My wife has introduced me to fasting. She will tell you all you want to know about autophagy and her excitement towards fasting made it hard not to at least try out. We eat dinner on Sunday night and don’t chew on anything until Tuesday morning. This is a 36-hour fast but there are many different types of fasting for different people/schedules. The past three weeks our Tuesday breakfast has been a meal to look forward to, and one that is hotly discussed! Where should we go? What time should we get up!?
Let me be clear. This is not like Yom Kippur where one eats nothing and drinks nothing for a day. We do have some liquids on the Monday fast day. My go-to liquid is matcha but I’ve been doing a lot of water and an occasional sip of the wifey’s coffee.
This experimenting does has some good side effects. I realized that we get in a lull of just eating because we think we are supposed to eat at designated times, and honestly like the way many of our decisions get made. I now don’t really even notice the fasting on Mondays. I have been losing some weight so I don’t know if it’ll be maintainable for months and months but it’s been a good reminder to stay awake in your decisions.
And since I’ve become very into personal finance I couldn’t help but wonder the consequences to what we’re spending on food. The rough back of the envelope math would suggest the food budget gets chopped by 1/7, or about 14%, but I don’t think that’s the whole story. I have found that we have been going out a bit more on the days we are actually eating, as eating is seen as more special now. Also we have tended to hang in Barnes and Nobles and sip on purchased coffee while reading our books (probably to keep our minds from thinking of food). Long story short I think our savings is more about 10%, but still that’s pretty significant. Just some FOOD for thought!