If I am being honest, I have always had a bit of an issue with my weight and it has always been something that has fluctuated quite significantly. Since my health issues of last year and the heavy use of steroids in my recovery from Ulcerative Colitis, I have found that my weight has been on a rapid increase and I have not really been doing a whole lot to deal with it. Pair this with bad eating habits, work being hectic and there is a perfect storm for some serious weight gain.

While I understand embracing your body and being body positive, I am not happy with how I look and I am not happy with not being able to do what I want to do because my body no longer likes it due to additional weight. I like being able to participate in sports and exercise without feeling as though I am actually dying and I’ve lost this because of the weight gain.

This state is entirely self inflicted and as such I now need to un-inflict it and as ever, I have a plan.

Fasting. This is my plan.

I have done a lot of research about fasting with IBD as well as for weight loss and interestingly it seems as though it may be positive on a couple of levels.

I plan on completing a what is known as a 16:8 fasting plan. This means that I will fast for 16 hours of the day and be able to eat for 8 hours of the day. In practice this means that I miss breakfast but go on to eat normally for lunch and dinner. I am setting my eating window as 12pm-8pm as this fits in with my life and most importantly, my job. I can generally get away with not eating breakfast, but need to eat lunch and dinner with the young people.

In some of the research that I have done, it talks about fasting being good for the health of the digestive system as it gives it some form of rest from constantly digesting things. There is a lack of empirical evidence to back this up but it will be interesting to know how fasting changes the output of my bag and whether I have to make any concessions given my ileostomy.

I have completed fasting plans before and it worked for me and I lost a lot of weight and felt a lot better about myself. It allows for an element of flexibility as you don’t have to necessarily restrict the food that you are eating in terms of counting calories really closely. It is also likely to help me to stop with the unnecessary snacking in the evening which is probably the reason for much of my weight gain. Let’s be honest, who doesn’t sit of an evening and snack on everything in sight?!

So from the end of January I am starting the fasting and seeing where I end up. I will keep you all updated.

I might write a piece on calorie counting as well. I have previously used this method to lose weight very successfully but it no longer works for me and I can explain why. I’ll discuss why in the future to give people a bit of a comparison as to the pro’s and con’s of each method.