Yeah I do a similar thing with intermittent fasting. I allow myself to eat as much as I want, but only after around 1600 (4pm for the temporally confused friends) or roughly the time the kid gets home from school and either has a small snack or we eat dinner straight away around that time. Couldn’t skip that, because I do need to show example too, since they, as many kids do, struggle to eat enough, sometimes just nibbling on stuff. Even if they’ve been very active with hobbies and friends and walking to and from school (around 4km total) and they really need the energy and the nutrients to build back and heal the body after all that, not to mention usual growing stuff. And as they often do, especially the salad sides are difficult without someone body doubling the experience, or if we’re doing something different, unusual food to slightly expand their comfort zone progressively. So I can’t really fast beyond that. But I’ve found I don’t really need to. I’ve lost around 10kg in a year just by this small fasting period. No other changes. I wasn’t obese before, just a bit overweight, but I have been back in the day, on the obese side even. I got back from that with keto diet, and luckily never let it slip back too much, but that isn’t an option anymore, for largely the same reasons; have to lead by example, show healthy eating habits (when they are there) and have diverse, nutritious food. Can’t do keto like that.

I’m not doing this for weight reasons though; my blood sugar is on the high side, almost pre-diabetic, and the docs tell me if I don’t get it sorted, I’ll eventually just slip over the line and that’s not something you get back from apparently. I also have vascular fat (or whatever it’s called in English, the inner fat) that I’d need to get rid of to get my liver values back to healthy bounds. Already gave up drinking some years back, even if it was occasional even then, and it wasn’t enough, so I have to try and get the fat off too. Keto would’ve been perfect for this, back in the day I lost crazy amount of that inner fat especially on it, but apparently this intermittent fasting is doing good things there too, although not nearly as effectively.

But the surprising thing to me is, I didn’t cut off any foods or food types, generally I’ve tried to keep the short carbs a bit lower than usual, but haven’t gone entirely off. And it still works. I haven’t been on the blood controls yet for either of the reasons, but my scale tells me about 2-3kg of that 10kg has been inner fat.

And even through Christmas and a lot of carbs, the weight didn’t seem to sway back almost at all, even with delayed monitoring.

Which is all to say, it seems easier to cut on the calories if you only consume them less than half a day, time-wise, even if you ate unhealthy food and generally not very diet-y. In the limited timespan it might just be impossible to get to similar amounts of calories vs. if you ate regularly throughout all day, if you like me have trouble regulating and tend to overeat fairly consistently (I have adhd so the dopamine rush gets me too excited every time and I guess I lose most of my sense of moderation for a while there).

Sorry for the weird digression. Just wanted to hop in with my experiences.

This works well for me. The hardest part comes from social interactions, not from hunger. Cooking for a family and not eating, that sucks.