So here's the thing. I started intermittent fasting in January 2023 because my friend kept posting these before-and-after photos and I was like, okay fine, I'll try it. But I'm a designer, right? I don't do anything without tracking it. I literally have a spreadsheet from 2019 tracking how many coffees I drink per week. It's a problem.
The first two weeks of 16:8, I just winged it. Ate between 12 PM and 8 PM, more or less. Sometimes 11:30, sometimes 12:45. I figured it didn't matter that much. And honestly? I lost like 2 kg in those two weeks, so I thought I was crushing it.
Then I actually looked at my notes. I had this random Notes app full of "Day 1: fine" and "Day 5: hungry" and "Day 9: ate chips at 11 PM, oops." Zero structure. Zero data. I couldn't tell you if I was actually fasting for 16 hours or 14.5 on any given day.
So I built a tracker. Just a simple thing at first — start time, end time, how I felt. And within a month, the pattern was obvious: on days I broke my fast before 16 hours, my weight stalled. On days I hit 17+ hours, I dropped. It wasn't even close.
I started getting competitive with myself. Could I hit 18 hours today? What about 20? I remember this one Sunday — I was at a friend's birthday brunch and everyone was eating these amazing-looking pancakes and I was sitting there with black coffee, timer running. I hit 19 hours that day. Felt like a superhero. Also felt like a weirdo, but whatever.
The real surprise came at week 6. I plotted my fasting hours against my weight on a chart (because again, designer, I need to see it). The correlation was almost perfect. Days I fasted 16+ hours: weight down. Days under 15: flat or up. It was like the data was screaming at me.
That's when I realized most people fail at fasting not because they can't do it, but because they don't know if they're actually doing it. You think you're doing 16:8, but you're really doing 14:10 half the time. And 14 hours isn't enough for most people to see real metabolic changes.
So yeah. That's why I track every hour now. Not because I'm obsessive (okay, maybe a little), but because the data is the only thing that tells me what's actually working. Everything else is just vibes.
If you're starting out, my advice is simple: track it. Don't guess. Your memory is worse than you think. I literally thought I was "pretty consistent" until I saw the numbers — and I was only hitting my target about 60% of the time. Brutal.
I'll keep updating this blog with whatever weird stuff I find. Follow along if you want. Or don't. But the data doesn't lie.