@juliasaxena wrote about intermittent fasting last month. Reading her post and another detailed and convincing one by James Clear (author of Atomic Habits), made me swing over and finally give it a go.

I started on the 16:8 intermittent fasting on 1 Sept (stop eating after 8pm, start again at 12noon), so it’s been around 3 weeks now. It’s amazing how easy it was getting into it. Few new habits felt this unhindered to develop. It was just “stop eating after dinner and skip breakfast”, which didn’t take much willpower or effort at all. In fact, it added value beyond just health: 

• No breakfast means I don’t have to spend time preparing and eating it at home in the morning, and I get more time for other things like exercise or work.
• No breakfast foods means saving more money. It’s not much, but hey, it pays for my coffee.
• No food after dinner means no unhealthy late night snacks, which often makes me feel bloated. Late night suppers had been something I’d been trying to quit for sometime, with varied success. I would get hungry past midnight or so, and I learned that it was the body’s way of getting more energy to stay awake past your body’s internal bedtime. I would try to get healthier snacks, but that didn’t help much. Then I tried adhering to a sleep schedule, with bedtime by 11.30pm, and that helped quite a bit. But now, with intermittent fasting rules, I didn’t need these imperfect tricks and hacks anymore. I simply just stopped eating anything after 8pm.
• No late night snacks means money saved too. It adds up.
• No eating after dinner also means I got to sleep early or on time around 11.30pm, because any later I will start feeling hunger pangs which will make it harder to fall asleep. This in turn helps me start my day earlier, and keep to my micro-habits schedule. 
• Some days when I run in the morning (before food), I do experience some low energy levels, but even then I’m starting to enjoy that bodily feeling of ‘lightness’ in the morning. It’s kind of like the opposite of that heavy, drowsy feeling after you had a big meal. I’m not starving, stomach ain’t growling, and it’s just a pleasant light alertness and calmness to it. Sometimes I even extend it an hour or so just to enjoy that feeling. 
• Best of all, intermittent fasting is helping me chip away at a particular unhealthy eating habit that I had for most of my adult life now. Hunger pangs seem to trigger a mild sense of alarm, and I would often rush to get something to eat at the first tiny whisper of a tummy growl. This means it’s often the first thing or the most convenient thing within my reach - meaning, unhealthy stuff. Through the fasting, I learned to be present to my hunger pangs, calmly accept it and revel in it. It often disappears after I do that. It feels like a sea change in mindset for me, and I love it. 

Looking at the list of changes that it catalysed, intermittent fasting feels like an unintentional keystone habit. With it, other habits that I had been trying to change or stop came easier, or with no effort at all. Other smaller habits naturally fell into place. I didn’t need much discipline or planning to pull them off either. 

Wow.