8 Pounds Lost - Really Happy with Results

I always gain weight starting in the fall and over the holidays and then work on losing it through the spring. My usual approach is intermittent fasting. This year I found this fasting subreddit and decided to do some fasting. I settled on eating 5 days a week in a 4 hour window, and then fasting on the other 2 days. I've found that this is sustainable for me even when I'm doing intense exercising most days of the week. The result is that I'm losing weight at least twice as fast as I normally do, and with much less effort. The first time I skipped a whole day of eating was tough, but after that it's so easy I don't even think about. It almost feels stranger when I go 2 days in a row of eating, lol.

There are some slight downsides. I have about the same overall strength, but less stamina when exercising after fasting for over 24 hours. However I'm not competing for anything, just trying to stay healthy, so this isn't much of an issue for me. The other downside is that I feel like the weight loss is harder to track. I weigh myself every morning and with my old method my weight was very stable and I would see it generally trend down by very small amounts each day. However with fasting I'm constantly gaining and losing large amounts of water weight, so I see my numbers shoot up by 4 pounds and then drop 5 pounds the next day. I calculated the 8 pound loss by taking the average of the last several days.

Additional info:

• Early 40s male, 5'8
• Starting weight ~172
• Current weight after a month of 5:2 ~164
• I take zero calories during my fasting periods, but I have coffee/tea and electrolytes and occasionally add some zero-calorie water flavor enhancers.