The Fast Diet: The secret of intermittent fasting � lose weight, stay healthy, live longer (8 page)

If you do not have an underlying medical condition, and if you are not an individual for whom fasting is proscribed (see pages 123-4), then there really is no time like the present. Ask yourself: if not now, when? You
may prefer to await a doctor’s advice. You may choose to prepare yourself, talk yourself down from a lifelong habit of overeating, clear out the fridge, eat the last cookie in the jar, have a scratch. Or you may want to get on with it and start to see visible progress within a couple of weeks. Do, however, begin on a day when you feel strong, purposeful, calm and committed. Do tell friends and family that you’re starting the Fast Diet: once you make a public commitment, you are much more likely to stick with it. Avoid high days, holidays and days when you’re booked in for a three-course lunch complete with bread basket, cheese board and four types of dessert. Recognise, too, that a busy day will help your fast time fly, while a duvet day generally crawls by like honey off a spoon. Once you’ve deliberated and designated a day to debut, get your mind in gear. Record your details – weight, BMI, target – before you start and note your progress in a diary, knowing that dieters who keep an honest account of what they eat and drink are more likely to lose the pounds and keep them off. Then… take a deep breath and relax. Better yet, shrug. It’s no big deal: you have nothing to lose but weight.

If it has been a while since you have experienced hunger, even the slightest hint, 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. Your first fast day should speed by, buoyed along by the novelty of the process; a fast day on a wet Wednesday in week three may feel more of a slog. Your mission is to complete it, knowing that, although you are saying no to chocolate today, you will be eating what you want tomorrow. That is the joy of the Fast Diet and what makes it so different from other weight-loss plans.

There is no reason to be alarmed by benign, occasional, short-term hunger. Given base-level good health, you will not perish. You won’t collapse in a heap and need to be rescued by the cat. Your body is designed to go without food for longish periods, even if it has lost the skill through years of grazing, picking and snacking. Research has found that modern humans tend to mistake a whole range of emotions for hunger.
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We eat when we’re bored, when we’re thirsty, when we’re around food (when aren’t we?), when we’re in company or simply when the clock happens to tell us it’s time for food. Most of us eat, too, just because it feels good. This is known as ‘hedonic hunger’ – and while you should try to resist it on a fast
day, you can bask in the knowledge that, if you please, you can give in to temptation the following day.

There’s no need to panic about any of this. Simply note that the human brain is adept at persuading us that we’re hungry in almost all situations: when faced with feelings of deprivation or withdrawal or disappointment; when angry, sad, happy, neutral; when subject to advertising, social imperatives, sensory stimulation, reward, habit, the smell of freshly brewed coffee or baking bread or bacon cooking in a café up the road. Recognise now that these are often learnt reactions to external cues, most of them designed to part you from your cash. If you are still processing your last meal, it’s highly unlikely that what you are experiencing is true hunger (‘total transit time’, should you be interested in such things, can take up to two days, depending on your gender, your metabolism and what you’ve eaten).

While hunger pangs can be aggressive and disagreeable, like a box of sharp knives, in practice, they are more fluid and controllable than you might think. You’re unlikely to be troubled at all by hunger until well into a fast day. What’s more, a pang will pass. Fasters report that the feeling of perceived hunger comes in waves, not in an ever-growing wall of gnawing belly noise. It’s a symphony of differentiated movements, not a steady, fearful crescendo. Treat a tummy rumble as a good sign, a healthy messenger.

Remember, too, that hunger does not build over a
24-hour
period, so don’t feel trapped in the feeling at any given moment. Wait a while. You have absolute power to conquer feelings of hunger, simply by steering your mind, riding the wave, choosing to do something else – take a walk, phone a friend, drink tea, go for a run, take a shower, sing in the shower, phone a friend from the shower and sing… After a few weeks’ practising Intermittent Fasting, people generally report that their sense of hunger is diminished.

As we’ve seen, one of the key studies to investigate how obese subjects react to Intermittent Fasting was done with volunteers doing the more demanding Alternate Day Modified Fasting method (ADMF) at the University of Chicago. This study found that ‘during the first week of Alternate Day Modified Fasting, hunger scores were elevated. However, after two weeks of ADMF, hunger scores decreased and remained low throughout the rest of the trial’, demonstrating that ‘subjects become habituated to the ADMF diet (i.e. feel very little hunger on the fast day) after approximately two weeks’. Furthermore, ‘satisfaction with the ADMF diet was low during the first four weeks of the intervention, but gradually increased during the last four weeks of the study.’

In short, the researchers concluded that ‘since hunger virtually diminishes, and since satisfaction with diet considerably increases within a short amount of time, it is likely that obese participants would be able to follow the diet for longer periods of time.
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Remember, this research
was done with people fasting every other day, something that we both tried and found challenging. By contrast partial fasting two days a week – the Fast Diet plan – is a doddle.

So, take heart. On a fast day, refrain, restrain, divert and distract. Before you know it, you’ve retrained your brain and hunger’s off the menu.

Perhaps the most reassuring, and game-changing, part of the Fast Diet is that it doesn’t last for ever. Unlike deprivation diets that have failed you before, on this plan, tomorrow will always be different. Easier. There may be pancakes for breakfast, or lunch with friends, wine with supper, apple pie with cream. This On/Off switch is critical. It means that, on a fast day, though you’re eating a quarter of your usual calorie intake, tomorrow you can eat as you please. There’s boundless psychological comfort in the fact that your fasting will only ever be a short stay, a brief break from food.

When you’re not fasting, ignore fasting – it doesn’t own you, it doesn’t define you. You’re not even doing it most of the time. Unlike full-time fad diets, you’ll still get pleasure from food, you’ll still have treats, you’ll engage in the regular, routine, food-related events of
your normal life. There are no special shakes, bars, rules, points, affectations or idiosyncrasies. No saying ‘no’ all the time. For this reason, you won’t feel serially deprived – which, as anyone who has embarked on the grinding chore of long-term every-day dieting, the kind that makes you want to commit hara-kiri right there on the kitchen floor every time you open the fridge door, is precisely why conventional diet plans fail.

The key, then, is to recognise, through patience and the exercise of will, that you can make it through to breakfast. Bear in mind that fasting subjects regularly report that the food with which they ‘break their fast’ tastes glorious. Flavours sing. Mouthfuls dance. If you’ve ever felt a lazy disregard for the food you consume without thinking, then things are about to change. There’s nothing like a bit of delayed gratification to make things taste good.

Most diets don’t work. You know that already. Indeed, when a team of psychologists at UCLA conducted an analysis of 31 long-term diet trials back in 2007, they concluded that ‘several studies indicate that dieting is a consistent predictor of future weight gain… We asked what evidence there is that dieting works in the long term,
and found that the evidence shows the opposite.’ Their analysis found that, while slimmers do lose pounds in the early months, the vast majority return to their original weight within five years, while ‘at least a third end up heavier than when they embarked on the project’.
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The standard approach clearly hasn’t worked, doesn’t work and won’t work.

In order to be effective, then, any method must be rational, sustainable, flexible and feasible for the long haul. Adherence, not weight loss per se, is the key, so your goals must be realistic and the programme practical. It must fit into your life as it is, not the life of your dreams. It needs to go on holiday with you, it needs to visit friends, get you through a boring day at the office and cope with Christmas. To work at all, any weight-loss strategy has to be tolerable, organic and innate, not some spurious
add-on
that makes you feel awkward and self-conscious, the dietary equivalent of uncomfortable shoes.

While the long-term experience of Intermittent Fasters is still under investigation, people who have tried it comment on how easily it fits into everyday life. They still get variety from food (anyone who’s ever tried to lose weight on ‘only’ grapefruit or cabbage soup will know how vital this is). They still get rewards from food. They still get a life. There is no drama, no desperate dieting, no self-flagellation. No sweat.

Your body is not my body. Mine is not yours. So it’s worth carving out your plan according to your needs, the shape of your day, your family, your commitments, your preferences. We none of us live cookie-cutter lives, and no single diet plan fits all. Everyone has quirks and qualifiers. That’s why there are no absolute commandments here, just suggestions. You may choose to fast in a particular way, on a particular day. You may like to eat once, or twice, first thing or last. You may like beetroot or fennel or blueberries.

Some individuals prefer to be told exactly what to eat and when; others like a more informal approach. That’s fine. It’s enough to simply stick to the basic method – 500 or 600 calories a day, with as long a window without food as possible, twice a week – and you’ll gain the plan’s multiple benefits. In time, there’s little need for assiduous calorie counting; you’ll know what a fast day means and how to make it suit you.

Once you’ve reached your target weight, or just a shade below (allowing room for manoeuvre and a generous slice of birthday cake), you may consider adopting the Maintenance Model. This is an adjustment to fasting on
only one day each week in order to remain in a holding pattern at your desired weight, but still reap the benefits of occasional fasting.

Naturally, one day a week – if that’s what you choose – may offer fewer health benefits than two in the long run; but it does fit neatly into a life, particularly if you are not intent on achieving any further weight loss.

Equally, if the beach beckons or there’s a wedding in the diary or you’ve woken up on Boxing Day haunted by that fourth roast potato, step it up again. You’re in charge.

The first thing you can expect from adopting the Fast Diet, of course, is to lose weight: some weeks more, some weeks less; some weeks finding yourself stuck at a disappointing plateau, other weeks making swifter progress. As a basic guide, you might anticipate a loss of around a pound with each fast day. This will not, of course, be all fat. Some will be water, and the digested food in your system. You should, however, lose around ten pounds of fat over a ten-week period, which beats a typical low-calorie diet. Crucially, you can expect to maintain your weight loss over time.

More important than what you’ll lose, though, is what you’re set to gain…

Over a period of weeks, you can expect your BMI, your levels of body fat and your waist measurement to gradually fall. Your cholesterol and triglyceride levels should also improve. This is the path to greater health and extended life. You are already dodging your unwritten future. Right now, though, the palpable changes will start to show up in the mirror as your body becomes leaner and lighter.

As the weeks progress, you’ll find that Intermittent Fasting has potent secondary effects too. Alongside the obvious weight loss and the health benefits stored up for the future, there are more subtle consequences, perks and bonuses that can come into play.

Expect your food preferences to adapt; pretty soon, you’ll start to choose healthy foods by default rather than by design. You will begin to understand hunger, to negotiate and manage it, knowing how it feels to be properly hungry; you’ll also recognise the sensation of being pleasantly full, not groaning like an immovable sofa. Satiated, not stuffed. The upshot? No more ‘food hangovers’, improved digestion, more bounce.

After six months of Intermittent Fasting, interesting things should happen to your eating habits. You may find
that you eat half the meat you once did – not as a conscious move, but as a natural one born of what you desire rather than what you decide or believe. You’re likely to consume more veg. Many Intermittent Fasters instinctively retreat from bread (and, by association, butter), while stodgy ‘comfort’ foods seem less appealing and refined sugars aren’t nearly as tempting as they once were. The bag of Haribo in the glove box of the car? Take it or leave it.