Self-Care and How to Leverage Intermittent Fasting
Leadership is about more than what you do or say. I am also a firm believer in the idea that taking care of yourself as a leader allows you to provide better support and guidance to those you serve and lead. With that in mind, maintaining a healthy lifestyle becomes critical to being your best as a leader. Through my experience this year, I have found that the practice of intermittent fasting has many practical benefits as well as health benefits.
The idea of intermittent fasting has gained popularity recently and could easily be seen as a fad for dieting or weight-loss routines. It does have weight-loss benefits, for sure, but there is much more to this practice than just losing weight. If you are reading this and weight management is not a specific concern for you, don’t assume that intermittent fasting would be a wasteful effort for you. Its benefits go beyond just dropping pounds.
What is intermittent fasting
I’ll provide some links at the end of the article to get more details on what intermittent fasting is and the benefits. In short, it is setting extended periods of time that you do not consume food. You can still drink water and certain other liquids (yes, coffee is allowed — so long as you do not add sugar or other calorie heavy ingredients to it).
Most common intermittent fasting windows fall into groups like, 18:6, 17:7, or 16:8. This means you have a window of 18, 17, 16 hours when you do not eat and then the corresponding remaining hours to eat a normal caloric diet. The idea is not to pause your eating for sixteen or more hours, and then cram as much food into yourself as possible in the next eight hours after that. For most people, this can be as simple as removing a single meal and still allow for a light snack or two between the meals you still have.
There are other fasting styles that rotate entire days of not eating, such as two days on, one day off throughout the week. I am not certain whether that would accommodate many of us in the retail world and the schedules we work. But this concept is flexible enough to work with your specific needs. I think it goes without saying, but I will anyway: you’ll want to do appropriate research for yourself and consult your doctor based on your specific situation or needs.
Intermittent Fasting 101 — The Ultimate Beginner’s Guide
6 Popular Ways to Do Intermittent Fasting
Intermittent Fasting: What is it, and how does it work?
Intermittent time windows
Choose a time window that works best for you and your lifestyle. Many of us in retail can have very distinct schedules, and working an eating plan around them can be challenging. You have flexibility in how you set your intermittent windows of eating, and with planning you can make this work even with a varied schedule or when doing something different on weekends.
The 7 Types of Intermittent Fasting, and What to Know About Them
Benefits
There are a host of benefits that can come from engaging in intermittent fasting. Below is a simple list and some additional links to articles that can provide more detail. I have also shared some of my personal benefits from taking an intermittent fasting approach in my life below.
Balance hormone levels in your body
Lose weight and fat
Lower risks for several health complications
Reduce stress and inflammation
Heart health
Helps your body heal
10 Evidence-Based Health Benefits of Intermittent Fasting
How intermittent fasting has helped me
I have been engaged in intermittent fasting for about four months now. It has helped to move my weight needle down more. (I had already been managing my diet and exercise habits since the beginning of this year. I had already taken about twenty pounds off prior to intermittent fasting, but this jump started the next ten pound reduction and has helped me stay steady since.) More than the weight loss, I have found I feel better in general, have more energy, especially in the morning, and it has helped me manage my overall food intake more consistently than before. What started out as a big change in how my day went has become the new normal routine. I don’t think about the fact that I do not eat breakfast in the morning anymore.
I run my intermittent fasts from about 8pm to Noon the next day. More often than not, I am running a 17:7 fast and ends up being approximately 8pm to 1pm the next day. I do drink coffee (decaf) in the morning and plenty of water. Once I was used to the timing, I found I wasn’t hungry during those morning hours. And what I realized the most is that I was eating because it was purely a routine or because I used it to fill small gaps in time. Working from home (versus the office) provided more access to different food throughout the day and made it easy to nibble snacks, especially mid-morning, when I finished a series of calls. This has trained me to avoid those, and the cravings for those foods have diminished.
Being a healthy leader is what leads to being an effective leader. I wanted to share something you may not have initially thought of as a leadership enhancement here. How we take care of ourselves, and even how we develop ourselves, is as much about our self-care of our health as it is the skill sharpening we tend to lean towards through reading or watching videos. It still comes down to taking care of you, so you can support others.
How might intermittent fasting help you take better care of yourself?
Additional Resources:
Intermittent fasting: Surprising update
An excellent resource for learning more about eating and maintaining your health. While Keto driven and Intermittent Fasting supporting, there is a lot more here to learn as well:
You can visit his YouTube site as well for many help and insightful videos.
He also has a short free video course:
How To: Intermittent Fasting by Dr. Berg
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