A new phase

On the 29th September I decided to make a change to how I was conducting my weekly fasting regimen.  Since February I've been fasting for at least 24 hours every Monday, usually 40+ hour and some much longer but I was looking for an additional challenge and wanted to incorporate more fasting into my week.

After some thought and a bit of research I decided on Alternate Daily Fasting, the basic premise of this being that you work in a repeating cycle of 2 days. The first day is a fast day and the second is a feast day.

Fast Day
Fast day in this model doesn't mean complete abstinence from food, it means consuming about a fifth of your normal daily calories, ideally around lunch time.

Feast Day
Feast day means you get to eat whatever you want to eat, cake, chocolate, ice cream, whatever.

Again the idea is that you are unlikely to consume the calories you didn't consume on the fast day, on top of the calories you would normally consume on your feast day resulting in a net deficit in caloritic intake.

Running the numbers
Assuming that you normally consume 2500 calories a day this would result in a fast day allowance of 500 calories, lets also say that on your feast days you consume an extra 1000 calories. What does this end up looking like?

Using the every other day model it takes 2 weeks before you repeat the days on which you fast/feast, so using that as our cycle length:

7 Fasting days     * 500 calories =   3500
7 Feasting days * 3500 calories = 24500

For a grand total of 28000 calories in a 14 day period.

If you had stuck with your original 2500 calories a day over the same 14 day period, you would have consumed 14 * 2500 calories = 35000 calories

That equates to a deficit of 10500 calories over that period, or just over 2 lbs fat (assuming 1 lb fat - 3500 calories).

General thoughts
I see a lot of benefits for some people in this plan, you are eating every day and are only ever one day away from any cravings that you may have. There is also a sizable caloritic deficit that seems to be at a sustainable level.

My modifications
I do a complete fast on Mondays so over a 14 day period my numbers look like this:
2  100% fast days         *       0  calories =        0
6   fast days                  *   500  calories =   3000
6   feast days                * 3500  calories = 21000

For a grand total of 24000 calories in a 14 day period.

Using the same assumption of 2500 normal consumption this results in a deficit of 11000 calories, or a little short of 3 lbs of fat.

I also don't intend on consuming an extra 1000 calories on the feast days (at least not on every one), so that would result in even more savings.

Final thoughts
If the idea of not eating for a substantial period is not something you get excited about and you're looking for a gentle introduction to the fasting experience then this may be something worth trying.

I'll be following this program for the next couple of months (perhaps longer depending on how it goes) and reporting weekly on my experiences.