Right now I do OMAD-ish or 20-4 type fasting. My meal is dinner after work. My main goal/purpose of fasting is weight loss (specifically I want the lump of belly fat that I’ve had for over a decade to go away, because I want the flat stomach I had as a young adult back).
I’ll start off the day being all like “yeah, today’s the day! let’s do this! let’s go for the extended fast! 48hrs, here I come!” but then as I get close to my meal time I question it, and by the time I’m at home I’ve convinced myself that instead I’m going to eat/feast. I get so massively hungry once I get home. Honestly it feels like I’m just hitting a wall over & over & over. I want to try do fasts over 24hrs… that is, until it’s meal time. Once it’s my meal time, then I basically talk myself out of it & want to eat so badly. I’m just about certain this is purely because it’s a learned habit, but I’m not sure what to do about that.
I did managed to skip my dinner once, but then I was so massively hungry when I woke up that I ate breakfast instead of going the whole 48hrs like I had planned. I hadn’t eaten breakfast in so very long, it was really weird.
I’ve tried bone-broth at my normal dinner time, but that just made the hunger even worse.
Does it matter that I have an active job? Most of my shifts are cleaning for 8hrs+. Tasks like lifting heavy trash, scrubbing floors down on all fours, manually mopping a very large room, etc. I mean when I get home I basically sit down & don’t move (watching youtube), but I wonder if my job being so active is making it harder to go without my meal, either physically or mentally (I’m fully aware this wall is probably purely mental, but that doesn’t mean I know how to get around it). I often have sore muscles after work, and I’m trying really hard to keep myself from getting dehydrated from the sweating, but some days my throat is as dry as a bone when I get home. I know exercising on an extended fast is fine, but I’ve only seen that in the context of a 20min workout, not 8-9hrs of physical labor. Does anyone else in the sub have an active type of job?
Anyway, any tips of following through with my decision & actually going through with a 48hr fast? How about a go to reminder/resource about how we don’t need to constantly eat?
I try to go with the “once I’ve set the goal I can’t change it” approach. Your brain is very good at convincing you to do things. You can come up with all sorts of rationalisations for things whilst you’re hungry, so I try to keep that in mind and discount any mid-fast arguments as intrinsically untrustworthy during longer fasts.
You will be hungry. The second day is the worst according to most people.
It does get better as your body adjusts. But not so much better that you don’t feel anything. Realize if you aren’t feeling sick you don’t need to eat.