The Classic Fast-5 Is Too Hard
Although I only posted about our switch to the classic version of the Fast-5 diet yesterday, we have been on that schedule since Tuesday, so this is our fourth day, and we just can’t hack it. Isabel and discussed it, and this diet just leaves us too weak — we can’t do our work, or follow our normal exercise routine.
I don’t think it is the diet itself that is so hard, but the timing in the usual version is terrible. You go to bed before you are really hungry, and then have all day of the hard part of the fast during waking hours. So as of today we are moving our eating window forward several hours. From now onward, as long as we are following a 19/5 type fast, the eating time will be from 2:00 PM to 7:00 PM. This accomplishes two things — first, it allows us to eat at our accustomed time of 2:00 PM for our main meal of the day. Secondly, it moves the end of the fast, the hardest part, to just five hours in the morning and early afternoon. We go to sleep about 1:00 AM, so we only have six hours of fasting at that point, which means we won’t be too hungry and can get to sleep easily, but still have ‘used up’ a good portion of the total fasting time.
We will see how this adjustment goes. I don’t think it should make any difference to the weight-loss potential of this diet, though to be sure I would have liked to continue on the previous schedule for a full week — doing so would have ruined our weekend, and just isn’t worth it. For now we plan to continue with the 19/5 schedule for the rest of this week, and then one full week more — if we can — before we decide if we want to stay on 19/5 for a while or return to 23/25 that we undertook originally.
In either case, when we are satisfied with our weight we will probably go back to the 23/25 schedule, since I suspect the less frequent, but slightly longer fasts are probably more beneficial to health. In the next few posts I’ll review some more of the scientific research, and see what conclusions we can draw from that information.
