not going to lose weight. Fasting, when done correctly, is perfectly healthy and even has health benefits.

So, what are some of the benefits of fasting?

Of course, if you’re eating fewer calories during your IF challenge, you’re going to probably lose some weight. At this point, the simplest way to explain it is - to lose weight while IF, you need to be burning more calories than you’re eating.

There are more benefits though than just weight loss. Fasting changes the body on a molecular and cellular level, initiating important repair processes and altering your hormone levels. For example, in one study, insulin sensitivity improved causing the subjects to drop their levels of insulin and increase their metabolism.

IF can help your cells repair more effectively, it can help protect your body against disease, it has shown to improve metabolism, you can lose weight when paired with proper diet and activity, it can decrease inflammation and loads of other benefits.

02 THE TOOLS

Because I am doing this challenge publicly, I needed to be able to track how my days went, so I could go back and write it into this blog post. For that, I used Notion. I created a quick table to make notes of my fasting times and what was going on that day, along with what I ate and when. This whole thing was a bit time consuming and a little over-kill, but it actually helped me draw attention to my eating habits more than I thought. I recommend keeping a journal of some sort at the start of your journey so you can find what does and doesn’t work for you. If you want to steal my template in Notion, you can get that here.

I also used the Zero app. It allows you to chose your fasting method and time them out so you can see your progress, get analytics and they have a ton of valuable resources within the app to help you.

03 HOW’D IT GO?

Day One, I forgot that I was supposed to be fasting, and even though I wasn’t hungry, I made myself breakfast at 6:30 am just because I had time before work. This was a really good lesson to start with, though. I realized I eat a lot of the time because it’s when I’m “supposed to” rather than when I’m actually hungry. That evening also happened to be date night, so my husband and I drank some wine up until around 8:15 pm.

I started my timer with the intention of not eating until lunch on day two, but I woke up STARVING. I ended up eating a really big breakfast at 8:40 am for a fasting time of 12 hours, 25 minutes. I felt pretty bad about starting off my challenge without hitting the 16-hour mark, but I realized this was going to take some adjusting and mistakes along the way. I knew I would need to stop eating by 5 pm to hit my goal, so I decided to take the day to prep a little. I planned out what I would eat and when, and I also planned when and what I would eat for my first meal on day three.

Planning my meals really helped. Day 3 I was able to fast for 14 hours, back to 12 hours (due to going out for a birthday and eating dinner later than I had hoped), and 14.5 hours on day 5. Day five I noticed a few key things:

It's much easier for me to eat dinner early than it is to eat breakfast late.
I am ALWAYS hungry when I get home from work. I need to have healthier snacks ready or at least in my mind.
I need to be drinking more water. I need water bottles filled and near me all the time or I don't remember to drink enough.
I need more veggies and fruit each day (I think these need to be my snacks since I have more time to cook when I get home).
If I drank black coffee, I could easily make my fasts 2-4 hours longer. I just LOVE coffee creamer.

Day 6 went great with 14.5 hours and then day 7 my entire family (myself included) got a lovely head cold. Medicine, Poweraid and soup broke my fast early (13 hours) but my small appetite stopped me eating before 6 pm so I actually managed 14.5 hours for day 8. 14 Hours seemed to be my average from then on. I kept trying to hit 16 but either ate too late the night before or just got too hungry to wait any longer.

I found that a lot of my day is actually scheduled for me - more than I realized - my day revolves around other people's schedules. I have to eat breakfast at work before 9 am if I want to be able to eat before lunch. I have to feed my baby earlier than I feed myself, which makes it very hard not to snack on what she doesn't finish. Dinner revolves around my family and they prefer not eating at 3 pm each day (who would've guessed).

Finally on day 13, I switched to black coffee and I hit my first 16 hour fast! (btw, if you're wondering about how tea/coffee/water fit into a fast, I'm going off of this article). After I switched to black or only a couple teaspoons of creamer, I consistently was able to hit between 14 - 16-hour fasts with no issues. From there, my schedule mostly changed depending on morning meetings, having people over for dinners or my family cooking and not eating early enough. For the most part, I was able to hit consistent numbers and around day 17, I started to drop some pounds.

The rest of the challenge seemed to go by super quick once I got in the rhythm of things. I went from an average of 13.2 hrs in the first seven days of fasting, to an average of 15.4h in the last week. It got much easier as time went on and as I began to figure out what habits worked best on different days of the week.

04 WOULD I DO IT AGAIN?

Yes and no. I think this little 30-day challenge was extremely eye-opening to my admittedly sh*t food habits. I did this because I wanted to see if I could cut out some of my bad snacking habits and it did work! I was a lot more aware of my eating patterns and I found myself eating better foods during my eating periods.

Actually sticking to the 16-8 rule was incredibly hard with my family schedule. We love eating meals together and it’s a routine that is really important to us. Instead of the 16-8 schedule, I’m going to continue IF with the circadian rhythm method (only eating when the sun is up). It’s been shown to have similar benefits without such a tight schedule.

Finding a long-term and realistic option is important if I want this to actually result in the benefits I wanted to get from this. Along with CR IF, I’ve started a consistent workout routine - together I think this can really help me balance my diet and maintain my healthy weight for years to come.

When I started this challenge, I was weighing in between 125 lbs and 128 lbs depending on the time of day and my mensural cycle. From day 15 to day 19 my weight fluctuated around 122 to 124. Not a huge jump by any means, but I did start to see my "mommy tummy" shrinking, enough so, that my husband actually commented on it.

During this challenge, I was working out three times a week, but I've been doing that for around 2 months before this and didn't change too much in my routine so I really believe the weight dropped was a direct result of my new eating habits. At the end of the challenge, my weight was ranging from 119 lbs to 121 lbs. That's between 4 lbs to 9lbs of loss - a pretty big number considering I didn't have much weight to lose, to begin with and that this was only a 30-day challenge. I am 5'3" for reference and I weighed a healthy 115 lbs before I got pregnant in 2018.

I think the best things that came from this were;

less snacking, especially on junk like chips, candy, and soda
better sleep, going to bed after 2+ hours of no eating really improved how quickly I was able to fall asleep
weight loss, partially from the better habits, partially from fewer calories, partially from a consistent workout routine
more awareness of how much I eat for social reasons and not because I'm hungry

05 FURTHER RESOURCES

Obviously, I am not a doctor, to be honest, I don’t know much about nutrition at all. I did chat with my doctor about this before starting this challenge and I recommend you do the same. IF should be more carefully considered by women, especially if you are or are trying to become pregnant. IF impacts our bodies differently than men (based on several studies).

Do not jump into this blindly or just because you want to lose weight, it’s not that kind of challenge.

Every situation is different and a challenge like this can be incredibly dangerous for someone with a history of body dysmorphia or eating disorders. Your body needs the proper amount of food to function properly and eating disorders are a serious and life-threating disease. If you or someone you know is showing signs of an eating disorder, there are a ton of resources available here.

If you’d like to do more research about IF and the health benefits to it, please check out some of these smarter-than-me-people: