Here we go! Day 1 of intermittent fasting (IMF)! If this is your first visit to The Diet Oracle, this month we have been taking a look at The Complete Guide to Fasting: Heal Your Body Through Intermittent, Alternate-Day, and Extended Fasting by Jason Fung, MD and Jimmy Moore for June’s Diet of the Month. Today, I will begin a week-long test drive of one of their recommended regimens to see what intermittent fasting is all about. (If you’d like a quick snapshot of the plan I’ll be following, check out my previous post, Intermittent Fasting: Ready, Set, Go!

My first IMF day will be a 6:18 routine, which means I’ll be skipping breakfast but will have lunch and dinner as usual with no snacking after dinner. I’m typically used to eating breakfast in the morning along with either some coffee or chai tea. Though I’m not usually ravenous first thing, I do like to eat by 8 or 9am at the latest. Completely skipping breakfast is not part of my usual routine.

So here is how the day went.

Breakfast: Skipped. I had two cups of coffee with half and half, which is pretty much par for the course for me. (Fung encourages up to 6 cups of coffee per day on fasting days.) While I do occasionally enjoy a chai tea with whole milk and a teaspoon or two of sugar, sugar is a no-no on fasting days.

Lunch: I made a yogurt bowl with Fage Total Greek Yogurt (the full-fat kind), berries, almonds, and unsweetened coconut.

Snack: I had 20 almonds along with some unsweetened tea. Feeling rather spartan, I must say.

Dinner: Steak Fajita Lettuce Wraps (recipe from the book) with cheddar cheese and homemade guacamole.

All in all, I would not say I felt great on my first day of IMF. I had a nagging headache for most of the morning and was really hungry by lunch, so much so that I reeeeeally wanted to keep eating beyond what I knew should have been enough. I tried to wait it out, but ultimately ended up feeling hungry pretty much all afternoon.

I tried the book’s recipe for Steak Fajita Lettuce Wraps for dinner and those were good! Nothing exceptional, it’s just hard to go wrong with steak fajitas topped with cheese and guacamole. I finally felt those hunger pangs go away, too. I personally like lettuce wraps, so I didn’t miss the flour or corn tortillas at all.

For exercise today, I walked my toddler for a couple miles in the stroller. I would say I felt a bit more gassed by the hills than usual, but perhaps that’s just a coincidence.

Though Fung does not particularly wish individuals who are following his plan to measure their portions and crunch numbers (he simply suggests eating until reasonably satisfied), I wanted to see what a day of fasting would look like on paper. Using the SparkPeople app, I dutifully measured and logged my food intake and though I will be discussing all of this in greater detail down the road, I’ll just briefly note here that my calorie intake for today came to 1416 calories with 59% coming from fat, 23% from carbs, and 20% from protein. Fasting or not, for me this would be a calorie level appropriate for weight loss purposes. This is also probably the least amount of carbohydrate I have ever eaten on a given day.

Alright! Day 1 is done, on to Day 2! Check back tomorrow to see how my second day of intermittent fasting goes!