Fasting Tracker - How to time your fasts

Many of you who are new to the Intermittent Fasting Lifestyle may have this nagging question - How do we time our fasts?

I explain a few pointers for those with this exact question.

Firstly, let me state that "trackers" be it for food, fasting, sleep or other activities are useful especially for beginners who want to form a habit. After all, what we are attempting is to go through somewhat drastic but life altering changes when we attempt to start fasting etc.

Towards that, I think an app can work wonders especially if you are not in that mind space yet. Furthermore, it’s the easiest way to go about it.

For example, let’s talk about 1 Fasting Tracker app that I have used for Intermittent Fasting.

It’s called iFasting (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ibuild.ifasting&pli=1)

There is a paid version as well but for most people, the free version is more than sufficient. And yes, there are plenty of advertisements while using the app but in this case, its not really an issue since you use the app in frequently.

In this app iFasting, you can enter your Intermittent Fasting schedule - 16:8, 18:6, OMAD -24 hours or even enter periods of time greater than 24 hours -incise you’re attempting a multi-day water fast.

The app itself is simple and in fact, you can use any Fasting tracker that you want to. The idea is to make it work for you at the beginning and more importantly, move away from it in the long run.

For example, in the beginning, I found it a bit difficult to move to 18:6 Fasting. The 16:8 Intermittent Fasting schedule was not working for me since I had started off with OMAD (more about that in the tweet thread below)

But OMAD isnt exactly the most sustainable of Intermittent Fasting Schedules. So I wanted to tone it down from eating once a day to eating twice. But 16:8 Intermittent Fasting Schedule turned out to be a dud for me (happens..., different people react differently to the schedules). But that extra 2 hours from 16 to 18 turned out to be a little harder for me mentally. That’s the thing about "lifestyle" interventions. When you’re used to a certain process, moving away from it can be difficult even if the supposed change is minor.

Also, digressing a bit, I think why the initial move to a 18:6 Intermittent Fasting Schedule was difficult was simply because my mind which had earlier gotten used to a no eating during the day now saw this extra window to feed and hence the will to move 2 hours extra was battered by random thoughts to eat something.

This is where the tracker became useful to me. It clearly showed me that there was x number of hors remaining during which I couldn’t eat (outside of the cheat codes mentioned here https://www.pradhyumna.com/intermittent-fasting-part-2-cheat-codes/)

This hard defining of an end time helped me mentally to successfully transition to a new Intermittent Fasting Schedule.

But here is my counter point.

These apps and Fasting Trackers will only help to an extent. If you don’t make it part and parcel of your life, then no amount of external support will help.

You may forget to check in to your app one day or you may "not want to".

What then?

This is where I personally worked towards the next step - ingraining this lifestyle in to your daily biological clock. A very Pavlovian development you can say.

For example, train yourself such that you don’t really start craving food will you have a certain drink. For example, at my home, we have a 4 pm coffee /tea break usually by then I am well over the 18:6 Intermittent Fasting Schedule. This can have a negative impact in a way on any random day where your schedule is broken but by then you will have enough control to not let it go wild.

Again, let me again state that Fasting Trackers work and I use them now as well once in while (if I'm on a multi-day fast or haven’t been on an Intermittent Fasting Schedule for more than 2-3 week - rare but has happened).

Basically, Fasting Tracker Apps are only a tool to move towards your larger goal of maintaining an Intermittent Fasting Lifestyle without any external support.