Your Fast Days in practice

So. Today’s the day. Six weeks until the great reveal. We all do it, don’t we? We calculate a reasonable interval between now and the first beach outing, a window of opportunity and diligence that, in theory, should get us swimsuit-ready in a great six-week leap. Women apparently plan to lose an average of 8lb in the run-up to a holiday. The operative word here is ‘plan’. I suspect that the reason everyone looks so despondent in the departure lounge at Gatwick is that they’ve all been bitterly disappointed by the scales that very morning. But with the Fast Beach Diet, you’re stacking the odds in your favour. Stay focused. Stay firm. This, you can do.

Which days to choose?

It really doesn’t matter. It’s your life, and you’ll know which days will suit you best. Monday is an obvious choice for many, perhaps because it is more manageable, psychologically and practically, to gear yourself up at the beginning of a new week, particularly if it follows a sociable weekend. For that reason, fasters might choose to avoid Saturdays and Sundays, when family lunches and brunches, dinner dates and parties make calorie-cutting a bore. Thursday would then make a sensible second Fast Day, chiming, if such things appeal, with the teachings of the Prophet Mohammed, who is understood to have fasted the second and fifth days of the week. But be flexible; don’t force yourself to fast when it feels wrong. If you’re particularly stressed, off-colour, tired or peevish on a day that you have designated a fast, try again another day. Adapt. Do, however, aim for a pattern. That way, over the six-week period, your fasts will become familiar, a low-key habit you accept and embrace.

When to eat?

Go with a timetable that suits you. Some fasters appreciate the convenience and simplicity of a single 500/600-calorie evening meal, allowing them to ignore food entirely for most of the day; some people say they actually feel hungrier during the day if they have breakfast. Having just one meal, as late in the day as possible, will clearly intensify the fast – allowing your body a longer period in which to be in a fasted state. Others prefer to eat breakfast and then avoid food for a Fasting Window of around 12 hours until supper.

Since it is the fasted state that is so beneficial to us, eating lots of small meals is likely to significantly reduce the benefits, particularly if you graze on carbohydrates. Mark Mattson at the National Institute on Aging agrees that eating the 500/600 calories at one meal is better than eating several smaller meals over the course of the day. It is, however, only ‘better’ if you actually do it. Compliance is critical, so experiment a bit and opt for a pattern that works for you. Remember that over time, as you get used to the diet, your body should acclimatise to periods of fasting; so keep your personal pattern flexible and adjust to a more lengthy Fasting Window when you feel able. Stay alert and tweak the regime to suit your needs.

What to eat

Aim to have food that makes you feel satisfied, but stays firmly within the 500/600-calorie allowance – the best options to achieve this are foods that contain lean protein, and foods with a low Glycaemic Index – for more on this, see page 46. So, stick to the Fast Day mantra: ‘Mostly Plants and Protein’.

The Fast Diet does not recommend boycotting carbs entirely, nor does it suggest living permanently on a high-protein diet. We certainly don’t advise eating protein to the exclusion of all else on a Fast Day, but you do require an adequate quantity, for muscle health, cell maintenance, endocrinal regulation and immunity. Protein is satiating too, so it’s a valuable part of your calorie quota. We recommend that you boost the protein content of your diet on Fast Days, so that it makes up a greater proportion of your diet on just those days. The best advice is to stick to recommended governmental guidelines, which allow for a (quite generous) 50g per day. Go for ‘good protein’ – steamed white fish, eggs, prawns, tofu and plant protein from nuts, seeds and pulses (which are also full of fibre and act as bulking agents on a hungry day). When it comes to veg, bring in the Double Vs – plenty of Volume, plenty of Variety.

What does fasting feel like?

If it has been a while since you have experienced hunger, you’ll probably find that eating no more than 500 or 600 calories in a day is a mild challenge, at least initially. Intermittent Fasters do report that the process becomes significantly easier with time, particularly as they witness results in the mirror and on the scales. Have faith: your mission is to get through the day.

Getting past the lows… and feeling the highs

There is no reason to be alarmed by benign, occasional, short-term hunger. Given base-level good health, it will do you no harm at all. Your body is designed to go without food for longish periods, even if it has lost the skill through years of routine picking and snacking.

Remember that the diet you may have been used to – a typical Western grazing diet – is almost designed to make you feel hungry, so much so that hunger becomes the white noise of daily life. Try to recognise that what you feel as ‘hunger’ can be a learned reaction to external cues – it’s often, as we’ll see in chapter 4, ‘emotional hunger’, rather than a true physiological state. There are ways to circumvent the feeling: the real trick is to eat food which keeps you feeling fuller longer. This means some protein. This means slow-burn, low-GI fuel. This means bulk from plants.

In any case, you’re unlikely to be troubled by hunger at all until well into a Fast Day. Fasters also report that the feeling of perceived hunger comes in waves; it will pass. You have absolute power to conquer feelings of hunger, simply by steering your mind, riding those waves, choosing to do something else; perhaps drink a herbal tea, go for a walk, get stuck into a sudoku or a movie or a particularly gripping novel. This is an acquired skill, and you’ll discover plenty of ways to obtain it in the chapters to come. Some people (Matthew McConaughey among them, apparently) swear that brushing their teeth stops them feeling peckish… Do whatever works for you.

After a few weeks’ practising IF, people generally report that their sense of hunger is diminished. So, take heart. On a Fast Day, refrain, restrain, divert and distract yourself. Before you know it, you’ve retrained your brain and hunger’s off the menu.

One of the reasons that the Fast Diet has proved so sustainable for so many is the simple realisation that ‘tomorrow’s another day’. There’s boundless psychological comfort in the fact that your fasting will only ever be a brief break from food. On the Fast Beach Diet, you will still be eating ‘normally’ on non-Fast Days: you’ll simply be eating with more awareness than you might on the traditional Fast Diet, using techniques to ensure that your food choices are absolutely the best you can make.

Bear in mind, too, that fasters regularly report that the food with which they ‘break their fast’ tastes great; my mother-in-law calls this ‘hunger sauce’ – and if you’ve never tasted it, you’re in for a treat. There’s nothing like a bit of delayed gratification to make good things taste even better.

Fast Day tips