Introducing FastTempo: A Fasting Timer That Does One Thing Well

Find your rhythm with intermittent fasting—without the bloat.

If you’ve tried intermittent fasting apps before, you’ve probably noticed a pattern: what starts as a simple timer eventually becomes a calorie counter, meal logger, recipe database, AI coach, and social network all rolled into one. Somewhere along the way, the original purpose gets lost in feature creep.

FastTempo takes a different approach. We built the fasting timer we wanted to use ourselves—focused, beautiful, and honest about what it does.

What Is Intermittent Fasting (And Why Does It Work)?

Intermittent fasting—or time-restricted eating—isn’t about what you eat. It’s about when you eat.

The science is straightforward: when you eat, your blood glucose and insulin rise. Your body enters a “fed state” focused on processing and storing energy. When you stop eating, those levels drop, and your body shifts into repair mode—clearing out damaged cells (a process called autophagy), improving insulin sensitivity, and tapping into stored fat for fuel.

Research suggests that maintaining a consistent eating window of around 8 hours offers significant benefits:

Improved metabolic health — Better blood glucose regulation and insulin sensitivity
Weight management — Not through restriction, but through giving your body time to process what you’ve already eaten
Liver health — Time-restricted eating has been shown to reduce fatty deposits and support liver function
Circadian rhythm alignment — Roughly 80% of the genes in your body operate on a 24-hour cycle. Consistent meal timing helps keep these systems synchronised
Enhanced cellular repair — Extended fasting periods (especially during sleep) allow your body to focus on maintenance rather than digestion

The key insight from the research: it’s not just how long you fast, but how consistently you maintain your eating window. Regularity matters more than perfection.

Why We Built FastTempo

We looked at the fasting app market and saw a clear gap. The major apps have evolved into sprawling wellness platforms—calorie counters, AI coaches, recipe databases, social networks. Many users just want a timer that works.

Meanwhile, honest pricing has become rare. Variable subscription costs, aggressive trial-to-paid conversions, and features that “used to be free” now locked behind paywalls have eroded trust.

FastTempo exists because we believe:

A fasting app should track fasting. That’s it. No calorie counting required. No meal logging. No AI chatbots.
Your Apple Watch should be a first-class citizen. Not an afterthought with basic functionality, but the primary way you interact with your fasts.
Pricing should be transparent. You should know exactly what you’re getting and what it costs—no “personalised” pricing based on quiz answers.
Streaks should reward consistency, not punish life. A rigid pass/fail system doesn’t reflect how habits actually work.

Core Features

The 24-Hour Timer

FastTempo’s main interface is a circular 24-hour visualisation showing your eating and fasting windows. At a glance, you can see:

Your current state (eating or fasting)
Time remaining in your current window
Your target start and end times
Whether you’re on track or have deviated from your schedule

The design is intentionally calm. Cool blues during fasting, warm greens during eating. No urgent alerts or panic-inducing notifications—just clear information.

Apple Watch Integration

This is where FastTempo shines. The Watch app isn’t a stripped-down companion—it’s a fully capable interface for managing your fasts:

Complications that show your current state and time remaining right on your watch face
Slide-to-toggle controls for starting and ending your eating window (Premium)
Works without your phone for those times you leave it behind
Haptic feedback so you know when your window opens or closes

Many popular fasting apps don’t have Watch apps at all. We built FastTempo Watch-first.

Flexible Streak Tracking

Traditional streak systems are binary: you either hit your exact window or you “failed.” But that’s not how habits work in real life.

FastTempo uses a tolerance window (±30 minutes by default, adjustable in premium). Started eating 15 minutes early because of a work lunch? Still counts. Finished 20 minutes late at a family dinner? Your streak survives.

This approach rewards consistency over time rather than punishing minor variations. Life happens. Your progress shouldn’t disappear because of it.

Slide Into Fasting

Jumping straight from eating breakfast at 8am to a noon eating window is hard. Most advice says “start with 12 hours and gradually increase”—but then leaves you to figure out the details yourself.

FastTempo’s graduated onboarding does the maths for you. Tell us when you currently eat breakfast and when you’d like your eating window to start. We’ll automatically shift your schedule by 30 minutes every day or two until you reach your goal. No willpower decisions, no manual adjustments—just a gentle transition over 7-10 days.

What FastTempo Doesn’t Do

We’re explicit about this because we think it matters:

No calorie tracking — If you want to count calories, there are excellent apps for that. We’re not one of them.
No meal logging — We don’t need to know what you ate. We just track when.
No recipe databases — Plenty of those exist already.
No AI coaching — We won’t pretend a chatbot knows your body better than you do.
No social features — Your fasting is your business.

FastTempo does one thing: it helps you maintain a consistent eating window. We aim to do that exceptionally well.

Pricing

Free tier: Full iPhone app functionality—timer, notifications, history, streak tracking.

Premium: Unlocks Apple Watch controls, adjustable tolerance windows, and additional widgets.

No hidden charges. No variable pricing. No aggressive trial conversions.

The Science Behind the Schedule

If you’re curious about the research underpinning time-restricted eating, the foundational work comes from labs like Dr. Satchin Panda’s, whose studies in both mice and humans have demonstrated that when you eat can be as important as what you eat for metabolic health.

Key findings worth noting:

An 8-hour eating window appears to be the sweet spot—short enough to provide benefits, long enough to be sustainable
Avoiding food for at least an hour after waking and 2-3 hours before bed maximises the body’s overnight repair processes
Consistency in timing matters more than perfection—a drifting schedule undermines many of the benefits
The sleep-related fast is particularly valuable, which is why extending it (rather than eating right before bed or immediately upon waking) delivers results

FastTempo is built around these principles. The defaults we suggest aren’t arbitrary—they’re grounded in what the research shows actually works.

Find Your Rhythm

Intermittent fasting doesn’t have to be complicated. It doesn’t require counting anything. It doesn’t need an AI to tell you what to do.

It just needs consistency—and a timer that helps you maintain it.

FastTempo. Find your rhythm.

FastTempo is available on the App Store for iPhone and Apple Watch.