Obsessing over Fasting
Human nature is a tricky thing. We all seem to have some form of innate competitiveness built into our genetic code.
And while this competitive streak doesn’t always manifest itself into a love of conflict or confrontation, it does drive us to constantly seek the extreme.
It’s this drive that can turn tools meant to make our lives easier into tools that burden us.
Think of laptops, Black Berries and iPhones.
All of these are tools that were meant to give us more freedom, but that have ultimately turned into tools that make us work harder and longer.
The idea of answering your cellphone while on family vacation simply did not exist 20 years ago, nevermind the idea of answering emails, texts, Skype calls, etc…
Many experts refer to this as “The Technology Trap”
From my experience this same trap happens in health and fitness.
Eat Stop Eat was designed to be freeing and flexible. To free us from having to count calories, measure portions and stress about our food. To be flexible in the fact that we can fit it into our lives without drastically altering our lifestyle.
With Flexible Intermittent Fasting the idea is to lose weight while breaking free of Obsessive Compulsive Eating.
1 or 2 24-hour fasts per week.
It is simple, and incredibly effective. It is the best way to get results while doing nothing. A great way to lose weight without stressing over what to eat.
The key is to stay loose with it.
1 or 2…not 4 or 5
24 hours, not 35,42, 50 or 72.
Eat Stop Eat is about fitting short periods of fasting into your life, Not turning your life into fasting…
The bottom line is that forcing yourself to agonize through a 100 hour fast just for the sake of seeing how far you can go is NO DIFFERENT than packing 8 Tupperware containers full of chicken and broccoli and carrying them around with you all day…They are both OCE.
When it comes to health and fitness, keeping it free means keeping it simple. You don’t need to workout 8 times per week. Your workouts don’t need to be 3 hours long. you don’t need to fast 4 times per week, and your fasts certainly don’t need to be 72 hours long.
1 or 2 24-hour fasts per week. – This is Eat Stop Eat
Anything more is a much different form of fasting.
It’s not Flexible Intermittent Fasting and it’s certainly not Eat Stop Eat.
If you lose the Flexibility, your just dieting all over again.
BP
Keep it Flexible with these steps.
1. Don’t try fasting without reading Eat Stop Eat. This may seem a little self-serving on my part, but I get close to 100 fasting related questions and comments per day, and the people having the hardest time are always the ones trying to follow Eat Stop Eat without reading Eat Stop Eat.
2. Start with ONE fast per week. I am a firm believer that many people would be surprised at how effective even one fast can be for weight loss.
3. Fight the temptation to fast more than twice a week, or to extend your fasts into 2 or 3 days straight. There’s nothing wrong with cutting a fast short at 22 hours, or extending a fast to 27 or 28 hours IF IT FITS INTO YOUR SCHEDULE. But if you end up fasting for 40, 50 or even 70 hours I simply don’t see how this CANNOT become intrusive on your life.
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Awesome post Brad, and one that absolutely needed to be written.
The other day I tried a 48 hour fast, HOWEVER it was only for “experimentation” purposes and not something I’m going to do regularly. It was more for kind of like personal development purposes, which I’m heavily into.
For other people I probably wouldn’t recommend it. It wasn’t intrusive for me b/c I work from home and was home most of those 48 hours, but for an average person it probably would be.
I 100% agree with the exercise too.
TOO MUCH EXERCISE IS A BAD THING!
Right now I’m only working out 2x/week, 3 sets per bodypart. The way I do it, that’s all I need. I also run 5 miles once or twice a week, but that’s more of a personal goal of mine and not really anything to do with fat loss or anything like that. I think the best thing to do is just mix it up. Keep your strength training consistent but add in some yoga and things like that to hit all energy systems in your body.
Anyway, awesome post again Brad!
Jeremy Reeves
http://www.HassleFreeFatLoss.com
Well said Brad. I can so understand how one could get obsessive about fasting and totally miss out on one of the main benefits of “Eat Stop Eat” which is freeing yourself of the obsession with food and obsessive compulsive behaviors in general. One of my big take-aways from your post is: if you’ve got some obsessive compulsive tendencies, be aware of that and do your best to keep them in check.
Brad,
Another great example of how less can be more. It seems just as often as I need to coach someone to MOVE more, I advise others to work out less!
It’s the same with fasting – people can think of one day is so good, why not go two? Not the point, keep it simple and far easier.
Jeremy, how was your experiment?
Lani
I agree with everyone here. Great post that needed to be put up. I can totally see how fastinng could become addicting in a way (never thought I would say something like that!). But I agree, people need to use their heads a little when it comes to obsessions or putting all their eggs in one basket (ie exercise, diet, weightlifting, etc etc)
@Lani Muelrath
Hey Lani…it actually wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be. I won’t do it again for awhile, but I was pleasantly surprised. Right up to 48 hours I was super-energized. In fact I was outside shoveling a giant pile of dirt (getting ready for spring lol) around hour 40 – and felt 100% strong.
I’m honestly starting to believe that people make the “I feel weak if I don’t get food” as an excuse to eat more..lol
Over 48 hours I think I got the hunger feeling about 6x – and it was only “bad” once. The other 5 were there for 1-2 minutes and gone. What I realized was that the hardest part is getting over the “I WANT to eat” part. I had that going through my head for probably the last 12 hours.
Jeremy Reeves
http://www.HassleFreeFatLoss.com
Definitely needed to be written. I too have pushed out the lengths up to 48 for experimentation purposes.
24 HOURS IS THE SWEET SPOT. Anything longer than that… I find myself overeating or thinking about food constantly. This totally removes the flexibility.
Take Brad’s advice! Stick to 24 hours +/- a few.
(Afterward) Which is worse than during.
I agree with this post Brad. I do make my lunch for the week on Sundays and it is made up of Chicken & Broccoli, but that’s so it’s convenient for me so I don’t have to worry about it.
THANK you for this post Brad. It obviously needed to be written. I find myself honestly on the edge between ESE and a “ESE-like diet”… I find myself and catch myself escaping into a dieting mentality (obsessive compulsive tendencies) over and over. (why not add 4 hours of cardio on the fasting days to speed it up… why not make it 3.5 days a week? why not make it 2.5 fasts a week, and then add 5 hours of non-eating at the end of the other days… etc)
And its good to have a simple reminder like this.
I know a bit about fasting and have done it before, but not in the manner of ESE. I’m right now in the middle of the ninth fast (2X weekly)of this regimen and it’s just the easiest way I’ve ever found to get a handle on eating habits.
However, if I hadn’t read the e-book I would not have felt as comfortable in doing it. To avoid that is a mistake.
Sure, you can save a few bucks by just doing the fasts and eating normally, along with exercise, but you don’t get the underlying info that is important.
People will always try to tinker with a system, this one is no different. I’m just glad that it doesn’t seem necessary and that ESE works perfectly “right out of the box.”
I couldn’t eat chicken + broc every day of the week. Life is too short. You can go quite far just eating a lot of protein and working out hard, if you have decent genetics. I’m not sure when the tupperware thing started, but it’s kinda sad to see that kind of OCE so prevalent these days.
We used to eat a ton and work our butts off. I got pretty big and lean doing just that.
hmmm, ive been looking into ESE for a while now, and its great to see that Brad always seems to offer sensible advice. being a university student, i thought i could save some money (especially because US dollars convert very expensively into Australian) and just try one fast to see how it worked out – but not knowing all about why and how it works, and the best way to approach a fast, really got to me. think i might have to buy your book soon!
cheers for taking such a real approach brad =)
Good stuff. In countries as free as in the western world, it seems we often become slaves to ourselves.
I don’t eat just Chicken & Broccoli all week every meal but for lunches while I’m @ work it saves a lot of money for me to bring my food from home.
@Anon
I have no problems with chicken or broccoli.. or even bringing them for lunch to work…it’s the extremes that concern me..that’s all.
B
Yeah, people often mistake a suggestion for moderation as a suggestion for the other extreme.
ESE (or the mckenna or other diet-less weightloss systems), are not about purposefully stuffing yourself with junk-food, or purposefully avoiding health foods and doing everything opposite of a “fitness diet”…
Its about not obsessing, letting go, and relaxing with a sane, moderate balanced approach.
@Jeremy Reeves
Jeremy,
Oh, I know what you mean! I don’t discount that people are really experiencing these things, but at the same time I don’t think they are necessarily grounded in physiology (I’m being polite
). Reeling in weakness after no food for 4 hours seems a bit much, especially when you consider the countless people on our planet who have much less than we do and…well, you know!
And it can be a handy copout, as you say.
Thanks for your reply!
Lani
Still it’s not clear to me what I should eat
Should I eat ice-cream, pizza, biscuits, cakes, sausages, bacon, butter, heavy cream, mayonaise, hollandaise sauce, pork ribs, fried chicken wings?
Are there foods to avoid and why?
Are there foods to prefer (aside from veggies and fruits?) and why?
Could you please post an example of what a normal daily many for you is?