Bernard O'Shea: 'Intermittent fasting totally changed my eating routine'

Bernard O'Shea attempts intermittent fasting. Giving up breakfast is easy, but Loop the Loops too?

Bernard O'Shea tried intermittent fasting. He attempted to eat three square meals a day between 9am and 5pm. but he says, there is the anxiety of knowing that you only have a set amount of time to eat. Photograph Moya Nolan

If you Google 'intermittent fasting' the first few display results will be mostly beginner guides and lists of the best way to start this trendy eating pattern. However, Google doesn’t take into account that I’m an idiot. Also, Google doesn’t know that I’ll read the first article I’ll see as quickly as possible and start experimenting on myself. This has resulted in some mortifying moments in my recent past.

I formulated a plan when I turned 40 to lose weight, get fit, and become mindful all within three months. It culminated in me being gently interrogated as to why I was in a church, ripping the skin off my shoulders with a weighted vest, having a near breakdown in a self-service checkout, puking my guts up for an hour in the Phoenix Park after swallowing sub-Saharan clay and nearly wetting myself in a city centre shop. But every cloud has a silver lining and mine was to realise I  might be a perfect candidate for intermittent fasting.

There seems to be two main approaches to this energy restrictive calorie plan. Firstly there is the 16:8 concept. This is where you fast for 16 hours and eat your meals within an eight-hour window. The second is the 5:2 diet. This is where you eat as normal for five days of the week and then restrict your calorie intake for two of the days. The 5:2 was way too extreme for me so I opted to do the 16:8.

Every time I see 5:2 or 16:8 written down they reminded me of the yellow bible placard thats held up on Hill 16 during matchday with “John 16:8” or “Paul 5:2” protruding through a sea of blue. I looked them up. 

16:8 is “I keep my eyes always on the Lord With him at my right hand, I will not be shaken” and 5:2 is “Hear my cry for help, my King and my God, for to you I pray.” 

I really wanted them to miraculously marry seamlessly into the onset of my new dietary journey. They didn’t. It's a pity one of them didn’t state “God wants you to know that regardless of when you eat if you don’t stop eating crap it's going to make very little difference.”

The biggest inducement that lured me towards the 16:8 approach was my ambivalence to eating breakfast. In the last few years if you told a dietician that you skipped the first meal of the day they would report you to the KGB. 

However, the last thing I want to masticate on first thing in the morning is a big fry-up. (I have no problem eating one at midnight though.)

I also have a hatred - and I mean a real hatred - of porridge. Growing up my whole family loved the stuff. So much so that my mother collected enough wrappers to get the Flahavans tracksuits. I have tried over the years to “Start the day the Flahavans
way” with water instead of milk or mixed with berries and seeds. I've even dipped my toe into the overnight oats craze of 2013 but I can’t get it down my esophagus.

My mother constantly bemoans my disdain towards the midlands' most precious export. “It's a pity because it would keep you going for the day.”

Also if you're not a breakfast eater the food guilt is horrendous when you're staying in a hotel. Your brain is screaming, “Eat as much as humanly possible you're paying a fortune for this”, while your stomach is asking you to “get a cup of coffee we’ll be fine”.

I decide to have my first meal at 1 pm every day which meant that by 9 pm I'd be finished. It seemed too easy … and it was. For the first two weeks, I was eating pretty much what I wanted for those eight hours. I’d have a bag of Tayto and instead of feeling guilty, I'd justify it because it was on the 16:8. Then I’d have an ice-cream after my dinner and think, “What the hell sure I’m on the 16:8”.

This trend went on for a while until my wife lovingly told me one afternoon as I slurped away on a Loop the Loop, “It doesn’t mean you can eat what you want you f##king idiot you have to eat proper spaced out meals. How did you think that it could be a diet ?” 

My answer to that? Remember reading the start of the article? “Google doesn’t take into account that I’m an idiot.” That would be the answer.

So for the last two weeks, I've started to eat three square meals a day between 1pm and 9pm and cut out most of the crap. It's not a difficult regime to do especially during lockdown because we're not going out socialising, but it would be next to near impossible for me to do if I was out on the road again gigging. 

There is also the anxiety of knowing that you only have a set amount of time to eat. That eight hours that seemed almost too much time at the start was now feeling like a surreal gourmandise time test everyday.

But there was an upside. After a few days, I was beginning to feel hungry in the mornings again. I decided to shift my 8 hours to 9 am to 5 pm. Rummaging through the presses, I lamented, “There's nothing in this house I can eat for breakfast”, and then a Lion King moment happened. I call them “Lion King” moments after the song, The Circle of Life. Because my wife shouted from the living room, “You should eat porridge it will fill you up for the day”. 

I’ll wear the tracksuit but apologies to all the tillage farmers out there, I just won’t eat the oats.