We watched Dr. Mark Mattson and got interested in the idea of fasting.
We followed various books and sources about the 5:2 diet, eating normally on five days of the week and lighter on 2. We read "Bright Line Eating" by Dr. Susan Peirce Thompson and followed her rules of no added sugar and no flour. What those three ventures did for us was to very much lessen our grip on three meals a day. We are both much more willing to drop a meal or two from our plans, even quite abruptly if needed.
Neither of us has a really terrible weight problem but both of us have a Body Mass Indexes over 25, too. We both know that various sources recommend a BMI as much as 30 for a person over 65 or 70 years old.
It is freeing to be able to switch from planning a meal to agreeing to skip it if we get pinched for time. Neither of us has fasted completely for even 24 hours although we have read of medically supervised fasts that last quite long, often held at expensive spas where I guess people go for such things.
The brain, the digestive system and the liver are all reported to benefit from a break from eating, although drinking some water during longer fasts seems typical. I tend to feel good when I skip a meal and it is interesting to see just how my body reminds me about eating. Going without food is called "fasting" in the sense of holding fast or tightly and securely to something. My experience now and back when I was a high school and college wrestling trying to make a target weight is and was that it works much better not to grit my teeth and think of cherry pie that I am not, not, not going to eat. It works better to read or watch a movie. When I get a nudge to eat, I just say to myself "Yeah, later. I will get to you" and go on with what I am doing. The other day, I ate very lightly for two consecutive days and the nudges got more insistent and more nearly continuous. From what I can tell, dying of starvation would be quite unpleasant. I think our bodies are made to try very vigorously to prevent that from happening.
