Our Longevity Diet

Our longevity diet is simple, we fast for 23 hours, then eat normally for 25. Scientific studies have shown that such a diet has all the benefits of caloric restriction when it comes to longevity, plus additional health benefits. We entered into this diet for those health benefits, and were amazed to find that it also caused us to lose weight, at least so far (we are currently one month into the diet — follow the blog posts for subsequent changes).

We live in Mexico, so we already were accustomed to eating our main meal in the early afternoon, between 2:00 and 3:00 pm. So, to implement this intermittent fasting diet, we simply eat that same main meal every day, but nothing afterwards, every other day. Then, on the days in-between, we still eat that normal main meal, but we have no breakfast or anything with calories before that meal. Since the night without an evening snack is followed by a morning with no breakfast, we have 23 hours of fasting out of every 48 hours. Here is an example of our schedule for the next few days:

• Saturday AM: eat breakfast
• Saturday PM: eat dinner and fast afterward
• Sunday AM: fasting
• Sunday PM: eat dinner and a night-time snack
• Monday AM: eat breakfast
• Monday PM: eat dinner and fast afterward
• Tuesday AM: fasting
• Tuesday PM: eat dinner and a night-time snack

As you see, it is simple. On any particular day we either eat breakfast and fast in the afternoon and night, or we fast in the morning and eat a night time snack. We have dinner every day. The days alternate, so either we are fasting in the morning or at night, and likewise we are either eating a small meal or snack at night or in the morning.

On days that a fast begins, we start the fast at 3:00 pm — we have just eaten, so start on a full stomach. It is not difficult to go without food for the first several hours. About 8:00 or 9:00 pm we begin to get a little hungry, but just drink plenty of water and ignore it. Four or five hours later we go to bed, slightly hungry but by no means starving. My stomach grumbles some when I lay down, but pretty soon I’m asleep and forget all about it. The next morning, we wake up with fine appetites, but have to make-do with just coffee or tea with no sugar or milk. But we know it will only be for a few hours, then it will be dinner time. About 2:00 pm, the fast ends and we have dinner. For the first week or two we had a tendency to want to stuff ourselves because we were so hungry, but by eating slowly and appreciating the wonderful taste of the food, we managed to eat normal proportions.

Also for the first couple weeks the mornings we were fasting left us feeling a bit week and lethargic, but soon we adjusted to the new schedule and now it has no effect on our activity level. We normally walk the 1.5 kilometers to the beach on Lake Chapala, and back again, as our daily exercise. This time of year we like to do that early in the morning before the heat of day, and it makes no difference for us if it is a fasting morning or not.

The fast is only 23 hours long, and 8 of those we are sleeping. Five or six more are just after eating our main meal of the day, so that only leaves about 10 hours out of every 48 that we are a little hungry. We do not find that difficult at all, now that we are used to it.