Invisalign – Do you really have to wear them for the recommended 22 hours?

In short – No you don’t. 18 hours a day should do the trick. Which is good because how Invisalign ever thought that 22 hours would be possible for anyone , I really don’t know. Unless of course you are one of those people who can just eat one meal a day. A man basically! Clearly Invisalign was invented by men. Any woman would have known that 22 hours a day was a non starter and would have gone straight back to the drawing board.

The eating regime of the average women goes a bit like this: Breakfast, another cup of tea/coffee, mid morning snack, more tea coffee, lunch, tea/coffee, further snack, early evening drinks and nibbles, dinner, chocolate. That would leave about 2 hours a day when your aligners are actually in. That won’t quite work either. So a bit thought and discipline needs to go into it but you don’t need to hit 22 hours.

You will have heard of the Invisalign diet. It’s not imaginary, it’s real. I lost about 5 lbs in the first 5 days through starving myself because I couldn’t get enough food down me quickly enough to get the aligners back in so I could stick to the recommended 22 hours. Clearly I wasn’t going to last the full course if I carried on like that. So I needed a plan.

Breakfast, lunch and dinner was an absolute minimum. So the routine goes like this: Coffee first thing in the morning. Then teeth are cleaned and the aligners go back in. Breakfast is as soon as I get into the office and they are out for a maximum of 30 minutes. Finding time to go and rinse the aligners before putting them back in is the difficult part but that just has to be done.

I could not get through a working day without lunch and I allow myself up to one hour without the aligners in middle of the day. And then they are back in until I get home in the evening. Evenings are my grazing time when the aligners are out for about 3 to 4 hours and I get to stuff myself with the junk food I have denied myself all day.

The main problem with this routine is that the 21st century office seems to be characterised by a never ending conveyer belt of junk food; cakes, biscuits, muffins, doughnuts. Any birthday, celebration, key date seems to involve treats etc. Rarely doe s a day go by when there isn’t something to celebrate and cakes aren’t being handed round. You will soon learn that you won’t be having any (unless you save your cake for lunch time). Grazing is simply not an option on the Invisalign diet. You will learn the art of self denial.

If you are a 10 cups of tea or coffee a day sort of person you will also have to have a rethink as it is not recommended to drink anything hot with the aligners in and of course both tea and coffee stain and would seep into them and it would be revolting.

In fact, Invisalign say the only thing you can drink apart from water is white wine so why not try substituting the tea or coffee in your day for white wine. J