On March 1st yeah, I weighed 104.5kg and wasn’t happy with my body. Like many, I had developed habits that meant I was consuming more food than my lifestyle required.
After hearing about the intermittent fasting app Zero Longevity, I made a decision to change and committed wholeheartedly.
I’m someone who loves data, so having the ability to track progress towards a goal is important to meeting (and beating) that goal. The app made monitoring my eating behaviour dead simple, with a start/stop timer.
My goal was to reduce my food intake to lose weight, so I looked better and felt better, which had the added benefit of unlocking a lot more of my wardrobe that I wasn’t comfortable wearing at my largest.
I decided that I would eliminate breakfast, going against the message drummed into us as kids, that breaking the fast with cereal, milk, toast, fruit and juice was important to a healthy lifestyle. Turns out that wasn’t true, at least not for me.
Since then I would start my fast from around 6.30pm at night, till 12-12:30pm at lunch the following day. This meant for more than 16 hours per day, my body was fasting.
I knew when I started that my coffee addiction had to come along for the ride or this wouldn’t work for me, so while not technically allowed under the strictest fasting rules, I still had my morning coffee and the results have shown that did not impact progress.
My goal, was to get back under 90kg, now at 41, I remember finishing high school and being 88kg, so while I think I’ll beat that, my goal was 15kg of weight loss, which I achieved today, June 26th, less than 4 months since starting this new way of life.
The best thing about intermittent fasting is that it feels completely sustainable, I’m not hungry during fasting hours and have sometimes gone 20+ hours without eating, not because I was forcing myself, but because I wasn’t hungry. This means the weight loss has actually been insanely easy, but does take commitment.
Some people fast for 5 days a week, I knew my own behaviours, that I needed to go all in for this to lock in as new behaviours, so for 7 days a week, I have fasted. There have been just 2 days during that time where I fasted for 15hrs, but every single day I reprogrammed my body to not expect and demand food the way it did previously.
What’s amazing about this model is that I can eat whatever I want when the eating window between lunch and dinner is open. I’ve dated takeaway (fairly rarely, but has happened), and I’ve eaten chocolate, ice cream, cake etc, pasta, etc alongside my more regular diet of ham, port, chicken wraps and a variety of meals at night.
Having all foods available to me, means I don’t feel limited in what I can eat, just when I can eat and I think that’s the big unlock here for me.
Intermittent fasting may not work for everyone, but it certainly has for me. Since writing about this in the past and sharing progress on Instagram, I’ve had a number of friends reach out and say they are seeing results too.
Now at 89.4kg, I have lost a total of 15.1kg and feel much better in myself, my clothes feel better (although I have the good problem of them being too big, rather than too small.
I’m a massive fan of Zero Longevity (I used the free version) and without a simple way to track my time, I’m not sure I would have achieved the weight loss today. I’ve also been using Google Fit to enter my weight when I jump on the scale every few days, which sync’s to Zero Latency.
If you have any questions, please leave them in the comments below.
Congratulations Jason – great result!!!!