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Antisuji comments on Lifehack Ideas December 2014 - Less Wrong
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[not sure if this strictly qualifies as a lifehack, but it seems to be in the general ballpark]
I have been practising a slightly modified version of alternate-day intermittent fasting since mid-January this year. Basically, every second day, I eat a small breakfast and then nothing until midnight (or at least I try to, in practice I sometimes have a snack at 10-11 pm). There seems to be some evidence that this is good for human health, and I have found it to be rather low-cost - I am still able to do moderately strenuous physical activity on fasting days (namely cycling from university to my home, which is half an hour away and mostly uphill), and do not get particularly hungry either (although I sometimes desire certain foods, hence the snacking). All in all, this seems like the sort of thing that is worth trying.
I've been fasting one day a week since the beginning of May of this year. I usually start Sunday evening and fast through Monday evening or Tuesday morning, around 24 to 36 hours, and this fits my schedule pretty well—alternate-day would be considerably more difficult. The trickiest part is declining offers from coworkers to go to lunch and then having to explain why. Sleeping through the night on Monday can be a little uncomfortable if I'm doing a longer fast.
I've fasted erratically for years (when I felt like it, which turned out to be once every month or two), but started the weekly cadence because I found out I had very high total cholesterol (~280 mg/dL) when I went to the doctor in May. When I donated blood in October my total cholesterol was down to ~190 mg/dL.
It's hard to know how much of this effect to attribute to fasting, since I did make some other minor systematic changes to my diet (more fish, fewer pastries, a shift from butter to olive oil in cooking) and there might be other changes that I don't know about or haven't considered. Since I'm comfortable with this amount of fasting and since there are non-health-related benefits I suspect the VoI of a more careful experiment is low to negative. (I can imagine finding out there's no fasting -> cholesterol lowering effect, stopping the habit because of this, and losing out on the less tangible benefits.)