Fitness & Fatherhood Part 5: Saving Time by Intermittent Fasting
One of the things everyone wish they had more of, besides money, is time. Unfortunately the number of hours in a day is finite so you have to figure out how to make the most of your free time. I’m sure anyone with children can attest to how much less free time they had since having kids. We’ve been trying to think of ways to maximize our free time, and recently we’ve decided to start intermittent fasting to try to save time. Over the past several years intermittent fasting has become all the rage in the diet and nutrition world. If you are unaware what intermittent fasting is I’ll give a quick summary. Basically, you go for an extended period of the day without eating, then during a certain window you eat all the food you’re going to eat for that day. For example, a common strategy is the 16:8 method where you don’t eat for 16 hours, then eat all your food for the day during an 8 hour window. Most people do this by skipping breakfast, then eating their first meal at 12:00 pm.
I first heard about intermittent fasting about 7 or 8 years ago, and I did it for about 6 months about 5 years ago. And to be honest, I didn’t like it. I’m a breakfast guy. The morning is my favorite time of day and breakfast is my favorite meal of the day. So intermittent fasting already had a strike against it. Also, I don’t think I got much out of it. I guess I should clarify that. I guess I didn’t like it as an everyday thing, because I’ve continued to do it on the weekends for sometime, and that has worked for me. On the weekend I workout in the morning and eat breakfast at around 10:00 am. So that is usually ends up being 14 hours without eating. I have also done other fasting strategies over the years such as eating an early dinner so as not to eat after 6:00 pm and that strategy seemed to work pretty well. However, these days I don’t get home from work until 6:00 pm or later, so that’s out the window. Many people swear by intermittent fasting so I’m going to wade gently into these waters. I’ve found that people get very passionate about their particular way of eating, in the same way they get animated about politics or religion.
The internet is full of so called fitness gurus who promote intermittent fasting because all of these wonderful health benefits, many of which seem a little far fetched. I’m not saying these people are wrong, there are health benefits. I’m just saying that many of these health gurus are also selling a diet/workout plan. People do lose weight intermittent fasting. This is likely due to the fact they also begin eating a healthier diet in general, reduce their calorie intake (wittingly or unwittingly), or both. Lastly, a person can lose weight by intermittent fasting even without cutting calories because it takes advantage of the effect food timing has on the metabolism. So there is a benefit to intermittent fasting.
However, weight loss is not why I’m intermittent fasting. I’m doing it to save time. In fact, I’m not even going to follow the normal protocol of skipping breakfast. Instead, I am skipping dinner. Why? Because the evening is when our time is the most limited, and every night my wife and I spend time cooking dinner, eating dinner, and cleaning the mess we made from cooking and eating dinner. It’s a huge time sink. For whatever reason it seems as if dinner requires more preparation and more clean up than breakfast does. As for lunch, we already meal prep our lunches on the weekend for the week ahead. So eliminating dinner just allows us to save time to do other things. Time we could better spend doing other things like spending time with our daughter, or our dog, or getting other chores done, or just relaxing after a long day. Regardless, we want to be more efficient with our time.
To be clear I am not cutting calories or changing my diet. I don’t want to sacrifice muscle mass and my diet is already pretty clean and healthy. Also, we both workout in the mornings so the idea of not eating breakfast, and waiting six hours after a workout to eat our first meal just sounds miserable. My hope is that we gain about an hour each evening. After all, for many of us time is one of our most precious resources and we should strive to conserve it in any way possible. It’s going to be fun to run this experiment and see how it goes. Of course, I’ll have an update after a month or two to see if we really saved any time, and to see the effects on my lifts, body composition, etc. Thanks for reading!
