Experimenting on Myself - In The Beginning...

I'm about eighteen hours into a weight loss experiment that I am conducting on myself. You see, after a tough last-half of 2014 and a some overconsumption at Christmas I find myself weighing more than I have in over five years. I am only just over BMI 25 so according to the statistics I am only slightly overweight but I am really feeling the flabbiness. Now I am a tall bloke and losing weight has typically been easy for me in the past so I could just cut out all of the sugary food and ease up on the portion size and I know that weight should come off me. But working for a weight loss company means that I keep track of the research into weight loss and obesity. This led me to an interesting paper published last year that showed that twelve-hour fasting in mice had a positive effect on weight; most notably that obese mice lost 5% of their body weight when they had restricted feeding times.

Which led me to an idea. What does this do to a human?

I admit it, I know that I have developed some bad eating habits over the last year. I tend to drink high-calorie drinks in the evenings, either soft drinks laden with sugar or alcoholic drinks with the empty calories they bring. On top of that I have developed a habit for caloric snacks - crisps, peanuts, post-dinner desserts - which all add on to my daily calories causing the inevitable increase in my waist size. If I stopped eating at 8pm each evening and started at 8am at least those would be cut out. Not only that, the research suggests that I may find my satiety improves and the hormones related to hunger get back under control. Those haywire hormones can lead to long-term weight gain so it seems reasonable that I might shed a few pounds this way too.

I am starting this at a weight of 93.4 kg (14 stone 10 pounds or 206 pounds in old money), and my aim is to lose around 10 pounds initially. What is important is that I plan to keep my diet as is. I am a fairly healthy eater in general as you would expect from someone who works for a company that advocates healthy eating. My general physical activity level is lower than I would like but is much improved over the last few months so I aim to keep that steady or improve it. I realise this is also completely unscientific as well so I do not intend to track my calorie consumption or exercise in detail.

Having started from 8pm last night until 8am today I have noticed only that I was ready for my breakfast when it came! I was not ravenously hungry but neither was I still feeling postprandial like I often am after an evening snacking.

I will be posting regularly about the effects, both physically and mentally. Something like this is easy to sustain early on but I am concerned that I will feel like slipping out of the habit when I get to the weekend. I may cheat in that instance and either have a night off on a Saturday (the research says you can survive the occasional cheat), or change the time period temporarily so that I am fasting from say 10pm to 10am.

Do I expect to lose weight? Yes, but I expect it will be slower than a deliberate change in diet. Watch this space.

Where Do I Start?

This blogging thing seems to have fallen out of fashion on today's web. Most  people post their stuff to social networks - Facebook for updates about their cat, Twitter for harassing celebrities, Tumblr for NSFW pictures found in the darker corners of the Internet -  but actually writing long-form on the web seems to have fallen out of fashion.

Writing for me is good discipline. It helps me order my thoughts on a topic and occasionally what I write has value to others so I'm going to start blogging and see where it takes me. Topics will be varied but no doubt they will include tech subjects, food (and booze), diets and weight loss, and a light dusting of politics. I'm not planning to write with any agenda, just for the mental exercise. Of course, I could do this on Google+ but I'm going to stick to short form their. Some of my old posts from G+ may get pulled in here and reworked too.

I can't wait to see where this takes me.