Yesterday was not only the first day of my weight-loss journey, it was a fasting day. I didn’t eat at all. This isn’t a new concept for me—I became interested in fasting a couple of years ago. But before I fasted for the first time, I wasn’t sure I could actually do it. Yet while going a day without eating wasn’t exactly an easy thing to do, it wasn’t as hard as I’d imagined it might be. I’d read a very good book on intermittent fasting before I tried it, and that book prepared me well. I learned that fasting has been practiced throughout history by numerous cultures around the world, for example. If they could do it, I figured I could do it as well.

The key to fasting is one I learned from that book: like waves, hunger comes and goes. There are moments when your stomach is growling and you feel like you’ve just got to eat something, but those moments pass. That intense feeling of hunger doesn’t last. But there is another challenge to deal with besides those intermittent physical pangs: the psychological longing to eat. There are points throughout the day when the brain just seems to be drawn to the idea of eating. Something seems amiss.

Much of the phenomenon described above may be simply habitual: in modern times, most of us tend to have very specific times during which we eat. We eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner, for example. So when we don’t eat at those expected times, an alarm goes off in our heads and our focus shifts from whatever we’re doing to thinking about food. But some of the experience is obviously physiological: our brains are programmed to seek out food when we’re hungry so that we survive. So fasting is sort of like fighting a battle on two fronts: the psychological and the biological.

The best advice for fighting these dual battles is this: stay busy. Boredom is frequently the inspiration for eating. “Oh, I’m not doing anything in particular. Let me find something to eat.” Eating, then, becomes a way of occupying time. When you fast, one of the things you notice most is that you seem to have a lot more time on your hands. That’s likely because your time is no longer broken into segments by meals; the usual “breaks” in your day are gone.

Anyway, I’ve got to get to the grocery store since the refrigerator is empty. I’m going to break my fast by having some yogurt and blueberries, and after that I won’t eat again until tonight. As you can see below, I did lose three pounds over the fast, and that’s typical for me. I’m still on the fence as to whether I should fast two or three times per week, but yesterday (when I was feeling that hunger), I was certain that I didn’t want to go through more than two days of not eating per week. I think that’s probably a good idea as being too aggressive can thwart sustainability.