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This morning, for the first time in at least 5 years, probably more, I weighed less than 80 kg (79.7 kg, in fact). Also for the first time, Wii Fit labeled my BMI as “ideal” instead of “overweight”, since it went below 25.0.
Intermittent fasting (IF), so far, works. And the best part is that, for the rest of the week, I can eat normally.
Like the previous two times, after 24 hours of fasting I wake up not feeling hungry; in fact, it’s 11 AM and I haven’t eaten anything solid yet (I will do so at lunch, of course).
I’m beginning to agree with the IF advocates when they say that the food and diet industry has convinced most of the Western world that “you need 6 meals a day”, that “being hungry is unbearable and bad for you”, that “if you go more than a couple of hours without eating you’ll feel weak and light-headed”, that “no way I could go an entire day without food; I’d faint”, and so on. I’m no expert (far from it – I’m a computer guy, not a nutritionist or a doctor), but, like I’ve said before, I have the “soul of a scientist”, and a scientist doesn’t take things on faith, or on “everybody knows”; I wanted to test things out for myself, and, so far, the results have been exactly the opposite of what “popular wisdom” tells me. In fact, they almost sound too good to be true.
As I said, I test things out; this is just my second week of IF, and my plan was to try this out for a month (until the end of April); if, in the end, I don’t feel as good as I do now, or I develop some health problem, I’ll stop, of course. But if I hadn’t done this, I’d never know, so, even if the test went badly, it would still have increased my knowledge, which is always a good thing. But, so far, so good.
Just for fun: have you thought about what would happen to the world’s economy if everyone in the world started eating just 5 days a week? Now that would be a crisis… so, naturally, there are vested interests in perpetuating the “need 6 meals a day, can’t ever feel hungry” belief.
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Tags: Intermittent Fasting
Most people misunderstand the 6 meals a day diet plan. It’s not an all you can eat quest, it is a way of people controlling what they eat in a way that make them more aware of what they eat and how they eat. When you have 6 meals a day that means that you must eat smaller portions of food and drinks. For example, it means that for lunch and dinner you’ll have soup and fruit and that before you go to bed you drink a glass of milk or have a yogurt, not that you’ll eat a steak and chips with some veggies and two hours later you’ll be having scrambled eggs. By doing so it is expected that you will be having all the nutrients and vitamins you need in a balanced diet.
The fasting thing might work for you to lose a few kilos, however you aren’t having a balanced diet and that might have severe consequences regarding your health. You’re not eating properly because you’re not having a balanced diet of vitamins and proteins. That is the major problem with most diets. People do lose weight but they’re not getting a balanced diet.
The best way to lose weight, keep fit and healthy is by losing more energy than the one you’re getting by eating i.e. doing exercise and eating less (smaller amounts of food).
Thanks for the comment.
However, I think you’re misunderstanding me; I don’t think that the 6-meals-a-day-thing is a license to eat all you can. 
I understand perfectly that you’re supposed to eat small doses. What I wonder is how good an idea that is.
You’re also assuming that my diet is unbalanced, when you don’t know that. Unless you think that the mere fact that I’m fasting makes it “unbalanced”. I love vegetables, salads, fruit, and other healthy stuff, and I almost never eat carbohydrates-heavy stuff (due to my tastes, not even due to any diet), such as bread, cakes, french fries, and so on. Even rice is rare these days (except when I go to a chinese restaurant).
Anyway, even before I ever heard about intermittent fasting, I saw two big problems with the 6 meals a day plan:
1- you spend a huge part of your day either eating, preparing food, or thinking about what you’re going to eat. Every day. This means that you can’t either work or have fun for long without interruptions and more interruptions. It also means that you have to always carry food with you, or go to a cafeteria several times a day. And don’t get me started on having to count calories, carbs, and so on.
2- I never accepted the apparently increasingly common idea that you must never feel hunger, that it’s unbearable, that it ruins your health, that you’ll faint if you don’t eat for half a day or even less, and so on. It’s simply not true for any healthy individual. When people “go crazy” due to skipping a meal, it’s not weakness or lack of nutrients, it’s withdrawal symptoms. Yes, just like any (other) addiction.
Anyway, I’m not trying to convince you (or anyone) to change your habits; I’m simply describing what I’ve been doing, and fighting the “common wisdom” (see item #2 above) which I’m discovering is completely wrong, at least for me… and, since I’m not an alien, it’s probably not wrong just for me.
Some advocate that when you go on a really strict diet, where you starve or eat very small amounts of food, then, when you stop the diet, you gain the weight back quickly, sometimes even gaining more than what you had lost.
I’m not a doctor, but I do believe the healthiest way of loosing weight is to eat a balanced and moderate diet.
Cris,
the point of this is that it’s not really a “strict diet”; one might say that it’s not even a diet at all.
But we’ll see. Today is, after all, just my 4th day of fasting.
Like I said in a previous comment one of the reasons you should eat every day is…
…Gastric acid. If a person with a ulcer should not eat every 3 or 4 hours because gastric “destroy” the walls (?) of the stomach that will reconstrate every 3 days, if you eat each 3 or 4 hours.
If you don’t eat… well, you will have your stomach seggregating gastric acid that don’t have any food to dissolve.
Sorry for my bad bad bad bad … english.