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.
