Our Longevity Diet

The Fast-5 regime was developed by Bert and Judi Herring as a weight-loss diet. Bert wrote a short book about the diet in 2005, which may be bought through Amazon or downloaded from the author’s website. It is a very simple fast, with just one rule: you only eat during a five-hour window each day, typically between 5:00 PM and 10:00 PM.

Of course if you eat too much during that five hour window, you can still gain weight — but most people can learn to curb their consumption enough to shed some kilos. Once you reach your desired weight, the author recommends that you keep on the diet, but either eat larger meals, extend your five hour window to a slightly longer period, or fast only some days out of the week — whatever best suits your lifestyle. Of course if you go back to eating as you did before the diet, you will gain back the weight you lost.

This diet sounds harder to me than our 23 hour fast out of each 48 hours, but I thought we should give it a try, so we can evaluate it fairly. Compared to our original fast, this method is four-hours shorter for each fast, but there are two such shorter fasts in each 48 hour period, rather than just one. So Tuesday, May 6th, we switched to the classic Fast-5 style, and plan to eat only between 5:00 PM and 10:00 PM each evening for at least one week.

The author points out that there is nothing magical about that time period however, so for our second week of 19/5 fasting we plan to change the window to match our earlier eating habits, probably from 2:00 PM to 7:00 PM. At the end of each week we will report on this blog our impression of the fast. Then after the two weeks we will either go back to our original fasting schedule, or extend the 19/5 regime, whichever we feel is best for us.