This title is too clever by half but stick with me and it'll make sense in the end.

I've taken control over my general health in recent years in a way that eluded me most of my life. I want to share my thinking around what has worked for me now and why I could never make it work before in the hope you find some inspiration or interest from this.

For as long as I can remember, I've tried and failed to improve my diet and my relationship with food. I failed to stick at every diet I ever tried after a short amount of time. Each time I tried a new diet I would find myself repeating the pattern of being intermittently consistent; for some time I would be consistent in sticking to the rules of the diet but that commitment would quickly fade and I'd return to an eating free-for-all. I would try another diet again later. Throughout most of my life therefore I had intermittent bouts of consistency when dieting.

Another more common term for this is yo-yo dieting, and it isn't a healthy way to live. 🪀

Why did I fail to stick at these diets? In short, because each required too much of me to keep doing. A diet of this type might ask me to count calories, or map food to points, or log everything I eat, or exclude certain food groups, or only consume shakes. At the heart of all these techniques is a simple premise: "you need to change what you eat", and this didn't work for me because fundamentally I didn't want to change what I eat and so I could maintain consistency for only a short period of time. 

Everything changed when I discovered intermittent fasting, which is where I've experienced prolonged success. Intermittent fasting is where you have an eating window and can eat freely during these hours, but once that window closes you must consume no calories.

A typical intermittent fasting routine is to do all your eating in an 8 hour window; this is called a 16:8 fast since you spend 16 hours of the day fasting and 8 hours of the day allowed to eat. If you want a more impactful fast, you might do 18:6, 20:4 and so on...

The intermittent part is because it is on and off, in a structured predicable pattern, each day.

A typical diet says "you have to change what you eat".

Intermittent fasting says "you have to change when you eat".

With intermittent fasting I can, and do, eat what I want. I snack. I order takeaways. I don't count calories.

Being consistent at intermittent fasting allowed me to shred weight, to the extent that I was losing weight even when doing no exercise at all.

[alt: graph showing weight change over time, separated into 3 sections A, B and C. A is gaining weight. B is losing a lot of weight and C increases rate of weight loss]

A: COVID anxiety causes weight gain
B: This is when I start intermittent fasting, but doing no exercise with it
C: Still fasting each day, I start running again too

Beyond C) I broke the latest weight goal I had set for myself. 🏆

It's been over a year of sticking to intermittent fasting (only pausing it while on vacation) because it's become a habit for me. It has put me in control of my diet and worked wonders for my weight loss. 

Now that I'm roughly where I want to be weight wise, I am little apprehensive that intermittent fasting might actually be too effective at weight loss to continue as I have been doing. I'll probably try reducing my average fasting time down from 18 hours to 16. 

But I can see me continuing with intermittent fasting in some form for years to come. It's made weight loss easy, simple and achievable in every way that other diets promised and failed to deliver.