How to Successfully Adopt a Fasting Lifestyle for Improved Health

Building a fasting lifestyle is a unique journey for each of us. It’s discovering a path that works best for you. This means figuring out how to incorporate fasting into your life, no matter how busy life is. Each day you get to determine how long you want to be in a fasted state and it can be fun once you find your fasting rhythm. You can customize your fasting lengths according to your body’s needs and what you may be trying to achieve. You can also customize your fasts when life events dictate changes to your schedule, such as family events, vacations, social activities, and work schedules. Most diets are rigid and hard to customize, often forcing you to modify your life to meet the demands of your new health plan, rather than the other way around. Let fasting work for you. To do that, it’s important you ground yourself in four key areas:

#1-Identifying Your Goals Understanding what you are trying to accomplish with fasting is critical.  “What fast is best for me?”  It all depends on what you are trying to achieve.  It’s really important as you go to build a fasting lifestyle that is in line with what you want to achieve. Is it weight loss? Is it to have more energy? Balance your hormones? Build greater gut health? And/or overcome a specific condition?

#2-Vary Your Fasting Lengths The goal with fasting is to learn a pattern that works for you and that you can maintain effortlessly as an ongoing health habit. When you first learn to fast, the most important step is to discover the best hours for you to skip food.  Once you have this base fasting time and length, your next step is to think how you might start to incorporate different-length fasts. This variation in fasting lengths is a powerful way to make sure you never plateau with your results. There are three reasons you want to vary your fasts: to avoid plateaus, to best honor your hormonal surges, and to give you flexibility.

#3-Vary Your Food Choices Do you find yourself eating the same foods over and over again? For the most part we eat the same 30-odd foods repeatedly even though our feminine bodies thrive when we make new, unique, diverse food choices.  One reason we often choose the same foods is because of cravings. It’s common to let our taste buds dictate our food choices. If your brain keeps sending you signals that it wants foods that don’t support your health, long-term health will always allude you. Let me reassure you, you can change your stubborn cravings by varying the foods you choose. With each new food you try, you feed new microbes. As these microbes thrive, they will send signals back to your brain telling it to crave new foods. Numerous studies are proving that your microbiome has a strong influence on your food preferences. One of the benefits of varying both your fasts and foods is that over time you change the terrain in your gut and kill the craving critters. As these microbes die, so will your cravings.

#4-Surround Yourself with a Supportive Community When you surround yourself with supportive people who are as excited for this new journey as you are, that positivity has a cascading effect.  And having a support system who has your back will only bolster your success.  Connecting with others in community gives you a massive oxytocin burst, the queen of all hormones. Nothing makes you feel as good as oxytocin. Lean into a community of other women as you build this amazing healing lifestyle for yourself. Gather a few friends and fast together and cheer each other on. Lift each other up and enjoy the experience of trying a new approach to health. Have fun with it!

Up next, what different length fasts can do for you and your metabolism.