[removed]
Your submission was removed for promoting dangerous fasting practices, specifically fasting with an eating disorder,fasting with a history of eating disorder, or promoting/exhibiting disordered eating behaviors
As a habitual over/binge-eater, ADF works great, but i find that no matter how long I have fasted my relationship with food stayed the same. Always been a live to eat kinda guy due to bad parenting and lifestyle for a long time, so i always look forward to eating. ADF is just what helps me lose weight/keep weight off. So the short of it is Yes, it will help with weight, but the craving will probably still be there lurking, so when you DO eat, it will probably still be in excess.
I’ve always failed because I didn’t address the psychological aspects of weight loss. I’ve done 24h fasting every week for a few months, I’ve also done TRF 16-8 for 3 months. At some point I’m throwing the towel and I’m 100% sure it’s because I’m not mentally prepared enough.
I’d love to do multi day fast like someone described here, but 21 days seems like climbing Everest. The most I’ve ever did was barely over 48h.
I 100% do this. For the last 2+ years I’ve been eating one (huge) meal every other day. So sort of a combination of alternate day fasting and omad.
It’s fantastic. I’ve lost an absolute load of weight.
Yep! And it works way better for me than other ways of fasting. One of the things I like about it is that I like my coffee with cream and sweetener. So this way I can still have it that way every other day. I don’t mind drinking it black on my fasting days. And I find I don’t eat as compulsively on my eating days. I actually feel somewhat in control. It really has helped me feel like I no longer struggle with my eating habits.
Fasting helped fix my relationship with food. I can honestly say, for the first time in my life, that food has no control over me. For me, it began with low carb…once those cravings went away, I wasn’t tempted by any of my typical trigger foods. Fasting took me the rest of the way. I have tried various schedules, but my most common one is I stop eating Sunday afternoon & don’t eat again until Thursday afternoon/evening. Then I usually have OMAD Thursday-Sunday. I eat a normal size meal during those times or until I feel satiated. I have no problem leaving only a few bites (or half of what I served myself) on my plate at home as I recognize when I feel done…it’s more difficult out at a restaurant, but I will most often share plates with my husband & he eats more than I do, so that works out. Otherwise, it feels wasteful, which is another issue altogether. My point is, a person can absolutely fix their issues with food through fasting. I think my body would rebel if I starved it one day & the next day ate like a glutton…that rollercoaster isn’t good for you…or at least, knowing my body, it wouldn’t be good for me. And I’m interested in health above all else, the weight loss is just a bonus that I have a love/hate relationship with.
>One thing I’ve learned about extended fasting to lose weight is that, for all the health benefits of the process, it doesn’t do much for fixing whatever’s broken about one’s relationship with food. You may finish with a different body, but you’ll still have the same brain - changing that is its own project.
You need to fast longer to change your habits and resolve addiction to food. After my 21 day fast I lost addiction or desire for very much anything, from coffee, to spiced food, sweets, meat etc. I was able to start eating whole plant based food only with absolutely no spices and the taste of any food is multiple times stronger than before, I have no need for coffee and I solely rely on my hunger feelings to eat as much as I want. Which is less than a half of amounts of food before.
However 7 or even 15 days is not long enough. It took me 20 days to stop thinking about taste of food and for some reason, that I never figured out why, all I wanted was cooked cabbage.
ADF seems like a torture for me.
It’s actually been the other way around for me.I was able to do ADF consistently only when my relationship with food got better.Overeating on feast days made fast days miserable and would inevitably slip.Really it was push/pull: fasts helped reset chemical food dependencies, which helped improve relationship with food, which helped fast more.
I used to overeat but I always used to have bloating and indigestion, etc. Whenever I am wanting to eat at a time when I’m not planning on it, I just remember how nice the feeling of hunger is compared to the feeling of having food in my stomach. This may not work for everyone but it does for me.
I also found that if you are skipping a meal at a time when you normally want to eat, it helps to replace it with soda water or something carbonated. I think it’s because of the bubbles.
I am also on clean keto and I credit this choice for why it felt so natural and easy to start intermittent fasting and even long term fasting. The fat makes me really satiated and I no longer get strong cravings now that I don’t eat sugar or refined carbs.
Tracking your food intake is actually a good way to to stop the over eating. When you log the calories from that pint of Ben and Jerry’s your brain quickly realizes it is bad. The same goes with a bag of Doritos or anything that tends to lend to be easily eaten in a sitting. If you ever want to really win the weight loss battle long term, understanding what you are actually taking in is vital.
You don’t specify what issues with food you have. If you suffer from bulimia or anorexia you should not use fasting. That would become another tool of disordered eating for you to use instead of addressing psychological issues behind those disorders.
I feel like I’m in the minority here, but I think that extended fasting can help “reset” my relationship with food, for a little while. I used to have disordered eating and hardly ate, despite weighing under 100 lbs. Somehow that switched to emotional binge-eating and I packed on the pounds and spent way too much money binging on fast food. After an extended fast, I just want nutritious food and my stomach feels smaller. I realize when I’m full and don’t overdo it.
To be fair, it takes longer than 24-36 hours fasted for me to get to that state though. And even when I’m in that state, it doesn’t last forever. I can still eventually fall back into the binging habit after a while.
I’m a recovering binge-eater and fasting (of all types) has seriously helped me more than any other thing I have tried. At this point I think my stomach has just shrunk too much from my OMAD fasting and occasional extended fasts that even when I want to overindulge now I simply can’t. But still technically I’m not restricting what I eat, I rarely feel like I’m deprived of anything so that makes it sustainable.