5 Tips for First-Time Intermittent Fasters

Photo by Natalia Ventskovskaya on Unsplash

The first time I tried intermittent fasting, it didn’t go so well. Equipped with new information, I’m giving it another go 6 years later.

Read on to find out what I’m doing differently this time round, plus my best 5 tips based on what I’ve learned through trial and error.

Intermittent fasting -- Take 2

I tried intermittent fasting a few years ago, but it didn’t go too well (more on that in a bit) and I stopped.

Recently, I participated in a class about the ketogenic eating style where they suggested intermittent fasting as a way to reset your metabolism.

I wanted to do what I often do, which is try something that my health-conscious community is hearing about, so that I could develop an opinion about it based on my own personal experience.

At time of publication, I’d tried this new round of intermittent fasting for about 5 weeks.

What happened when I tried intermittent fasting the first time

I was really hungry during my fast.

My fasting hours were 8 pm to 12 noon, so I fasted for 16 hours and ate during an 8-hour feeding window. I work out in the morning and it was really difficult to be physically active in the morning but then not be able to eat until noon.

Could I have moved my physical activity to just before noon, so that I could eat right afterwards? Sure, but this didn't always work out for my schedule.

I sometimes felt like I wanted to adjust my eating window.

I felt frustrated about this super-restrictive schedule. I do have the tendency to sometimes see things as fixed and do not always consider whether or not I can be flexible. That was definitely an issue with this first experience.

The Second Time Around: What I’m doing differently

I’m focusing on a macro split that I know works for me.

That means making sure that:

I get my healthy fats.
I don’t have too much protein. Too much protein makes me feel horrible.
I am watching my sugar intake from everything, including nuts, seeds, legumes, and grains — not just added sugars, which I was already monitoring pretty closely.

I think that the first time I did this, I ate way too much protein and I hadn’t removed the added sugars. So I was just plain old overeating, which caused discomfort and weight gain that I didn’t necessarily need.

I’m eating when I’m hungry.

When I first tried intermittent fasting, I was stuck on the 16 hours as a hard rule.

But the class I recently participated in taught me to eat when hunger ensues naturally.

Oh. You mean, I’m just supposed to eat when I get hungry? I see. Whoops.

Back in 2015, because I’d often wait too long past the hunger point, when it came time to eat I ended up packing way too much food into my meals. In hindsight, it makes sense that I gained weight.

Also, I’m not really wanting to eat that close to bedtime. I’m an early bird, so my bedtime is 9 pm. Eating up until 8 pm doesn’t work well for me, because that doesn’t give my body enough time to digest before lying down. So finishing up my evening meal by 6 pm works way better. And in that way, I can eat earlier the next day if I get hungry before noon.

I do intermittent fasting on some days, not every day.

The last time I tried intermittent fasting, I thought I had to do it every single day. This time around, the information I read suggested only intermittently fasting on some days, not every day.

And honestly, most days when I wake up I’m not hungry right away anyway.

So I’m just going with the flow — something I tell my clients to do all the time!

I don’t have to force anything. I just eat when I’m hungry, which most days is already 14 hours or so after my last meal.

Intermittent fasting: To stop or to continue?

So, where do I go from here?

Well, that’s still a work in progress. At this point, I’ve now gotten used to the intermittent fasting and it’s working for me.

In fact, it turns out that I’ve actually been doing some form of intermittent fasting on and off my whole life. Ever since I was a young child, I’ve often not felt like eating breakfast, and so on those days I was practicing this way of eating without even realizing it.

Now that I understand that it’s not a rigid timeframe (I’ve seen fasting time frame recommendations vary between 12, 14, and 16 hours) and that it just involves listening to your body’s hunger cues, it’s not so very different than what nature suggests.

My top 5 tips for you if you want to try intermittent fasting for the first time:

Here are my top 5 tips based on my experience:

1. Just eat when you are hungry.

When you’re listening to what your body needs and not eating based on habits, emotions, or what others around you may be doing, you can’t go wrong.

2. Pre-stock your kitchen with foods high in fiber and healthy fats.

Some examples of these two categories:

High-fiber foods: leafy greens and other brightly colored vegetables
Healthy fats: avocados, olives, walnuts, almonds, hemp seeds, flax seeds (and if you eat fish: salmon or sardines)

3. Lay off the sugar, particularly first thing in the morning.

This includes things like beans, lentils, corn, and sugary veggies like peas and root veggies.

4. Go easy on the protein.

There are calculators to help you figure out what you need. One common general guideline I’ve seen is to cut your body weight in half and eat that much in grams.

5. Watch the portion sizes.

This goes with tip #1. If we wait too long to eat, we are more likely to eat too much.

If you’ve tried intermittent fasting but like me, found that it didn’t work for you the first time...

My best advice for you is to find some new sources of information about intermittent fasting.

If I had read more than just one article about it back when I first tried it, I might have seen that there were different perspectives and could have picked the one that worked the best for me.

Remember to trust your intuition when it comes to deciding what, when, and how to eat!

Are you considering giving intermittent fasting a go?

I’d love to hear your thoughts around this way of eating, leave me a comment below.