How I lost weight by closing the window

I recently lost a bunch of weight by doing something called intermittent fasting. It's not a diet. You don't restrict your calories, but you do restrict the amount of time you will eat. But by doing intermittent fasting I have lost an average of 4 pounds per month pretty consistently.

8 Hour Window

There are many ways to do intermittent fasting. But probably the easiest way to begin is by only eating within an 8-hour window. Here is an example of what I mean:

• No eating or drinking anything (except water) until 12 o'clock noon. 
• Eat whatever you like. And eat as often as you like. 
• But once it's 8 o'clock p.m. you will stop eating for the rest of the day.

What this eating schedule does is create a 16-hour fasting period (from 8 p.m. to Noon the next day). During this fasting period your body will use up much of the glycogen in your muscles and liver. Once the glycogen stores are used up, your body will start mobilizing stored fat to use as energy. The longer your fasting period lasts the more fat will be burned.

4 Hour Window

If your push your breakfast to 2 p.m. and eat whatever you like up until 6 p.m. you will be creating a 20 hour fast. Remember that the goal here is not to cut calories, only to restrict the time that you eat. So, in this case, you will have four hours to eat the same amount of calories that you normally would.

1 Hour Window

I personally started doing intermittent fasting using the one-hour window method. Many times I would go to the buffet at 12 noon and eat all I wanted for an hour. Or I would make a huge breakfast of bacon and eggs pancakes and anything else I wanted, as long as I ate it all within an hour or so. This eating schedule works great for me up until about 9 p.m. when I would get really hungry. I would solve this by going to bed earlier. You can try eating an apple (since it's only about 70 calories, and it will help you get through the fast).

Mix it up as you need to

Realize that the start time and the end time for the above eating schedules are arbitrary. You can start and end at whatever time you'd like. But in general, you want to take advantage of the time that you are sleeping and make sure the majority of your fast is happening at that time. Just make it fit your schedule.

Also, I would use a combination of one 4 and 8 hour windows depending on the day of the week. I would mix it up depending on what was going on that day (so if I was going out to dinner with friends that evening, I would eat with them). I would just expand to an 8-hour window for that day or shift my eating window time so that it fell in line with the dinner.

So this is just an overall view on intermittent fasting that I have done for the past few months. I will add some tips and tricks and other fasting methods in future articles.