welcome back everybody today we're going to get back to basics with fasting the who what when where and why and make sure you like the video for more and stick around to the end where i'm going to share some tips that we use at the fasting method to help stephanie lose her weight because that's what we're here for we're here to learn from each other to help each other and inspire each other so let's get right into it isn't fasting just starvation i hear this question all the time so it's important to be clear what
is fasting so fasting is defined as the voluntary abstinence of food for spiritual health religious or other reasons and the key word here is voluntary you're always in control when you fast what it means is that there's food available but you choose not to eat it and the reasons are up to you starvation on the other hand is when you don't know when food is going to be available that's not what fasting is this is a conscious decision on your part to not eat don't forget that you're always in control of this process you can
start fasting at any time you can stop fasting with time if you don't feel well you can stop if you do feel well you can start you can do more or less it's always voluntary and that's the key difference between fasting and starvation there are some people who shouldn't fast remember when you're fasting you're not eating so there's no nutrients and in certain conditions you want to make sure you're getting enough nutrients that is if you're a child that is you're growing or if you're pregnant or breastfeeding then it's very important to get enough nutrients
so those people should not do long fast for example there's also other situations if people are underweight or if they're malnourished for any reason of course then again nutrients are very important and those are situations where you don't want to fast however in most other cases for adults anybody can fast in some situations you should really talk to your doctor if you're taking medications for example some need to be taken with food and in those cases you should talk to your doctor about how you should adjust your medications so that you can fast the other
situation is if you're on medications that are going to affect your blood sugar so make sure that you talk to your doctor if you're really taking any medications at all if you have a history of eating disorders or anorexia nervosa then you might want to be careful and also speak to your doctor you can fast anytime you feel like it so you can fast once a year you can do it once a month once a week or even every day and how long you fast for is completely up to you you could just fast from
dinner until breakfast the next day that's 12 or 14 hours you could go to 16 hours which is called time restricted eating you could go to 24 hours like a one meal a day schedule or you can do multiple day fasts the world record for fasting is 382 days so there's really no upper limit to fasting and you can also vary it up so if you're on holidays going on cruise or it's christmas time you can fast if you want to or you can stop fasting maybe after christmas you might want to do some more
just to lose some of the weight so you can turn it on turn it off start stop whatever you feel like it's completely up to you there are many great reasons to fast probably the most obvious one is to lose weight and it's a great way to lose weight after all if you don't eat you're going to lose weight but there's a lot of other health benefits to fasting you can reverse your type 2 diabetes so if you don't eat your blood sugars will fall and that's going to let you manage your blood sugars without
taking medications and if you reduce your weight and reverse your type 2 diabetes that's going to put you at far less risk of all types of diseases like heart disease stroke cancer and these are the biggest problems that we face in health today but other than that lots of people feel better when they're fasting that's why people often say it's a cleansing period or a detoxification so a lot of people feel that they have more energy when they're fasting and they feel that they can think more clearly and there's good reasons why that might be
but there's also other more practical reasons it's a way to save time it's a way to save money it's a way to simplify your life and that's not even to mention a lot of spiritual and religious reasons to fast fasting is really just any period of time that you don't eat and it can differ along two major pathways one is what is allowed during the fasting period a classic fast is water only but there's many different ways to change that many variations you can allow for example green tea herbal teas black tea coffee coffee with
cream or even bone broth and while these are not classic fasts you can still do very well with these fasts so don't rule them out you can really fast for any period of time but there's two very popular regimens one a popular regimen is called time restricted eating it's also called a 16-8 and what it means is that you fast for 16 hours and you eat during an 8 hour window so for example you might decide to start eating at 11 am and eat only until 7 pm and then after 7 pm you'll stop another
popular regimen is a 24-hour fast which is sometimes also called a one meal a day here you might eat from breakfast to breakfast or dinner to dinner for example giving you close to a 24-hour period where you're not eating these fats are very popular and generally the longer fast you might do less often so while a time restricted eating it might do six to seven days per week a one meal a day schedule most people will do three to four times a week but there's nothing stopping you from doing more or less according to your
needs so if you're just starting to fast what would i recommend i would start by cutting out snacks for a week just eating breakfast lunch and dinner and then you can progress to a 16 hour fast or time restricted eating and during that period of time you might allow green tea herbal teas and coffee with a little bit of cream but no sweetener this is a very lax variation just to let you get used to it if you're getting great results then continue there's no reason to stop if you're not getting the results you're hoping
for then you can slowly change it to a longer fast or maybe more of a classic water only fast but remember whatever you do make sure that you're staying safe and healthy while you're doing it you're feeling well and keep on going so here's a tip from stephanie that we used at thefastingmethod.com make it a habit so just remember that everything is hard when you get started you're not used to it everything seems so difficult but if you keep doing it over and over again you get used to it this isn't just true for fasting
it's true for everything if you go into a very uh bright room for example you're going to be blinded at first but then you're going to get used to it same thing for fasting at first it's going to feel very strange not to eat but the more you do it the more you get into the habit of it for example i don't eat breakfast very much and it's really easy for me to skip breakfast because i'm in that habit it doesn't feel strange for me to skip breakfast it feels strange for me to have breakfast
so when i have it it's a real treat it's something i don't often get but most of the time i just don't go i just have a coffee i have a tea i just go on without it if you make it a habit you're going to be able to do it day after day after day without even thinking about it and that was the secret in the 1970s when they ate dinner at six o'clock and they didn't eat again until 8 o'clock it was a habit so they always got 12 to 14 hours of fasting
without even thinking about it if they wanted to do more they could simply tack it on but if you make it a habit you're going to have automatic weight loss and that's the basics of fasting to get you started make sure you like comment and subscribe below and turn on the bell for notifications and check out the other videos in this fasting playlist bye everybody
