After three months of intermittent fasting, which prolongs the amount of time you leave between certain meals and forces your body to burn fat for energy as a result, I managed to drop a few kilograms. However, I'll never do it again and the lessons I learned could be far more important. Like many people at the start of summer, I was looking for ways to cut down a few final kilograms before heading off on holiday.
However, as anyone with PCOS and thyroid issues will know, this can be an incredibly challenging task when your own metabolism is deadset against you so the usual mainstream diets don't work for me. Instead, I decided to look into intermittent fasting, which is when you leave a substantial gap between your last and first meal of the day. Most intermittent fasting beginners start on an even split, 12 hours of eating and 12 hours not eating, but people can personalise this however suits them with some extremists doing just one hour of eating with 23 hours of fasting.
In my research I found most experts discussing a 16:8 or 18:6 ratio for weight loss where you only eat for eight or six hours respectively. I opted for the former and opted to go for 18:6 if I felt like I could handle it (spoiler alert; I couldn’t). With that, I set my hours; 8am to 4pm, limited myself to 1,400kcals a day so I wouldn’t gorge in my eight food hours and set off on this experiment.
The first few weeks were incredible. Like any Gen Z I consume a lot of ultra-processed snack foods especial.
