I am starting a 48-hr fast today after lunch, so starting a new thread for October.
This is my last chance to fast this month - headed to Houston on Sunday to work a plant shutdown and will be working straight 12-hr shifts for 3 weeks. The last week on nights.
I am starting the month on vacation, just doing my best to eat healthy real food. Fasting my normal time isn’t possible due to travel and social events. Looking forward to getting back home and back on my routine. Just hoping not to gain weight.
Ugh. Hang in there. I’ve been retired for long enough that those hours sound like torture.
I tend to skim past the threads about fasting. I Then I remember…
I have been IF for so long that I don’t think of it as fasting. It’s just eating only when I’m hungry. Often OMAD.
IF is just normal to me (even if I STILL have the occasional non-IF day 
what’s wrong with me?), always were. It’s what comes naturally. There is a high chance that I eat whenever I CAN but it’s usually still IF. Eating “all day” is IF in my world (it feels like eating all day, of course not in the morning, that’s not for eating for me), proper days have a small eating window. And I don’t do them often enough. I still can’t wait until hunger… Not like it’s necessary bad but I need to eat the right items then and that’s just not me yet.
So I will working on both this month! Small eating window (it doesn’t seem OMAD is for me right now but that is my eventual goal… TMAD, IF 21/3 then, that sounds good too), right items (not just any carnivore food, I tend to eat too much that way).
The first 2 days of October wasn’t so good IF wise. Many meals, Sunday was keto (with a quite significant overeating, carbs and many meals do that to me), Monday was carnivore (still no chance of fat-loss but I had 5 meals and too much dairy again…), today is carnivore again and I ate around 1pm because I got slightly hungry and won’t go to a 2.5-3 hour walking when hungry, it never ends well. I expect a cute TMAD day. Even if I ate horribly early but I had a reason.
I pulled off my first 24 hour fast last Friday-Saturday. Now that I have done it once I’m going to shoot for every weekend.
I haven’t checked in yet, and being the second Thursday of the month, it’s a good time.
I’ve been curious about “one of those things” that I keep coming across but just don’t know if it’s really better or if there’s anything to it. The idea is that the length of the fast doesn’t matter as much as the particular hours of the day that you fast. If I understand what they’re saying, it’s that since many of us have that dawn phenomenon of higher blood glucose first thing in the day, we should eat breakfast and then skip 23 or 24 hours until the next day’s breakfast. The last time I had any food was around 14 hours ago, and when I fast I typically won’t eat again for another 24 hours, so while it’s taking 14 hours off my fast, the fact that I have breakfast is supposed to make it better.
I’m just sure how to know if it’s really better. What does better mean? Ideas, suggestions, prior results from trying it or stale jokes appreciated.
That would be interesting to test Easier if you have a CGM. Kinda painful if you don’t. 
This guy is an advocate of what you’re proposing:
I’m not sure I could eat “breakfast” (which I usually eat around 10 am or so) then fast until my next breakfast, though I’ve never tried it.
It’s impossible for me to finish my eating window before 4pm. I WILL get hungry then. 4pm has a high risk too, 5pm has okay chances but I need a big meal there.
And I can’t eat in the morning. So an early eating window is definitely not for me.
I personally fast for as long as I comfortably can. The later I start eating the better - except if I don’t get hungry until 6pm. That may be late but it’s so very rare I am unsure. I just know that eating (way?) after 6pm is a bad idea for me if I already ate on that day. I call this my “gremlin time”. I am not a bottomless pit around that time if I carbs are properly low but it’s still not ideal. Hard to satiate and satisfy me then and I am super undisciplined at that time so the chance of carbs is high (unless I block it with determination, like I always go for a carnivore November and it’s hard to break that in the first 2 weeks… I always went off afterwards but maybe not this year…? one can always hope 
).
My very natural eating window for TMAD is 3-6pm so that is my goal most of the time (but I try to skip my 3pm lunch too, it’s just rarely realistic).
I had some bad time this week with hunger at noon, IDK what is wrong with me… (I obviously ate, I don’t do hunger. A tiny meal, I can’t eat much so very early and can’t afford it either.)
Today it was TMAD, finally. About 4 hour eating window? Good enough for now (it’s a bit long if you ask me but compared to my 4MAD yesterday…).
I thought that the only thing I was likely to see was a change in blood sugar and that was all I could really do. I went to check my blood sugar before I started the experiment and realized I was out of test strips. (Well, they expired months ago) So, “no data, no experiment” and I ended up eating yesterday. Which is unusual by itself.
I normally don’t eat anything until sometime between 11 to noon, and do TMAD, with the bigger meal of the day as the second.
I guess the bottom line is I’m not sure that it’s worth doing and I’ll look for data. There’s just so much stuff that varies from person to person, that it’s hard to know if it’s worth it.
I eat the same way, although my lunch/breakfast meal might be bigger now. I’m often not that hungry at dinner.
It is true, this is variable.
I hope to get back into a 36 hour fast next week. My kids are back to school. I have set up dog training for Tuesday at 7-8pm, then have to pick up my daughter from dance at 8:15pm. If I go home, pick up the pup, go to training, then pick up my daughter, it’ll be 8:30pm. I only have to make it 30 minutes before I go to bed. So, that’s a definite possibility.
I feel a higher desire to do EF again… Meanwhile I can’t even do OMAD now
But if I am lucky/“strong” (I never know it until 1-2am or whenever I go to bed), today is a wonderful TMAD with a 3 hour eating window at the perfect time, 3pm-6pm! My lunch was small, my dinner was tiny. But I ate a lot yesterday so hopefully it will be fine. (And it’s not like I can tell if I ate 1000 or 2000 kcal anyway Probably closer to the first…? But probably in the middle? I can track for several years, I never get better at guessing, not even when I eat my usual items.)
Tomorrow we will go to a lovely excursion on the last summer day… It’s the hottest October I ever experienced! But then it’s over and it hardly will come back again.
When I am not at home and busy with feeling well in Nature (it’s not fully natural but that just adds to the experience, wooden bridges, rope bridge and other things… and marshland ), it’s typically easier to fast longer than usual. So I plan to eat a dinner only, maybe an early one, no idea when we come home. But I won’t pack food, that’s tiresome anyway. I would love a nice OMAD day again. A really good one tends to trigger another one the next day…
I may push myself a tiny bit more next week. But I mostly focus on carnivore, it’s not so easy yet, summer is too close and my SO eats fruits all the time… And I can’t focus on multiple things at once without quitting probably both quickly, focus is very tiring to me. I just want to eat whatever, whenever and get carnivore(-ish) OMAD/TMAD. If I need a tiny focus for EF, that’s fine.
It probably will happen one day. I can wait and train until then.
So far my weekend fasts have been successful. I pulled off my 2nd 24-hr fast about 9 days ago, from Friday dinner to Saturday dinner. Then this last weekend, I got home from work late and at aroun 8pm. When 8pm Saturday rolled around, I didn’t want to eat late, so I went to bed, woke up, and at around noon for a total fasting time of 40 hours.
In my thinking I am in maintenance, but my body is still rewarding me with slimming down and very slowly dropping weight. I am still about 3 pounds overweight by the charts and my doctor’s thinking. But I am happy with my results.
3 pounds overweight…is not overweight. Regardless of what your doctor thinks.
Exactly. It’s nothing. And charts doesn’t know anything anyway. But even if it would be something informative like bodyfat percentage, there aren’t strict lines. Some people are happy with a tiny bit more padding, that’s not unhealthy.
I did my best to do OMAD today, we will see if I will be successful. I got my protein but little fat (not even 100g) and it was lunch but it ended after 4pm… So maybe it will work. My food was nice and satiating. I really would like some OMAD if just for a few days!
Beats snacking all day… or 6 small meals a day like some dieticians rcommend 