Hi y’all, it’s getting toward the end of the summer, and back-to-school adverts have already started. After working so hard to create a swimsuit body—cough-cough, yeah, right—it would be shame to gorge on carbs as the nights grow shorter. In the June, 2017 issue of GQ, there is an article called How to Fast: A guide for the Hungry Man. The author lays out two types of fasts. The 16:8 diet and the 5:2.

How It Works: the 16:8 plan. For an eight hour window a day, you eat however you normally do. For the other 16, fast. You can drink water, black coffee, and herbal tea. That’s it. You’re giving your body time to digest.

How It Works: the 5:2 plan. For five days a week, eat normally. For the other two, “fast” by limiting yourself to 600 calories a day. (And yes, booze counts.) A typical breakfast: a slice of ham and two scrambled eggs. Dinner is a protein-packed chicken salad.

By Jeff Vrabel: If you somehow stick with it, you’ll join a lineage of fasters dating back to Aristotle and Plato, who proved that even humanity’s deepest philosophers sweat their beach bodies. Fasting may actually put us closer to our natural state; some experts think humans aren’t designed for three squares a day and that we mistakenly regard mild hunger as an emergency. Which is why, although our loinclothed ancestors only ate when they brought down a mastodon, we invented Doritos Locos Tacos.

Naturally, this got me wondering, what if D/s wasn’t 24/7, but restricted to either one of these fasts? As a Dom, you could only be in charge for eight hours a day. If you decide that sleep is not part of the hours, then that would leave you roughly eight out of sixteen awake hours to dominate your submissive. It could be breakfast to mid-afternoon; mid-morning to dinner; or mid-afternoon to bedtime. With only eight consecutive hours of D/s a day, how would you work around work? Use text and calls and pass on the physical for a day? It’s not so farfetched when you consider that if you take away sleep and work time, most people only have a 4 to 6 hour window in any case. Toss in a family, and that time slivers to minutes. Would a scheduled time work better?

The other plan, 5:2, is what I think most D/s couples+ would likely choose. Work is no longer M-F 9-to-5, but skipping all D/s twice a week, doesn’t sound all that bad when you consider that some days nothing happens anyway. This would take the pressure off in terms of feeling let down that there was no play time or spanking. The downside is deciding whether to take a two-day break, with five on, or some pattern where the breaks are further apart. Constantly starting and stopping may seem a hardship at first, but it may also ratchet up the intensity knowing that if time is wasted, then the wait will make the next on day feel more precious. So, any takers for a D/s diet?