The skip breakfast experiment
Before lockdown, I was working towards getting my weight down to ninety-two kilos. Then lockdown hit and I put on six very unwelcome kilos, pushing my weight up to one hundred kegs. This had to change, I knew what to tweak (stop eating cake, drinking alcohol and get back on the mats). To turbocharge my weight loss I decided to start intermittent fasting.
In this article, I am going to share what I know about IF,
how I am doing it and my results so far.
As with anything health-related, please seek professional medical advice
before trying it.
What is Intermittent Fasting?
Intermittent Fasting (IF) or “skip breakfast” as I think of
it, is the practice of not eating for a set period of time, then eating for a
shorter period of time. I think of these
periods as my “fasting window” and my “eating window”
There are quite a few different IF methods/ models/ plans out there. I have listed the most popular methods below. If you are looking for more details on the methods, this article from Medical News Today is one of the better summaries out there.
- 12:12 plan: fast for 12 hours, eat whatever for 12 hours
- 16:8 plan: fast for 16 hours, eat whatever for 8 hours
- 5:2 plan: fast 2 days a week (consuming only 500-600Kcal on fasting days), eat whatever the other 5 days
- Alternative day plan: 1 day fast (consuming only 500-600Kcal), 1 day eat whatever
- 24 hour fast: only drink calorie free liquids for 24 hours
What can I eat?
Intermittent Fasting (IF) is not a traditional diet, in that
it does not limit any food groups or make you count calories. When I dug into the nutritional does and
don’ts of IF I found that most sources say something along the lines of you
can eat what you want in your eating window.
Then in the next breath something similar to but it helps if you
are eating a healthy balanced diet i.e. fresh fruit and vegetables, no refined
sugar, no alcohol, etc.
Another theme I noticed is that (apparently) you can eat
your daily calorie intake within your eating window and still lose weight. The only real hard and fast rule is consuming
calories within your fasting window. In
a nutshell, most advice says the only things you can consume are no/ low
calorie drinks e.g. water, tea, black coffee, green tea. Some articles say having a splash of milk in
your English breakfast tea is ok as the calories are negligible.
What are the perceived benefits of IF?
The reason I say “perceived benefits” instead of “benefits”
is because the research into IF whilst promising is still young. Hopefully over the next five years more
studies and clinical trials will be completed allowing conclusions to be drawn.
For now, the following are thought to be the benefits of IF:
- Weight loss
- Reduced blood pressure
- Lower resting heart rate
- Improved thinking and memory
- Improved physical performance
- Prevents diabetes and obesity
My really crap summary of the science behind IF
Ok, so I am not a scientist and I think there are far too
many charlatans on the internet claiming expertise when they should be
researching and reading. I claim no
expertise, this is my simplistic understanding based on what I have read.
Eating food kicks off your body’s digestion process,
carbohydrates are absorbed into the bloodstream as glucose (sugar). This pushes up your blood sugar level and
triggers your body’s insulin response. The
insulin in your blood sends glucose to tissues where it is consumed as energy, any excess is stored as glycogen. Guess
what, when your body has enough glycogen, then it stores the rest as fat!
Now, when your body doesn’t get any glucose from food it has
to look elsewhere to keep going. Firstly,
it uses up all the glucose in your bloodstream, then it secretes a hormone
called glucagon which uses your glycogen reserves. As these two are depleted, your insulin level
comes down. This is when your body stops
burning sugar and starts burning fat, this change is referred to as “Metabolic
switching”
During the metabolic switch, your body secretes fat burning
hormones which convert fat into energy to keep you going. Now your body is in fat-burning mode. A by-product of this process are Ketones
(fatty acid molecules) which provide energy to your vital organs (brain, heart,
etc). Ketones are thought to be why you
are more focused during your fasting window.
Finally, your body switches into a state called Autophagy. When you are in this state
your body repairs and recycles old or damaged cells. This apparently increases the lifespan of
your cells and improves their efficiency.
So how does Intermittent Fasting fit into this? Intermittent Fasting defines the time when each of these phases takes place based on your last meal.
- +11 hours after eating, metabolic switch
- +12 hours after eating, ketosis
- +14 hours after eating, autophagy
The theory of Intermittent Fasting is that the longer you
are in these states the more fat you burn and the more optimized your body
is.
My research into Intermittent Fasting
There is a plethora of information online about Intermittent
Fasting, Dr Google has a lot of answers.
On top of that there are plenty of people cashing in writing books about
it. Due to the fact that the practice of
Intermittent Fasting is pretty simple, I didn’t bother buying any books on
it. To get some insight into the “why”
behind it and cut through the bullshit I asked a doctor pal what he thought
about Intermittent Fasting and what credible information he had come across on
the topic.
The links below are from him (thank you Gerard) and what I
consider credible sources (in my inexpert opinion). I found the Johns Hopkins Medicine articles
to be the most insightful. They explore
the benefits, whether or not it is for you, and most importantly the why behind
it. Anyway, don’t take my word for it,
have a read for yourself.
- Harvard Health Article – Not so fast
- MedPage Today – Intermittent Fasting: The Science is Growing
- JohnsHopkins – Intermittent Fasting: What is it and how does it work?
- JohnsHopkins – Intermittent Fasting: Is it for you?
- JohnsHopkins – Live fast live longer
Getting started with IF
For the past four months I have been experimenting with Intermittent
Fasting. The purpose of my experiment is
to see how quickly I can lose weight when fasting.
I have dabbled with Intermittent Fasting in the past and
know that to an extent it works for me. A
lot of my past success with Intermittent Fasting came down to habit and accountability. Indeed a few
of the studies I read noted that one of the reasons Intermittent Fasting is
hard to test is because people struggle to stick to it. To make myself accountable I set myself my
first goal “Get to 94kg” i.e. get myself
back to the line where I was before lockdown.
I achieved this fairly recently (it took about three and a half months)
my new goal is “Get to 92kg”.
I wanted to track my fasting progress properly so I could
measure the results. I had a look at the
app store and found this excellent free(ish) app called Fastic. Fastic is awesome, not only does it track
where I am with my fast but it tells me which of the different stages my body should
be in based on how long I set the timer for (metabolic switch, ketosis,
autophagy, etc).
The app has some other cool features to keep you engaged
e.g. you are awarded stars for completing and surpassing your fast, these let
you buy a frosty which is equal to a cheat day.
As well as the mini-economy game, the app has some nice charts built-in
to track your progress over time.
I need to call out some other diet changes I made around the
same time. These changes
have probably tainted my test but fuck it they were healthy decisions to
make. Firstly, I was inspired by a
friend who is doing a year without booze.
I decided to have a go at this goal too for a variety of reasons. Secondly, I cut down on the amount of sugar I
was eating (namely the brownies my wife makes for her business). Undoubtedly these two changes will have
contributed to my success so far… which makes me question… does IF work because
of the science behind it or because it introduces positive behaviours (healthy
diet) and a calorie deficit?
Lastly, I chose the fasting plan I was going to follow. This part was easy, I naturally don’t miss eating
breakfast so I chose to use the 16:8 plan.
I know from past experience that I will not fast properly if I have to
get up early, which I do on Fridays and Saturdays, so these are my non-fasting
days.
My IF Hacks
Here are the things I have found help with starting on and sticking to IF:
- Track your progress, hold yourself accountable
- Have a positive mindset (see below)
- When you get up first thing in the morning, drink 1 litre of water
- When you think you are hungry drink water, green tea, black coffee, black tea, etc
- Try bulletproof coffee (black coffee with a teaspoon of coconut oil blended into it)
- When you break your fast, make sure the first thing you eat is healthy protein with veg. My favourite is scrambled eggs with avocado
Ok, out of all the hacks I listed above, the biggest
challenge is mindset. Accept that you
are going to be hungry when you start fasting and that each day before you
finish fasting you will get pangs of hunger.
Know this, the hunger passes. I
find that drinking a glass of water or yet another cup of tea helps me get through
it. One thing I noticed at the start is
that I felt colder on the run-up to the end of my fasting window, drinking hot
drinks helps with this.
Do it on your terms, you do not need to do this everyday. Have a day or two days in the week where you
eat what you want when you want. The
nice thing about Fastic’s in app economy is you can save up for and “buy” cheat
days (without spending any of your actual money). Another example of doing it on my terms is
that I still add a splash of milk to my cups of tea or coffee. Strict “fast-tards” (as I think of them) will
say this isn’t right but I am still seeing results so kiss my hairy arse. Similarly, when I am in my eating window I
eat what I want within reason. I am not
a monk, I enjoy biscuits and deserts, I drink alcohol free beer, etc.
This is really the key to most, if not all habits I
think. If the habit feels like a
penance you will never succeed unless you really push and really want it. The only example of success is forcing myself
to like green tea, I stubbornly persevered with that for months until my taste
buds adjusted (more an exception than a rule though).
My results so far
Since I started tracking my
results in June I have lost my lockdown weight more or less. The graph below is testament to this. I am back to somewhere between ninety three
and ninety four kegs. At this point I
know there are more tweaks I need to make to my diet to shed that last two kilos.
![]() |
Line graph of weight loss |
One observation is that I became obsessed with weighing myself, to the point that I was weighing myself first thing in the morning, then after id taken a dump, in the afternoon after eating my first meal of the day, last thing at night, after training. Like I said, obsessed. Although, it kept me very accountable, jumping on the scales first thing and seeing I am a half a kilo or a kilo heavier than the day before motivates me to fast longer.
![]() |
Graph showing cumulative fasting hours |
My other observation is around the duration of my fasts. Some days I go over and end up doing eighteen hours, one day I hit twenty hours. In spite of that my average according to Fastic is 13.0 hours a day. This is because on Fridays and Saturdays I do not fast because I get up around 5am. This is my only issue with the Fastic app, it would be great if I could program the days that I am fasting and the days that I am not fasting for free. It would be better still if I could see my timeline by day over a few months rather than an aggregated number by month or week.
Conclusions and future experiments
What have I found out?
My experience with intermittent fasting has been largely positive. Tangibly I have lost nearly five kilos over a
period of four months. There is still
work to do but the results speak for themselves.
Coming back to the perceived benefits I listed earlier I can only comment on some of these because I have my own tangible data to review.
Weight Loss
I do feel that a lot of the success
I have had so far is because the discipline of sticking to the 16:8 plan has
made me get used to being hungry and eating less. I have noticed on the days I choose not to
fast I eat less out of habit. Furthermore,
I am more mindful of what I consume. For
example, I have a thing for sausage rolls, I still eat them but when I do I
mentally note that it is shit calories going into my system (part of me doesn’t
give a fuck, they are too damn good not to eat).
The other big contributing factor
is not drinking alcohol, the empty calories from beer and wine have been removed
from my diet completely. I think this
has contributed to the steady weight loss I have experienced just as much as
the fasting.
Decrease in resting heart rate
I wear my trusty Withings Hybrid
watch pretty much 24/7 the only time I take it off is when I train Jits or
Wrestling. I have pretty good data
before I started fasting and during fasting.
My resting heart rate and sleeping heart rate have not changed over the
past six months.
Improved thinking and memory
I honestly can’t say I have
noticed feeling sharper or more alert while fasting.
Reduced blood pressure
I haven’t been tracking this but
may start to in the future.
Prevents diabetes and obesity
I haven’t had any blood work done
so cannot comment.
To sum up, I think intermittent fasting works, I am not too bothered about changing from the 16:8 plan. I am quite happy to continue skipping breakfast five days a week. Although, I might do a 24 or 48 hour fast in the future just to see what that feels like but I am not going full “fast-tard” with this shit.
I have achieved what I set out, which was to
lose weight and establish a lifestyle choice.
The challenge now is keeping that lifestyle choice in place for the next
three months. As my long standing back
injury seems to be healing I intend to add more fitness to my routine (compound
lifts, running and swimming in the sea).
I imagine once I start with this I will be able to hit my target of 92
kilos. Staying at 92 kilos will be a test in itself but it is fun tracking my progress and keeps me focused on poor lifestyle choices.
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