Fasting tips

Once you’ve decided on an eating window, it is time to eat. I have found that eating small meals periodically throughout your eating window works best. The goal is to give your body the nutrition it needs without overeating. If you eat smaller meals like this, you will regulate blood sugar levels and that alone is a great benefit. An added bonus is that there are no hunger pangs when you eat this way. While many people have decided that you can eat whatever you want to while practicing intermittent fasting, I have found the opposite. While there are no rules as to what you can eat (only when you can eat), it doesn’t mean you should throw caution to the wind. Having a healthy and balanced meal plan is always a good idea. Try to fill your eating hours with whole foods like fruits, veggies, whole grains, healthy fats, and proteins like meat, poultry, legumes, eggs, nuts, seeds, and more. Even without a diet plan, there are foods we know we should avoid in general, like fast food, overly processed foods, and other junk food. As it pertains to intermittent fasting, fast food, and processed foods will cause inflammation, which is the opposite of what we want.

The most important step with 16/8 intermittent fasting is to choose your eating window and your fasting window. One of the easiest windows for eating is from noon until 8 pm. This way, from 8 pm until noon the following day, you won’t be able to eat or drink anything except water. Of course, this also means you will be skipping breakfast, but you can still enjoy lunch and dinner. Another option, which is slightly more difficult, is the 9 am to 5 pm eating window. This eating window can be more difficult since it includes more hours where you are fully awake (and more opportunities for hunger and cravings to strike). When choosing your window, try different options (as long as they stick within that 16/8 parameter) to figure out which works best for you.

When you have done all of this work to water fast for days and days, you do not want to leave your first meal to chance. You will likely be quite hungry when you break your fast, but you do not want to overwhelm your digestive system. I planned that once I was off my fast, I would stay to a vegetarian Keto Meal Plan to maintain my ketosis and keep my digestive system from being overwhelmed. This would also allow me to have small, evenly portioned meals, that were easily prepared so I didn’t have to think too much about cooking or grocery shopping. I chose to break my fast with an avocado. It was soft and easily digestible and the perfect thing to ease me back into the world eating food.

This was quite possibly one of my favorite parts of fasting. I tracked how much I weighed, tracked mood fluctuations, and even saw my hunger levels at a glance. It was extremely valuable and important to my water fasting journey. It allowed me a chance to put my thoughts on paper with everything that was being processed inside of me. Water fasting has a way of illuminating revelations in your mind and helps bring clarity to situations. Plus this “BuJo” spread turned out so good!

This approach is the simplest of all the methods and involves fasting for a 12-hour period every day. For example: Choose to stop eating after dinner by 7 p.m. and resume eating at 7 a.m. with breakfast the next morning. Autophagy does still happen at the 12-hour mark, though you’ll get more mild cellular benefits. This is a minimal fasting window of 12 hours in this method. An advantage of this method is that it’s easy to implement. Also, you don’t have to skip meals; if anything, all you’re doing is eliminating a bedtime snack (if you ate one to begin with). But this method doesn’t maximize the advantages of fasting. If you’re using fasting for weight loss, a smaller fasting window means more time to eat, and it may not help you decrease the number of calories you consume in that window period.

98% of water fasting is about your mental state. There is nothing that will make you go longer or do better than simply being in a good mood. You have to make up your mind that you’re going to do this, and then you have to decide it to be in a good mood about it. On day four my mental state of mind declined significantly. I was grumpy, I even yelled at my husband once, I was frustrated because of being hangry, and overall in a bad mood. If I had been in a better state of mind, I believe I would have been able to go the whole 7 days. If you want to do your own water fast, be sure to grab my complete water fasting prep kit! It completely free and its what helped me conquer water fasting for 40-DAYS!