Fasting Guidelines
If you’ve been looking at fasting as a way to lose weight, it might sometimes look too easy. Or, depending on who you listen to, it might look too hard. I fall in to the “it’s pretty easy” camp. I’m talking about Eat Stop Eat style intermittent fasting here – not cleansing diets, not days and days of not eating. I’m not a doctor and I can’t recommends long fasts in good concience – but I know short 24 hour fasts work from experience, and the Eat Stop Eat book does an amazing job of showing how healthy it is, so I feel good about these guidelines.
Guidelines for fasting: Don’t eat!
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Ok, don’t eat for 24 hours. This is different then ‘don’t eat all day’. Although it sounds like it – that’s not what happens. Quit eating after one meal – and have that meal, the next day, be your next meal. I like to do dinner to dinner, as the evening meal is a social one for me. It certainly sounds less hard, to me, then lunch to lunch (or breakfast to breakfast… shudder). I wake up in the morning… a little later then normal… so I just don’t have time to have breakfast. Doing something similar for lunch – then supper comes around pretty easily.
A few things I found helped the fast – gum can be your friend – and after awhile, you don’t need anything to chew.
More (nutritionist documented) help for fasting
Water is allowed – drink lots of it. Again, eventually you should not use no-calorie flavor packets (plus they kind of creep me out, artificial sweeteners might not be bad, but they are so blatantly artificial…) but they are a good way to transition into fasting. Diet sodas do the same thing – again I’m leery, but they provide some stimulation for your mouth, which can be mistaken for cravings.
Be busy! Plan some errands for your lunch break that keep you away from food, put a few more things then normal on your to-do list. Being focused on what you’re doing is helpful to keep hunger away from your mind. This is a HUGE skill you can bring from fasting into your everyday life. We somehow think we’re going to starve if we don’t get food exactly when we THINK we’re hungry. But much of the time – it is just thinking. If you are carrying extra weight, then you’ve thought you were hungry more often then your body actually needed calories.
Practicing denying all food cravings, for limited amounts of time, can be a godsend – calling attention to just how often we have the urge to eat. I was startled at just how often it was in my thoughts the first several times I fasted. But as I practiced, they got much weaker – and it translated into the rest of my week as well. Such a good thing – I feel so much more in control of my eating now.
You can find more fasting guidelines online, or specifically at Brad Pilon’s website – he has been promoting this method of fasting for a long time, and has good documentation of the benefits. There are alternative types of fasting, like the warrior diet – but this has the benefit of being just one day out of your week, and the rest of the time you eat when and how normal Americans do. Just try it yourself, the basics are easy enough – I promise you won’t starve in a day. (I also recommend you pick up the book too though – there are far more helpful tips and reasons to give you the determination to pull through your fasts in it) Thanks!
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