I started off the new year right and I was able to fast for 16 hours very easily for a few days. My typical fasting window was 8pm - 12pm. This was not my first stint of intermittent fasting and I barely ever eat breakfast unless I’m going out for brunch. So I thought, this would be the easiest thing to implement. 

What Went Wrong? 

I was so wrong… I broke it 2 weeks in. I stopped writing in my food journal and I also stopped tracking when I eat. How did this happen?? 

Well, first off, I stopped going to the gym 2 out of 3 days a week so I lost a keystone habit. I was originally planning on going to Asia for two weeks so I wanted to save some money on my gym membership and I paused for a month. However, due to the severity of the novel coronavirus, my parents suggested that I didn’t travel to Asia at all. My plans included Taiwan & China . I was ready to cancel the China leg of the trip, but not the trip to Taiwan entirely since I really wanted to visit my parents. 

My boyfriend was also visiting me from NYC and he makes amazing fried ramen. Nights at home meant ramen + steak after 8pm. My hypothesis is that since we don’t see each other very often, his food is super rare for me. For me in SF, I just haven’t found food that is a good price for the quality/taste. Food at home with him is really well priced and tastes amazing (no wonder I gain weight right)? Slowly, our eating and sleeping schedule shifted later and later. 

But these are all excuses and I think I should be better about being disciplined even when it gets hard. So I decided to try again. The odds were stacked against me since instead of visiting my parents in Taiwan, I visited my boyfriend in NYC. This time around, it was pretty easy. 

How I Succeeded

I started this challenge again while I was in SF. I pushed myself to always try to eat dinner before 9pm, which meant I could start eating (latest) at 1pm the next day. This meant that I had to go home before an exact time everyday and get something to eat. This would normally be around 7:30pm so I could start dinner at 8pm. Sometimes I even fasted for 20 hours! Those days, I would eat around 4pm and be so full by 7pm that I didn’t think I could eat anymore that day so I just went to bed early, not super hungry still. The next eating day would start at 12pm and since breakfast is not in my normal diet, it was easy to just be hangry for a bit :P Also, I’m really lazy so I usually would rather go hungry than make food.

Takeaways

Looking back, my lessons learned are that I should always account for things not going my way. I should also allow myself to make mistakes sometimes. To account for this, I think it’s best if I log my triggers for the first few days while they’re mostly using willpower instead of habits. Using my triggers, I can figure out what would cause me to break my training for my new habit.