You've almost certainly heard of intermittent fasting. It's everywhere right now. But in my work as a clinical nutritionist, I've come to think that fasting is only one small piece of something much bigger — and much more useful. What if the real problem isn't just when you eat, but that almost nothing in your life ever switches off?
That's the idea behind intermittent living. And once you see it, you can't unsee it.
What intermittent living actually means
"Intermittent" simply means something that comes and goes. It's up, then down. On, then off. Not constant.
Your body was built for that rhythm. Almost every system you have — your hormones, your digestion, your nervous system, your immune function — expects a pulse rather than a flat line. Yet most of us now live in a world that offers us a flat line and calls it convenience. Light all night. Food at any hour. Notifications at midnight. Challenge without pause.
Intermittent living is the deliberate practice of putting the off button back in. Not just with food, but with light, movement, stress and even the people and routines you love. If you only take one thing from this article, let it be this: your body doesn't want constant. It wants a rhythm.
Light: bright days, dark nights
This is where I'd start if you only wanted to change one thing. Natural daylight is roughly a hundred times brighter than typical indoor lighting, and that difference matters enormously. Bright light during the day tells every cell in your body what time it is and what job it should be doing right now — making energy, digesting food, being alert and productive.
At night, your body needs the opposite: the absence of light. Artificial light after dark sends what I'd call incoherent signals. Your eyes are telling your brain it's daytime while your biology is trying to wind down, and that mismatch creates dysregulation across the whole system.
So the practice is simple, even if it isn't always easy. Get outside early and often. Then, as the evening comes, let it actually get dark. Dim the lamps. Put the screens down. Let your environment do the signalling for you, rather than fighting it.
Food and movement belong to daylight
Your body isn't designed to digest a meal at midnight. Night is for repair and recuperation — for the quiet maintenance work that keeps you well. When you ask your digestive system to process a heavy meal during that window, you're asking it to do a daytime job on the night shift.
The same principle applies to movement. Being physically active during daylight hours works with your biology. Hard training late at night works against it, because you're pouring stimulation into the very hours your body has set aside for rest.
I want to be clear that this isn't about restriction for its own sake. Eating in daylight and moving in daylight isn't a punishment — it's just putting the right activity in the right window. Most people who try it tell me they sleep better within a week.
Challenge needs a counterweight
Here's the part that surprises people. Stress isn't the enemy. A good challenge is genuinely good for you — it's how you grow stronger, physically and mentally. But challenge only builds you when it's followed by support and recovery.
What breaks people isn't a hard day. It's a hard day, every day, with no off button. Too much challenge for too long, with no supported recovery on the other side, is how you end up depleted.
So yes, take on challenges. Just not all of them, and not all at once. Ask yourself whether your day has any stretch of time where nothing is being demanded of you. If the honest answer is no, that's your first thing to change. This applies to training too: vary what you do, and let the off days actually be off days.
Emotions need processing time
We're very good at talking about sleep and food, and far less comfortable talking about emotional rhythm. But the same logic holds. If you're constantly in a state of overwhelm, with no quiet space to actually process how you're feeling, those feelings don't go anywhere — they just accumulate.
This is why I'll often suggest building genuine quiet time into the day. Not productive time. Not scrolling. Quiet time to reflect, to check in with yourself, to notice how you're actually doing. Ten minutes of that is worth more than an hour of distraction.
And when you notice you're not travelling well, do the things that genuinely nourish you. Acts of self-kindness aren't indulgent. They're part of how a nervous system comes back to baseline.
The gift of abstinence
Here's the beautiful part, and the reason I think intermittent living works so well in practice. When you step away from something for a while, you build anticipation for it. You get a little surge of excitement when it comes back. And crucially, you appreciate it more.
That's a big part of why intermittent fasting feels so good to people. It isn't only metabolic. It's that food becomes something you look forward to again, instead of something that's simply always there.
The same is true of almost everything. Take a break from your usual routine and you come back to it with fresh eyes. Take a break from the foods you eat constantly and you taste them properly again. Even relationships benefit from a little space — when we see the same people every single day without pause, we start to take them for granted. Absence really does make the heart grow fonder.
When everything is constant, we stop noticing it. The pulse is what restores the appreciation.
Key takeaways
- Get outside into natural daylight early in the day — it's around a hundred times brighter than indoor light and it sets your internal clock.
- Let the evening get genuinely dark. Dim the lights and reduce artificial light so your body can read the signal.
- Keep eating inside daylight hours where you can, and avoid late meals. Night is for repair, not digestion.
- Move during the day, rest at night, and vary the types of exercise you do rather than training hard every single day.
- Build in real quiet time to reflect and process your emotions, rather than running from one demand to the next.
- Deliberately take breaks — from routines, from favourite foods, even from constant social contact. Abstinence rebuilds appreciation.
What I love about this approach is how well it fits the way I work at me&my wellness. Health was never going to come from one heroic intervention. It comes from the rhythms you live inside every day — your light, your food, your movement, your rest, your relationships — and from how well those rhythms match what your body is actually expecting. Intermittent living is a holistic lens, not a protocol. You don't need to change everything at once. Pick the pulse that's most obviously missing from your week and start there.
Want to go deeper on this? Book a free 30-minute discovery call with Anthony at meandmywellness.com.au