If you’re wondering why I’ve chosen the full-on fasting route vs portion control to lose weight and stave off cravings, a review of my food log will answer why.

Portion control only works if I stay disciplined throughout the day to stave off cravings. Unfortunately, my day consists of long gaps of inactivity where I am tempted and distracted by food, which sets me up for failure at the end of the day. No matter how hard I work out, I’m "rewarding" myself in the evening with an out-sized dinner meal that destroys my early day efforts to stay on track.

I’ve tried intermittent fasting as well, where I allocated the majority of my portions within a certain window of time to keep down my consumption. But that too only incentivized me to reward my "good behavior" with more food.

Now I’m trying the full-day fast to reprogram my brain of these deprive-reward cycles that lead me to over-indulge. I realize most of the weight-control literature and research suggests that this is the least recommended method of achieving results, due to relapse. However, growing up poor I knew feast or famine food cycles that likely shaped my adult eating behaviors. When it was economical, my family ate abundantly;  when money was tight, we ate sparsely or not at all.

That all changed when we arrived in America, the land of plenty and super-size-me meals. Availability meant we ate anything and everything, and knowing this kind of prosperity, we kept eating just in case, you know, one day the food might run out. (I’m sure guilt played a role in there somewhere–my parents were likely ashamed for being so poor that they made sure we cleaned our plates to make up for all those lean years.)

Well, the food hasn’t run out and as I’ve grown older, my metabolism of course slowed down, but my consumption didn’t. That’s where the insidious weight and fat gain crept in, along with all the afflictions that comes with it: emotional instability, hormonal imbalances, hypertension and pre-diabetes…and oh yeah, I was overweight.

MFP, accountability and busting my ass in fitness activities helped me dropped the weight, but I had problems with adherence. Without a coach keeping tabs on my diet, it was hard to stay on track for long. I tried other methods of curing my sugar-addicted brain by doing Whole30 and Paleo/Primal diets, but eventually, I relaxed my food prohibitions and occasionally indulged, which led to the inexorable climb back up the weight scale. No amount of exercise, macro-balancing and calorie counting helped me attain the recomposition I was looking for. And it certainly wasn’t killing the cravings.

So I’ve arrived at full day fasts to help me meet my calorie budget for the week. I can’t say that it’s curing my cravings; it might be worsening my deprive-reward behavior. However I can count on the scale and my clothes fitting that I’m achieving the desired results. 

So in a sense I’m increasing the duration of my IF windows to span days, not hours, to control portion sizes and at the same time jump-start my metabolism into fat loss mode.

I hope to continue this experiment every 2 weeks to see how it goes and will report back on my progress.