During the first month of Daily IF, new fasters often find themselves overeating. This is for three reasons: (1) Appetite Correction (where your body starts telling you to stop eating naturally—it’s super cool!) hasn’t set in yet; (2) People often enjoy the new-found freedom of not having to restrict foods as much, so they eat craving-inducing foods (and too much of them!); (3) They often still have too long of an eating window, which greatly affects the amount of food they consume.

The good news is that you get better and better at Daily IF! It is amazing how skilled you become once all of the incredible benefits are in play. You will become a fat burning machine during your fasting hours (fat adapted). You will not eat everything in sight during your eating window (appetite correction). And you will start losing weight and looking great!

Many people cannot lose weight with a medium-long fasting window (16, 17, or 18 hours) and a long eating window of six, seven, or eight hours. The fasting window is not long enough for someone on a moderate or high carb eating pattern to burn through their glycogen stores and circulating glucose and really get into body fat burning mode. The eating window might be too long for us, allowing us to eat more than we need for the weight we desire. Also, appetite correction is challenging with long eating windows because you are “getting full” twice rather than once in a seven or eight hour period of time.

It would be unusual for someone who doesn’t count calories or carbohydrates to lose down to their ideal weight with two meals a day and a snack or two (eating anything in any amounts). If you’re not getting the benefits of body fat burning from a long eating window, you’re not getting some of the IF benefits. Then you are relying on eating fewer calories to cause you to lose weight. Bottom line: You might need a longer fasting window and a shorter eating window if you’re not controlling your calories and carbohydrates via another protocol at the same time.

Many Daily IF teachers (myself included) do not impose a certain eating plan on their students. So many of us have “been there, done that” for many years with a myriad of diet protocols. Daily IF is our ticket out of the rat race of dieting. We can finally enjoy pizza night, birthday parties, banquets, Mexican restaurants, and more without worry. Appetite Correction during a short eating window ensures that we stop eating in time to keep us losing or maintaining our weight. However….if you’ve been doing Daily IF CONSISTENTLY (not off and on!) for a period of time, your body is a fat burning machine each day, appetite correction is in place and works for you, but you are still not losing weight, you will want to examine some other things.

Here are some questions to consider: (1) Are you opening your window with something low carb/healthful? Many people have better weight loss when they do so. (2) Are you eating too many processed foods or junk foods? Appetite correction responds better to real foods (and a real meal as opposed to just a series of junk food throughout your eating window). (3) Are you having more than one dessert or treat in your eating window? I teach an OMAD/3 approach to the eating window–OMAD (One Meal a Day) in three parts—a. Appetizer/salad/snack to open the window; b. Entree or meal an hour or two later; c. Dessert or snack before closing window if still hungry.

Daily Intermittent Fasting is like any other weight loss plan when it comes to getting close to your goal weight. The body’s weight loss slows down as it gets close to its goal. While you don’t have to “starve yourself” down to your goal weight like you do when you do calorie restriction, you will be tweaking and perfecting your fasting and eating windows as you get near the end of the weight loss portion.

If you have only ten or twenty pounds remaining to lose, your weight loss will not likely be fast (unless you’re doing an extreme keto at the same time as Daily IF). But it will be steady. This is the beauty of IF–weight loss is not fast and furious, but it keeps going–consistently. If we do not stop Daily IF and we have a lengthy fasting window and short eating window, we will eventually weigh what we want to weigh. And…..at that point, we will maintain that weight (and continue to trim up and lose body fat!) when we using Daily IF for maintenance as well.

Of course, Daily IF yields many other NSV (non-scale victories) besides weight loss and a great physique. As a matter of fact, there are many IF’ers who do not weigh at all–they rely on their next “goal jeans” to tell them how they’re doing. They don’t care what they weigh as long as they wear the size clothes and look the way they want to look.

So be sure that, even if you are just getting started, you look for the first NSV–inflammation going down (face thinner; less “fluffiness”); less hunger during the fasting period as you move into fat adaption; empowerment that comes through living this lifestyle; a consistency on weekends and for many days in a row that you were never able to achieve with other weight loss protocols; feeling amazing without being bogged down with carbs and food during the day; time freedom of not having to buy, shop, and prepare so much food; no packed lunches and snacks; financial freedoms as you spend less money on food and drinks; and so much more!

1) Length of Time You’ve Been Practicing IF: IF Journal Podcast

2) Length of Your Daily Fasting Window and Eating Window: 5 Ways IF Can Seem Upside Down

3) What You’re Eating During Your Eating Window: IF Journal Podcast

4) How Much Weight You Have to Lose: Feast Without Fear by Gin Stephens

5) Other Non-Scale Victories: Complete Book of Fasting by Jason Fung

There’s one thing that most Daily Intermittent Fasters agree on: water during the fasting window. It helps regulate you (a problem many fasters have as they eat less food and eat less frequently), helps flush out fat and toxins, and can make you feel full (or at least less “empty”). Some fasting experts recommend half your body weight in ounces of water; others recommend up to 150 ounces of water every 24 hours!

There are four kinds of water you might benefit from: a. Tap, bottled, or filtered water–just your every day water, with or without ice. a.  Mineral water—it has four times as much calcium and magnesium as regular tap water. Can balance your electrolytes/mineral deficiency easily and quickly with mineral water. c. Sparkling water (mineral or not)–it  tricks the “ghrelin gremlins” (grehlin is the hormone that tells you you’re hungry) into thinking you’ve been fed due to the bubbles. d. Caffeinated water–for those who want caffeine to help with hunger.

Cold or hot unflavored, unsweetened, non-caloric beverages help many Daily IF’ers get through their fast. These include coffee, tea, green tea, unflavored, etc.

Some fasters use caffeinated water (again, flavorless) to get their water and their caffeine both in. Others use “caffeine pills” to give them a caffeine boost. Note that neither of these is an “energy drink” that is loaded with sugar, calories, and artificial ingredients.

Himalayan salt contains the same 84 trace minerals and elements that are found in the human body. Some of these include sodium chloride, sulphate, calcium, potassium, and magnesium. When consuming this salt, you are actually getting less sodium intake per serving than regular table salt because it is less refined and the pieces are larger.

You can use this salt in a couple of ways when hunger is challenging, especially in the first few weeks of Daily IF. First of all, you can put some of the tiny, unground chunks under your tongue for immediate balancing. People have reported that dizziness, nausea, and headaches leave immediately when doing this. You may also make a coffee or other drink with the ground pink Himalayan salt and drink that down when you feel weak.

Clean fast advocates say NO calories. They believe that any calories (even fat ones) take the body out of body fat burning because even though they are not carbohydrates, they cause a metabolic response. Some allow a tablespoon of cream or two, saying that compliance of actually fasting for many hours each day is more important than perfection. Others allow fat of any kind, including avocados, oil, butter, cream, and certain nuts. Many of these people drink bullet-proof coffee, ranging in calories from 400 to 1200 per cup!

If there is a chance that your fasting hours aren’t truly fasting hours (because of a little cream), you might want to forgo the cream in the coffee. The biggest thing for me is that I do not want to “drink” 400 calories or more during my fasting window. Calories do eventually catch up with you if you consistently eat more than you burn–and I don’t want to “spend” any of them during my fasting window.

Some believe if it doesn’t have calories, it doesn’t matter. Diet pops, stevia-sweetened lemonade, gum, sugar-free jello, sf mints and hard candy,  etc. Others say it doesn’t have to have calories or carbs to elicit insulin response. Any sweet or fruity taste can do it and is breaking the fast.

Studies have shown that fruity or sweet flavors (even non-caloric) can cause an insulin response. An insulin response can take you out of body fat burning. Who wants to work this hard at fasting, getting into a fat adaptive state, getting your body to truly be a “fasting inferno”–just to take you out of that with a measly sugar-free jello when you’re going to be feasting on planned, enjoyable, health-giving foods in a very short time? Try breath drops that are pure; brush your teeth often (carry a mini toothbrush and toothpaste–it does more than freshen your breath; it can become a “starting ritual” when you begin your fast or a “continuing ritual” when things get tough).

1. Drink Water: Delay, Don’t Deny

2. Drink Caffeinated Drinks: https://plexusworldwide.com/raylreish/product/plexus-accelerator-plus

3. Take Pink Himalayan Salt:  Himalayan Salt Crystals

4. Do or Do Not Use Fat/Cream in Coffee, Bullet-Proof Coffee, etc.:  Appetite Correction

5. Do Not Consume Flavored Drinks/Sugar Free Gum or Mints: Fasting Inferno blog post

IF Fasting Journal here at Donna Reish

Recipes and Tips here at DonnaReish.com

YouTube Channel

IF Journal Podcast at iTunes

Just say no! Say no to continuing bad eating habits on Monday that you had over a less-than-perfect weekend. Say no to having the diet mentality that “I already blew it this weekend, so I may as well just forget it!” Stop the overeating madness right now—not later! You could have your body back into a fat burning state in two or three days of clean long fasts (18-23 hours). Don’t let the weekend ruin what you know you could do!

Take a look at what happened this weekend. You know that you can adjust your fasting hours and eating hours to accommodate special occasions (not every Saturday and Sunday is a special occasion!). You know how flexible this lifestyle is (for life!). So what went wrong?

See if you had the weekend “Diet Mentality”—perfect on week days and indulgent on weekends. See if what started out as a simple exception or lengthening of your eating window for a special day turned into a weekend eating fest. Did you not have a plan in place to handle the down time or the food that you were going to be around as you cooked breakfast for your family? Examine your weekend—and fix it for next weekend!

The “Diet Mentality” is that we are perfect on our “diets” during the week to compensate for over-indulgence on the weekend. The “Diet Mentality” is that we punish ourselves on Mondays to do penance for our weekend food sins. This can stop with Intermittent Fasting!

While you might want to extend your fasting hours to prepare for a shorter fasting window for a special occasion. While you might want to do sugar-free for a few days because you do better without as much sugar. While you might want a short eating window when you go out to a four course dinner….you no longer need to punish yourself for whatever may have taken place food-wise over the weekend! If you push yourself to do an Extended Fast (EF—36 hours or more) as punishment when you aren’t ready for that lengthy fast, you could set yourself up for fasting failure in general. If you decide to do super low calories in Monday’s eating window, your Tuesday fast will be HARD. Get rid of the punishment mentality—regardless of what your weekend was like.

Another Diet Mentality! Associating weekdays with health food and weekends with junk food is no longer needed with Daily IF! You can have whatever you want, whatever makes you feel good and achieve your health and weight management goals, any time. When we attach certain food types to days of the week, we also risk the “I already ate junk today, so I may as well forget my program” mentality. (Do you see how the “Diet Mentality” is a slippery slope?)

Eat what you want, what you like, what helps you feel good, what leads to your goals—on whatever day you want to. If you want ice cream on Tuesday, eat ice cream on Tuesday. If you have a special occasion and want a longer eating window on Thursday, have a longer eating window on Thursday. If you don’t have anything special on Saturday, have a longer fast! Don’t base your food choices and/or fasting windows on weekdays vs weekends!

Start Monday out strong! Don’t waver. Don’t let the weekend’s successes or failures dictate how well you will fast this week! Briefly look at your calendar and plan your fasting windows and eating windows based on your schedules and social events. Think about how you will move your windows around to accommodate a Friday lunch date that is really important to you. Plan, plan, plan! (We have so little to DO in IF that looking at your calendar and thinking through the week for a few minutes is really not much to ask!)

If you didn’t use your coping techniques, distractions, or self-soothing strategies on the weekend, pull them out and get them ready to go! Use self-talk as soon as you get up on Monday morning: “I have already fasted for twelve hours. I am only six hours away from eighteen hours. I’ve got this. I am 2/3 done. I succeed in fasting because I plan and think and love the results!” Get ready for a great week—without worrying about what happened on the weekend!

IF Fasting Journal here at Donna Reish

Recipes and Tips here at DonnaReish.com

YouTube Channel

IF Journal Podcast at iTunes

Generally speaking, people do well in their early days of diets.They shop, prep, clean out old foods, make a plan–and feel generally optimistic in the first few weeks. People do not usually feel physically bad on their new diets at first–and they are “good” for a while on them. Many people brag on social media that their new plan is “easy” and “can be done forever.” Down the road, however, the restrictions become too much to stick with for many people.

On the other hand, Daily IF is HARD at first. Before you become fat adapted (where your body goes from using your glyogen stores to using your body fat for fuel), hunger is very real. And it can hurt, cause headaches and dizziness, leave you nauseous, and more. However, unlike other diets, if you stick with it for five to twenty days of CLEAN fasting, IF will get easier and easier.  it is truly “upside down” in how easy it becomes later on!

When someone goes on a typical “diet,” weight loss can be immediate. There is usually a large enough calorie deficit, coupled with a large water loss, that the scale is pretty friendly to traditional dieters in the first few weeks.

Weight loss with Daily IF can be slower at first for a number of reasons:  People who come to IF from traditional diets often go crazy the first few weeks with their food during their eating window (i.e. too many calories). Appetite correction  (where your body naturally tells you that it’s done eating for the day–it really DOES happen!) hasn’t set in during the first couple of weeks, so new IF’ers often overeat during their eating window.  And, the newbie’s IF skills are not honed yet. You do get better and better at Daily IF as time goes on! On the up side, when these things are all solved, usually two to three weeks in, weight loss will come–and it will usually remain steady as your body works its magic.

Many traditional diets cause you to lose pounds by losing fat AND muscle (especially traditional calorie-restricted diets). In these protocols, a person must lose a large number of pounds in order to translate in to significant inch loss and/or a size loss.

 Daily IF changes body composition. It attacks fat and preserves muscle. Therefore, a pound of fat, which might look like a large one-pound bag of feathers, can be lost while a pound of muscle, which might look like a one pound bag of marbles, might be gained. There would be no weight loss on the scale in this scenario; however, the body can look significantly different and show inch loss/size loss well before it shows scale loss.

From day one of a Daily IF protocol, a person enjoys amazing freedoms–time freedom from not having to shop, prep, cook, and clean as much; money freedom from not having to buy as much food in general and as much specialty (“diet”) foods specifically; and thought freedoms from not having to think about and plan food as much. This is where IF really outshines other diets in a truly “upside down” way! Other weight management protocols zap our time, money, and thoughts immediately!

Daily IF, when not coupled with other eating protocols, gives amazing food freedom. People who come from stringent diets to IF finally get to go out for pizza with friends, have birthday cake (on their own birthday!), and eat dessert on Saturday night. Food freedom is huge with IF! Even those eating low carb have all of their carbs to “spend” during a shorter time span, which gives more opportunity for fruit, small servings of starches, etc., as desired.

When someone is on 1200 calories a day and cheats at the end of the day by eating, say, a candy bar for 200 calories, that person is pretty unharmed by that “cheat.” When a low carber eating 30 carbs a day eats an apple at the end of the day after they’ve already had 30 carbs, they just ate 50 carbs that day and can actually still be in ketosis. Small cheats don’t ruin other diets as much. The success of IF is based in large part on the fasting hours–having enough hours in the fasted state to burn through your glycogen stores so your body burns its own fat for fuel. “Cheating” on IF can fill these stores up too much for IF to work the next day for you.

There really isn’t a need to “cheat” on IF! If you need more eating time for a special occasion, you can just shorten your fasting window on that day and lengthen it on another day. However, if someone does “cheat” too much on Daily IF by eating three meals a day (whatever they want), they will (a) eat too much and gain weight; (b) fill their glycogen stores up full again; and (c) sort of have to start over emptying their stores and getting their body back into fat burning. (Why go through that again?) So, it’s upside down in a sort of bad way–cheating on IF isn’t good. However, once you are fat adapted in IF and you get into an IF rhythm, you don’t need to cheat anyway!

#1 Your Fasting Window Might Not Be Long Enough to Burn Through Your Glycogen Stores: IF Journal Episode 4

#2 You Might Not Experience Appetite Correction (AC) in a Longer Eating Window: Appetite Correction by Burt Herring

#3 You Will Likely Consume Too Many Calories for Weight Loss to Take Place: Delay, Don’t Deny

#4 Your Body Will Experience the Other Benefits of Daily IF More Fully. The Obesity Code

#5 You Will Likely Experience More “Personal” IF Benefits With a Shorter Eating Window: IF Journal Podcast

IF Fasting Journal here at Donna Reish

Recipes and Tips here at DonnaReish.com

YouTube Channel

IF Journal Podcast at iTunes

When we start Daily Intermittent Fasting, we gradually change our thinking from Diet Mentality to Lifestyle Mentality.  Diet Mentality (which is actually responsible for many of us not reaching our weight and health goals) says that week days are for self discipline and strictness—and weekends are for excess. This cycle yields a net gain or net balance of weight for most traditional dieters. Our week day perfection is undone in two or three short weekend days of indulgence.

With Daily IF, we no longer need to go off and on. We no longer need to “suffer through the week” in order to reach the weekend splurge. We can follow our new Daily IF seven days a week! You might need to adjust your eating window for certain occasions (any of the seven days a week that an occasion arises), but the whole idea of gluttonous weekends is now behind us!

It’s easy to say that we should treat weekends like every other day, but other people do not do that–and we live with other people. Thus, rather than treating weekends differently than you do weekdays, consider each day’s schedules, meal plans, social events, etc. The problem with acting like weekend days are different than every other day is that even if we don’t have something special on the weekend, we still often have our guard down and eat indulgently  (with the Diet Mentality).

Instead, look at each day and plan your longer fasting window/shorter eating windows and vice versa on each day’s merit–not based on where it falls on the calendar. If you have a party Thursday night, plan your eating window around that. If you have a Sunday family dinner at noon, plan your fasting window around that. Treat all seven days the same–with longer and shorter windows based on each day’s activity, while still keeping your fasting hour average where you want it to be.

Again, this is a Diet Mentality. There’s no perfection in eating–and no over-indulgence in eating–with Daily Intermittent Fasting. If you want some low carb days to put yourself into fat burning faster, have them (any day of the week!). If you want ice cream on Wednesday, have it! If you have a birthday party on Thursday, eat cake!

When we assign “good foods” to weekdays and “bad foods” to weekends, we give ourselves license to overeat, eat outside our eating window (“I’m already blowing it today with a lunch then a birthday party!”), and wreck everything we’ve done all the other days. Eat what you want when you want it–based on your schedule and social events for the week.

Like we taught our children with doing their schoolwork and chores, “every day can’t be special.” Life is life. It is filled with a lot of ordinary days (and many wonderful ones and many ordinary ones that are also wonderful!). When we start extending our eating window every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, we are back in the Diet Mentality (and we have trouble getting our fasting average per day back up!).

Extending your eating window for a carry-in lunch at the office on Tuesay, eating with the grandkids on a Wednesday at noon while you’re cutting their PB & J sandwich, a Friday birthday party at noon, Saturday brunch with the family, and Sunday dinner at your favorite Mexican restaurant all just made your fasting window way too short for health and weight management and fat burning–and your eating window way too long to control total intake. Judiciously choose (ahead of time!) which days you will have long fasting windows and which days will have not so long fasting windows. Every time you shorten your fasting window under 16-18 hours, you run the risk of not getting your body into fat burning those days.

One way that weekends can be different and challenging to Daily IF is that we are often not as busy as we are during the work or school week. Another difficulty is, of course, that people eat out and have events morning, noon, and night on weekends!  In order to keep the Daily IF hours fairly high on the weekend, we need to look carefully at our schedules and fill our time up with non-food activities.

Look at each weekend day and see when you can fast FOR YOU! Then look at your schedule and fill down time that is not in your eating window with things you enjoy. Plan activities that you can’t eat while you do–reading to your children; taking a walk, run, or hike; yoga; cleaning; organizing; knitting or other hand crafts; etc. Plan your down hours so that you don’t find yourself bored and wandering out to the kitchen looking for food. Also plan for really yummy foods that you can look forward to. Sometimes just knowing that you’re going to have a favorite food during your eating window can help you be strong even during slower times of off days.

#1 Your Fasting Window Might Not Be Long Enough to Burn Through Your Glycogen Stores: IF Journal Episode 4

#2 You Might Not Experience Appetite Correction (AC) in a Longer Eating Window: Appetite Correction by Burt Herring

#3 You Will Likely Consume Too Many Calories for Weight Loss to Take Place: Delay, Don’t Deny

#4 Your Body Will Experience the Other Benefits of Daily IF More Fully. The Obesity Code

#5 You Will Likely Experience More “Personal” IF Benefits With a Shorter Eating Window: IF Journal Podcast

IF Fasting Journal here at Donna Reish

Recipes and Tips here at DonnaReish.com

YouTube Channel

IF Journal Podcast at iTunes