I’m having difficulty implementing intermittent fasting and eating on a -4 to +4 scale. What usually happens is that I can push myself to eat within a 4 hour eating window, but during that window, I eat everything and anything that’s on my protocol. It’s also strange – some days, it’s really easy to wait until the eating window, and other days I’m feeling ravenous and I look for activities/productive ways to distract myself from that hunger. The flipside of the hunger though (especially because I exercise during the fasting periods), is that I eat to the point of feeling uncomfortable during the window. I get that I’m driven by my thoughts, actively choosing this path forward, but it’s a cycle that keeps repeating itself and I feel like I need to adjust something moving forward.

Given this history, would you recommend that I drop Intermittent Fasting and just focus on learning how to eat -4 to +4 on the hunger scale? I would like to implement IF, because on the days that it works (where I plan out how and when I’m going to eat within the window) it really does feel good. It just hasn’t been sustainable. The way I lost the initial 15 pounds was just to cut out sugar and flour but not worry too much about how much I was eating. Then, when I implemented IF, I just started eating way more and everything felt a lot more disordered. Perhaps there’s another way forward? Anyways, thanks for listening and l look forward to your reply!