I am lazy and I hate calorie counting and I am not keen on having a limit on how much I eat a day.

I am pretty fit and strong, and lift weights regularly every week, but I had quite a bit of a gut, and was probably over 25% body fat.

I cut out drinks with sugar in them, eating after dinner, and in general just eating healthy meals with a focus on eating more proteins (protein pasta is great).

All this lowered my fat levels down to a reasonable level, but still left me with about 23% body fat and a bit of a belly, and that remained consistent. Trying to diet here and there and trim out things during the day didn't really cause any maintainable change.

Then I tried doing a 24 hour fast once a week. This really means just eating one dinner a little earlier (4:30pm) and then skipping breakfast and lunch and drinking water with electrolytes added.

With keeping the rest of the days calorie intake the same, I have shaved off consistently about 1 pound a week and 1/2" from my waistline.

Those are some nice trend-lines. :) Also, it seems my weight is fluctuating much less on a day-to-day basis.

This has been going for 5 weeks now, and I have gone from 23% to 19.7% based on Navy body fat formula.

What is great is I have no cravings or feelings that I am depriving myself except for the last 8 hrs of the weekly fast. The rest of the week, I eat well.

My plan is to bring myself down to 15% and then continuing to measure. If I get above 15% I fast that week, if I don't then I don't fast, so it basically becomes like a controllable throttle. Getting too low seems to have negative side effects, and 15% seems based on what I have read, to be a healthy limit.

A concern I had starting out on this was that eating and muscle growth go hand in hand, and it is hard to grow muscles when dieting. I have continued to lift the same number of days a week, but I just don't lift when I am fasting (don't want to over stress those muscles). So far, to my surprise, it seems I have broken through some plateaus on lifting, so my weight loss is mostly targeting fat and isn't hurting my lifting. One way to also see this is my waistline is shrinking faster than my weight, which is a good sign that the weight loss isn't hitting muscles hard.

But just on a feeling, I am feeling even stronger than before, and hitting even more personal records.