So I’ve been only been doing… okay… with food control, and I’ve recently been considering trying something different to switch things up.

Fasting diets were super trendy back around 2012 or so; I’ve poked around the idea, a year or so ago. I kind of like the aesthetics of it. Restrictions are interesting to me. I even tried it a year or so ago, with middling results.

I even followed up with a number of posters on MetaFilter who had chimed in as adherents to a fasting diet, five years after they’d posted. None had stuck to it long-term. Nobody had anything especially negative to say about it.

This seems to bear out the research, which shows that it’s hard to stick to. 

But I am, motiviationally, in a bit of a slump foodwise. It’s easy to sway me into breaking good habits. I’m a bit bored with it all. Fasting is a shake-up.

So I think I might set up a controlled failure experiment with the 5:2 thing. Fast on Mondays and Thursdays (Tuesday-Thursday this week), for… let’s call it a month. Long enough to have an impact, but not a lifelong commitment, and hopefully something that will kind of shock me out of complacency.

I think the idea might be to say “hey, this isn’t fun! Just controlling what I eat but eating normally is much better.” And re-excite myself about regular eating again.

That’s the idea, anyway.

My wife is getting into a 10-day booze-free healthy regime to round out the month, so it seems like The Spirit of New Things is alive in the house right now. I know it’s not a silver bullet (what is?), but it feels like a way to shake myself out of a complacency and get thinking about food differently for a while.