Food Experiment Update and Change in Format

Upto this point, I have been posting what I ate every day with very little explanation or discussion.  I have decided, however, that this format, while providing some significant data, is not very useful for my readers or myself. 

As a result of this, I am going to transition to a different self-experiment format.  For each self-experiment, regardless of how long it is, I will post an introductory post, weekly progress posts, and a concluding post.  This will allow me to make other posts from day-to-day and also provide more in-depth analysis on my experiments.

Since my food experiment will be ending soon, today's post will act as a progress post, both to update you on what's happening and give you an idea of how this new format will work.

For the past few days, I have been fairly succesful in following a two-meal-a-day intermittent fasting approach.  Each day, I keep my two meals within an ~8 hour window.  My diet consists of pretty good paleo food, with the occasional non-paleo dessert.  I have been focusing more on enforcing the 8-hour window than the strict Paleo because I believe the intermittent fasting will yield more significant benefits in the long run. 

The key benefits of intermittent fasting that I wish to gain are reduced appetite and reduced cravings.  As the goal of this experiment is to decondition my addiction to food, with weight loss being a possible side effect, I am more focused on reducing the reward feedback loop that I seem to have created in regards to food.  Intermittent fasting does a good job in this respect because not eating for longer periods of time allows this response to down-regulate more and more.  In addition, the act of not eating for longer periods of time allows my stomach to shrink, thereby reducing my appetite.

For this last week (the experiment ends on September 12th), my goal is to work up to an even longer 36-40 hour fast.  This would involve not eating from dinner one night until breakfast two days from then.  I will discuss my success or failure at this in the conclusion post.

As I've said before, if you want a good, more in-depth discussion of intermittent fasting, check out Martin Berkhan's site LeanGains or Brad Pilon's site Eat Blog Eat.