CHAPTER 6
How to Get Started If You’re Unsure If you have never tried to fast for any amount of time and can’t imagine even skipping a meal—let alone a whole day of eating—then I invite you to take a deep breath and remember that you don’t have to jump in with both feet. There are dozens of relatively easy things you can do to lower the psychological barrier to fasting. That’s what this chapter is all about. Of course, if you’re a “dive right in” kind of person and want to get going, then by all means, get to it! There is no special preparation needed to begin fasting. You can start now. Group your eating moments—don’t graze. First and foremost, distinguish mealtimes from all other times. You can eat any amount of food you want—just eat it at either breakfast, lunch, or dinner. Respect that all other times are non-eating times. If you want dessert after dinner, eat it in the same “eating moment” as dinner itself. Don’t get up, clear the table, wash the dishes, retire to the couch for a movie, and then eat dessert. Similarly, don’t nibble before breakfast, or have a mid-morning snack after breakfast. If you are hungry before and after breakfast, make yourself a bigger breakfast. And if you normally have a snack a couple hours after lunch, add that snack to the end of your lunch. Then, wait to eat again until dinner. Swap heavy cream for sugar in your coffee or tea, or take it plain. This is a small but significant move. Many of us drink coffee or tea once or more per day. The beverages themselves have great health benefits, and I generally don’t see reason to restrict them. The trouble comes when you add sugar or other sweeteners to these beverages. They become just another source of sugar in our daily diets, and continue to reinforce the sugar cravings you are trying to put to rest. Instead of sugar, learn to take your coffee black and your tea plain. If you can’t take it black, add heavy cream (not milk) or coconut oil or cinnamon if you like those flavors. Don’t add almond milk or similar products that have carbohydrates, alternative sweeteners, or both. If you are fasting and want to take coffee or tea on your fasting day, it’s helpful to get this practice under your belt. Create a “no eating” buffer around your sleep time. If you’re doing well with three meals a day and you aren’t grazing or snacking in between, the next step is to create a mini “no eating” window after dinner and before breakfast. If you think about it, sleep is the longest period of fasting that most of us have every day—a nice eight hours or so. If you can push your first morning bite out two hours into the day, and make sure dinner wraps up two hours before bedtime, then you’ll increase that fasting window by 50 percent! That’s a fast of 12 hours, and is a real accomplishment. If this works for you, keep going that way, maybe pushing breakfast out two more hours the following week. You’ll see that you may get to a 16-hour fast in no time.
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