So I have recently had a bit of a breakthrough with my eating. Basically I eat in a small window, a two-four hour window, and I love it. I find I can focus more clearly on what I want to get done throughout the day as I fast but I do not feel deprived because I look forward to a delicious meal that I plan beforehand (there are no rules other than the time window). I have been doing this for about 6 days.

Today I had my meal, ate slowly and happily and enjoyed it. I had picked healthy food and it was all great and I was so happy I had not eaten to the point of discomfort. Then I sort of kept eating. In part out of greed and in part out of habit and in part because my flatmate was talking at me and I was anxious and wanted to get away. And now I am finding myself uncomfortably full.

This way of eating in a very limited time window often leads to people over-eating in the beginning. Also your stomach shrinks over the 20 hours of not eating at all, so some feeling of fullness is probably unavoidable but I feel like I ate the post-dinner dessert in a very emotional way and was not listening to my body. At the moment that is not something I’ve deliberately tried to not do. But also this level of fullness is extremely unpleasant, and I imagine will not be leading to my weightloss goal of losing 8 pounds.

Going forward I do not want to add new rules to the “what to eat” in my 4 hour window. I might see if doing it for one more week helps me get the hang of stopping eating sooner, and then consider adding a rule to not eat past 5/10 on the fullness scale.