It’s like my will power is nonexistent
12 hours is a great start! If you’re fasting after dinner until morning, you’re already eating during a smaller window than most people and likely eliminating a lot of after-dinner snacking. If you can stretch your window over time by distracting yourself after hour 12, do it. Otherwise, fast 12 hours a day and be consistent. Positive results will still follow from that if you’re watching what you eat during the other 12.
Like one of the other poster said, try moving to keto/low carb for a couple of weeks and then start back fasting for 16:8…by just skipping a meal. Twelve hours is not really a fast because most likely you are still using glucose/glycogen for energy. Also, if your diet currently includes sugar and highly processed foods, you are addicted and need to break that addiction and fasting will become much much easier.
Are you fasting “clean”? No sweeteners, flavors, gum, mints, etc.? It’s not some kind of holier-than-thou purity test; getting all that stuff out makes fasting easier. Get rid of the stevia, the zero-calorie flavored beverages, the mints, the lemon in your water, the chewing gum, the flavored coffee… try fasting on just water, black coffee, or black tea. It’s nothing to do with calories and everything with insulin.
Hunger comes and goes in little waves, and we get hungry at times when we usually eat. So if I usually eat dinner at 6pm, then around 6pm I’ll start getting hungry. This is good and efficient! It means I have an appetite right when I plan to eat my meal! But it can be tricky when adjusting to fasting. We all have a mindset of hunger as a growing force, like “if I’m a bit hungry now and don’t eat, then in 2 hours I’ll be REALLY hungry!” but it really doesn’t work that way. But if you’ve set your body up to expect to eat at the 12-hour mark, you will get hungry at that time! Try powering through it—nothing crazy, just hold out for an hour and mark how you feel. Did you stay hungry? Get hungrier? Did it pass?
You can also focus on TRE, time restricted eating, “full meals no snacks.” Again it’s all about controlling insulin and blood sugar. So you can only fast 12 hours? That’s not nothing! But if you can eliminate all snacking between meals and just break your fast with a solid breakfast, then hold out for 6 hours (nothing but water between meals) have a good lunch, hold out for another 6 hours and have a nourishing dinner, and repeat that cycle indefinitely, you’ll still be much better off than 90% of the population, and could conceivably be doing better than an IFer who’s fasting 18 hours but chowing down on snacks and Starbucks nonstop for the other 6.
Boredom is usually my biggest problem. If I am just sitting watching tv or scrolling on my phone, I just want to snack.
Do something that occupies your mind AND hands so that you aren’t even thinking about food, and couldn’t eat it easily anyway.
Video games, knitting, reading a paper book, doing a puzzle could all work (Personally I don’t think I could do puzzles often enough to make it work, but to each their own haha)
It is rough when consuming 420 for sure. I have a single measly 5-10 g edible for pain/sleep about four evenings a week, and those mornings are the ones where breakfast sounds good.
I loathe breakfast foods, btw. So it’s weird.
My day off IF is still a 13 hour circadian rhythm overnight fast. The rest are scheduled as 16/8 or 18/6, but I’ve noticed my timer hitting 20 fairly often.
It’s a buildup, for sure.
420_gator…12 hours is more than most, so you’re off to a good start!Don’t beat yourself up…just take it one day at a time…like another person pointed out - add increments to lengthen the fasting time.
Don’t beat yourself up, 12 hours is a great start and a few months ago there was no way I could have done even that. What are you eating during the day? I find that makes a big difference for me in how hungry I am when it gets close to the end of my fast. Try to load up on protein and fiber rich foods to help stave off hunger. And like others said, try not to eat a lot of carbs. I love carbs but I’ve noticed on the days where I have a bagel as my first meal and then a pile of rice for dinner, I’m starving by 8pm. Herbal tea helps in the evening too.
You can do this!
So much of it is mental. I’m only 3 weeks in and doing well at 16:8, but don’t have any results yet so today I’m going to start 18:6.
Here’s the thing, at least with me. I’m a runner. No matter how many miles my run is, the last one is mentally challenging for me. If I go for a 10 mile run, I want to be done at the 9 mile mark. If I go for a 3-mile run, I want to be done at the 2 mile mark. Even though I know I can go longer, and I run much longer distances, when I know I only have a mile left mentally I want to check out. It’s always a mental struggle for me to do that last mile.
If that’s the same with me with fasting. When I’m in that last hour stretch, it gets hard for me. Even though I’ve done longer (I have done a few 18s already) I’m not going to starve LOL, and I know I’m going to be able to eat soon, that last hour is mentally hard.
So with me, and maybe with you, it’s more about the mental training. Getting through that last hour or so. It’s a lot of mental gymnastics at this point for me.
You’ve got this! Keep hydrated and just try it in small increments. I’ve been doing 16-8 on off for a long while and on some days it gets to 10an and my body still lies to me with hunger signals. Keep in your mind why you’re doing it and what the end goal will look like
Keep it up you’re doing great
Please excuse the assumption if I’m incorrect but given that ”420” is in your name, the munchies are very difficult to suppress if you’re a recreational user.
I had to limit my use specifically for this reason. Breaking my fast is pretty much impossible when under the influence.
What helped me was limiting my use to night time only, a few hours before heading to bed.
Be kind to yourself. There are other ways to fast and if a daily 16:8 doesn’t work, try a different one. You can do alternative fasts where you fast every other day, weekends, etc.
In a more granular level, see if you can change one thing during a specific time of day. For me i started mixing fiber with my flavored water I bring to work. It tends to put me in a fasting mindset. It’s not a drastic change and it’s something you can do right away. Not much willpower needed.
t’s hard to break habits. Usually coming up w a better/more suited to fasting to replace a bad one is the way to go.
Stick with it, ghrelin(hormone that makes you feel hungry) will decrease and leptin(hormone that makes you feel satiated) will increase. Do 10 if you can’t do 12, or 8 if you can’t do 10. It gets easier the more you try.
I do two 36 hour fasts a week except usually my first one turns into 48 hrs but I am just not hungry. I started this a month ago and have gone from 168 lbs to 156 lbs. I’m also a 5’10 male so I don’t have that much weight to lose so 12 lbs is very impressive.
I started fasting without coffee and was able to do 60 hours. I forced myself to do it as I knew 36 hrs would be a breeze after doing 60. 12 hours is not even a fast. You need to occupy your brain with something other than food. After 2 hrs or so of being hungry your mind will realize you are not feeding it then you won’t be hungry or even thinking about food.
I’m on 38 hrs right now with no food and I haven’t even hand any feelings of hunger. You can definitely do it. Keep pushing your food intake later and later into the day.
Start where you are. Also… clean fasting has made alllll the difference for me. I thought it would be harder, or honestly impossible. But I decided to give it a try and wow- it actually made it doable / maintainable. You may already be doing that idk- but I wish someone had mentioned it to me in the beginning. Found out about it in a podcast
For best results with IF, most people require 16-20 hours. You can do 12 hours, but your body’s metabolic process needs time to cycle while not processing food. It’s either burning fat or sugar (most food breaks down to sugar). In fasted state after 12 hours of not eating, your body is mostly burning fat, and that increases until your first meal. What you are experiencing are cravings that will remain until your gut heals. We put our bodies through a lot with what we eat. Your gut heals faster when you consume carbs and sugar at a lower rate. The more you can do that and depend on protein and healthy fats as your primary food sources, the faster you get there. Some people follow the Keto diet to get there. There are other ways too, but operating from a calorie deficit long-term is not IF; that’s a diet that most people fail when they go back to their unhealthy habits. Keep educating yourself on IF because you will be better prepared to take this on.
Good job! Proud of you! It takes time to get accustom to it. A lot of it depends on lifestyle factors too: New to IF, stress levels (mentally/physiologically), baseline choices of food, if you exercise (or not), any drinking/smoking habits etc… All of that factors in. Just take it easy and enjoy the ride