For years, I assumed the same thing, that &quot;fasting&quot; meant experiencing significant hunger. I always associated it with going entirely without food for some vague amount of time that was probably some consecutive number of days. But three weeks ago, after some Googling, I began what is called &#x27;intermittent fasting&#x27;. Since it&#x27;s only been three weeks, all I can say personally about the benefits is that I&#x27;m still doing it and have no plans to stop in the future, but I <i>can</i> say that by the third day, the hunger issue was negligible.<p>The first Google result on the term is pretty good: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;jamesclear.com&#x2F;the-beginners-guide-to-intermittent-fasting" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;jamesclear.com&#x2F;the-beginners-guide-to-intermittent-fa...</a><p>At its simplest, for men it means eating all your food for the day in a roughly eight-hour window, often noon to 8pm. (There is apparently some scientific thought that women may have significantly different needs; I <i>really</i> can&#x27;t speak to that.) In practical terms, this translates to &quot;skipping breakfast&quot; and avoiding midnight snacks. This turns out not to be that difficult, but has definitely had an positive impact on me, <i>so far</i>. Discomfort-wise for me, I tend to get a bit of a rumbly tummy around 10am, but generally it subsides pretty quickly and even by 11am I can easily go for another couple of hours without even thinking about lunch if I get busy. It is far from constant hunger. (But I won&#x27;t lie and say it&#x27;s <i>zero</i>... just, negligible. Literally. It can easily be neglected and it will in fact go away.) I can also say that I&#x27;m hardly watching the clock in the evening and trying to judge whether it&#x27;s the crack of 8pm yet or not... I often eat at noon-thirty or 1pm and then dinner at 6pm and am done thinking about food for the day, without any willpower expended. It just happens.<p>I say this mostly to point out to people that there is something to investigate that they may have misconceptions about, as I did. I will fully and up-front admit once again I am not in a position to extol its benefits particularly. (I like to do something like this for at least a couple of years before I do that.)<p>(But I will go slightly out on a limb and say that I would not be all that surprised to discover that &quot;intermittent fasting&quot; has somewhere between 80-120% of the benefit of the scientifically-studied high caloric-restriction diets, with much lower willpower and discomfort costs. It turns out that if you dig into those, we&#x27;ve really only studied &quot;normal (modern) diet&quot;, &quot;heavily calorically restricted&quot;, and sometimes a particularly unrealistic fasting schedule (see link), so if you&#x27;re interested in a point in the middle of the two we&#x27;ve studied, you&#x27;re sort of scientifically on your own. Hence the possibility I cite of 120%; currently it would fit the two data points we have just fine for it to turn out that &quot;caloric restriction&quot; isn&#x27;t the optimum and is in fact overshooting.)