I started intermittent fasting and like it.

I've been doing IF more or less continuously since May 2019, which in the IF world makes me a grizzled old veteran of intermittent fasting. I like it a lot and, though I think with time I will loosen it up a bit as far as how many days per month I do IF (currently around 28, but likely to decline to 23-24 down the road), I think I will stick with this WOE long-long term. For reference I'm down 71 lbs into a 128 lb weight loss effort.

It was a great eye-opening epiphany for me the extent to which the body and mind adapt to the eating schedule, such that the hunger signals get sent right before meal time but not much of the rest of the time. I was previously an enormous nighttime snacker/binger (the reason i got into IF in the first place) and would also wake up starving and eat huge breakfasts. Within a few days of starting 16:8 IF, I was waking up with absolutely no appetite or interest in food whatsoever; the awareness that I should maybe be eating something wouldn't even start until 10 or 15 minutes before my eating window of 11 am to 7 pm. As far as at night, that took a while to adapt to, but there too, I got used to the complete absence of food after 7 pm and my internal signals telling me to eat at night mostly shut down. Never 100 %, but substantially. In all honesty I'd still like to binge around 9-11 pm but IF has made it much easier not to, and it's more of an eat out of boredom thing than a true hunger/craving like before.

One day out of the blue in November I decided to try tightening the window to 18:6 - noon to 6 pm - and found it quite a bit easier and better than 16:8. The extra 2 hrs of fasting got quickly absorbed into the general "this is the time period when I'm not eating" period, and my mind adapted in a day or two to the new schedule so that I had 2 more hours per day when I wasn't thinking about food. It may not sound like a big deal, but that gave me 6 hours instead of 8 to use allllll of my calories for the day, which left me with even more satisfying, huge meals within the window. I eventually hit a mid-point of noon to 7 pm which fit my schedule a bit better, and that's where I've remained ever since.

For me IF has been an easy way to stay within my calories and hit my weight loss goals. It's hard not to be an evangelist for IF because I was a very tough case when I started my diet, with severe nighttime binge behaviors and an awful fast/junk food addiction/fixation, and and nothing had ever seemed to work for more than a few weeks, yet IF has worked for me. A huge part of it for me is how my body and mind have adapted to the eating window such that the rest of the time I'm just not that interested in food, which ... to describe it as a "big change" from my previous relationship with food would be a vast understatement.