How to Get Intermittent Fasting Results Guide: The Intermittent Fasting Factor 3

 

What To Do If You Fail To Eat Within Your Feeding Window

Let’s get real. Even the best-laid plans fall apart. As the old saying goes, life is what happens when you are making other plans. You may be thinking that after reading the introduction all the way to chapter 3 of this book that you have everything you need to know about intermittent fasting.

 

You can’t wait to start. You’re all pumped up and its inner reasons and mechanics for working highly motivate you. I congratulate you if you have this mindset. I wish you the best and I know you will do well if you follow the advice I gave you in this book.

 

But I also know that you, like everybody else, are human. We all have our weaknesses. We all fail at one point in time or other. That’s okay. There will be times where you will fail to eat within your feeding window. I know this full well because it happened to me all the time when I first started with intermittent fasting.

 

It felt like I was trying to hit a moving target. I couldn’t quite get all my meals within that 8-hour window. But when I followed the steps below, things started to turn. Previously, I would eat maybe 3 to 5 hours outside my window.

 

But sooner or later, I got closer and closer to my window until all my snacks and full meals were eaten within that 8-hour time frame. How did I do it? Here’s how.

Read Intermittent Fasting Results Part 1

Adopt The Right Mindset

When you fail to eat within your feeding window, it’s very easy to think that you’re the biggest loser in the world. It’s tempting to think that you have somehow let yourself down and that you have embarrassed yourself.

 

Listen. You’re not doing yourself any favors when you think these thoughts. You’re just beating yourself up. Believe it or not, it’s not the end of the world. It really isn’t. Let’s be honest here. This is probably not the first weight loss book or lifestyle modification guide that you have ever read.

 

If you’re like most people, you probably have read other diet books before. You probably have tried to follow them. Just as it wasn’t the end of the world when you failed with those diets, it’s not the end of the world that you failed to eat within your feeding window trying to follow the tips of this book.

 

I want you to wrap your mind around this concept. It’s not the end of the world. So, stop overreacting. Stop looking at it from this perspective. You’re not letting yourself down. You’re not betraying your ideals. You’re not a bad person. It happens. Get over it quickly.

 

Next, just because you messed up doesn’t mean you have to mess up the whole day. I play this little game with myself when I first started intermittent fasting. I would fail to eat within my feeding window so I would give myself permission to eat throughout the day.

 

I consoled myself with the thinking that “I’ll make it up to myself tomorrow.” Don’t do this. When you allow yourself to mess up for the rest of the day, what you’re really doing is you’re training yourself to completely ignore your feeding schedule.

 

You’re basically saying to yourself “It’s okay to eat whenever you want.” You are completely reversing the whole point of intermittent fasting. Just as it’s okay and completely expected for people to get knocked down as they try to do something in life, it doesn’t mean that they have the license to just lay there.

 

Make no mistake. Whenever you’re confronting life’s challenges, you will get knocked down. That’s a guarantee. But what separates successful from less successful people is the amount of time it takes successful people to get back up after they got knocked down.

 

This is all a choice. So when you mess up eating outside of your feeding window, make it a choice to not repeat it. Acknowledge what happened and resolve not to let it happen again. That’s how you make progress. That’s how you get ahead.

 

The worst thing you can do is to think “I already messed up. So I might as well just take a pass for the rest of the day.” You’re setting yourself up to go back to your old habits when you do that. Remember, whenever you’re trying to make some positive change in your life whether it’s emotional, psychological, physical or spiritual, your body and mind will always put up a fight.

 

Consciously, you know that this is the right way to go. But certain parts of your body and mind have other ideas. We’re all creatures of comfort. There’s always a part of us that is just so used to doing things the old way.

 

This conflict between the habitual you and the new you is constantly raging. Don’t give in to the old you by resolving to mess up the rest of the day. You made a bad move. That’s okay. Own up to it, acknowledge it, understand its impact and then resolve not to do it again.

 

When it happens again, go through the same process. As long as you’re conscious about why you’re doing this and what the consequences are, things fall into perspective and you’re less likely to do it again. Before you know it, you’re less likely to mess up.

Read Intermittent Fasting Results Part 2

Focus On The Fact That You Are Able To Mess Up and Stop

I want you to understand that just because you messed up doesn’t mean that you have to keep messing up. You can stop messing up. What’s important here is self-education and acknowledgement.

 

Just as when a kid does something bad, it’s really important for the parent to say “What did you do?” It’s obvious that the parent knows what the kid did. That’s why the parent is disciplining the kid in the first place.

 

It’s crucial, however, for the kid to understand what they did because this is the beginning of them getting a clear idea of the consequences of their action.

 

You have to do the same with yourself. When you eat out of your feeding window, remind yourself why intermittent fasting is so powerful and how it can benefit you and the new life that you want for yourself.

 

Also understand what you did wrong. Finally, resolve to stop. When you do this, you’re able to mess up and stop. This makes it all that much harder for you to mess up the whole day or mess up in a big way. If you do this right, you keep reprogramming yourself regarding the right way to look at hunger pangs.

 

If anything, it prepares you for the next step.

 

Prepare and get ready to try again. The whole point of acknowledging your mistake is to try again. It’s not an intellectual exercise. It definitely isn’t something you do to beat yourself up emotionally. It serves a purpose.

 

You have to try again. You have to understand that just like working out at the gym, doing well at work, moving up the corporate ladder, you have to keep working and keep moving forward to achieve momentum.

 

This is that point in time where it’s harder to stop than it is to begin. In other words, it’s the precise opposite of your beginning. When you’re just starting out with anything, maybe it’s a relationship or career or business or even working at a gym, it’s hard to start. You have a million and one reasons not to start.

 

Then once you get started, it’s hard for you to keep going. When you achieve momentum, it’s the opposite. It’s easy to start and keep going. It’s harder to stop. The best way to trigger momentum is to prepare to try again and again and again.

 

This is mostly mental because ultimately, the belly serves the mind. If you get your mind right and prepare to try again regardless of how badly you slipped up, eventually, you will achieve victory.

Final Note

Focus on the fact that if you don’t give up trying, you’ll eventually get the hang of it. Please understand that everything you do is a learning opportunity. It’s easy to see the learning opportunity when adopting intermittent fasting.

 

But even your screw-ups and failures are learning opportunities as well. What kind of information do you give yourself when you see that you have given in to your hunger pangs? At the very least, you would be able to see your decision-making process.

 

Once that’s clear, you can start tweaking them until they lead to other results. Of course, a lot of this is not going to happen overnight. As long as you are mindful of this and as long as you are looking to learn, eventually, you will achieve a breakthrough.

Stay Hydrated

Drink 8 glasses of water per day. It’s not only great for your physical health. It’s also great for your mental health. Look at your glass of water as a bridge to satiety. You may be dealing with very nasty hunger pangs right now. Get yourself some water.

 

The best thing about water is that the calorie count for 8 ounces of water and 16 ounces is the same, zero. Knock yourself out. Sip or gulp. Just wait for the hunger pang out. Eventually, just like a nasty storm cloud, it will pass or dissipate.

 

Focus On Your Goals

As I have mentioned previously, if you’re all caught up in obsessing about the what, how’s and where’s of what you’re doing, sooner or later, you might break down. Focus on why you’re doing what you’re doing.

 

Focus on the reasons why. This will give you the resolve that you need to not only wait out your hunger pangs, but to eventually achieve a state of momentum. Focus on the fact that you want to look better. Focus on the fact that it just hurts so much to feel unattractive, out of shape or undesirable.

 

Whether you are driven by your dreams or you are pushed forward by your fears, it doesn’t matter. Focus on your goals.

Scaling Up Intermittent Fasting

If you have gotten to this point in the book, congratulations! This means you’ve taken care of the heavy lifting. Chances are you have achieved some sort of momentum so it’s harder for you to stop fasting than it is to start. Again, congratulations!

 

However, I have some bad news for you. Depending on how your personal physiology is set up, you may hit a plateau sooner rather than later. Don’t get me wrong. When you adopt intermittent fasting, you can lose a lot of weight.

 

At first, a lot of this is water weight. Did you know that a huge chunk of your weight, maybe twenty percent, is based on the water that you are retaining? This varies from person to person. Some people retain a lot more water than others.

 

However, when you go on intermittent fasting or you adopt a new diet like the Atkins diet or paleo diet, a lot of the initial weight loss is actually from your water weight. Regardless, it looks awesome. You may have a lot of jiggly fat around your body and you start trimming down. When you look at the scale, you can’t help but want to jump for joy. This is the easy part.

 

When you adopt intermittent fasting, eventually, you may hit a plateau. Some people hit this sooner than others. This is when all the easy weight loss is gone. What do you do then? That’s when you scale up. This is where you start to trigger ketosis so you can go from just burning your retained water to burning actual fat.

 

The good news is you don’t have to go onto a full fast like some sort of monk. It’s not like you pack up all your belongings, put it in the car, head to the nearest mountain, and just meditate on anything for weeks on end. That’s not the kind of fasting I’m talking about. There is an easy-to-scale process where you can take intermittent fasting to a whole other level.

 

Step #1: Eat-stop-eat

With this intermittent fasting protocol, you actually fast. That’s right. You go a full day without eating. However, as the name implies, you eat a full day then you stop for a full day then you eat again. This operates on a pure one-on-one basis. You just basically skip eating every other day.

 

The good news is for many people, ketosis or fat burning is triggered when you don’t eat anywhere from 16 to 24 hours at any one time. Of course, when you eat a lot of carbs, it’s going to take a lot longer for you to achieve ketosis.

 

In fact, eat-stop-eat is probably not going to work all that well for you if most of your diet comes in the form of rice, mashed potatoes, pasta, or white bread. However, if you eat really moderate amounts of carbohydrates and lean more towards protein or fatty foods, eat-stop-eat can help you burn fat.

 

Step #2: 2-2-2

In this protocol, you level up from eat-stop-eat to fasting two days in a row. You follow that up with eating two days in a row. This increases your chances of triggering ketosis.

 

Step #3: 3-3-3

You just add another day to the 2-2-2 protocol to enjoy higher levels of ketosis. During the times that you’re not eating, you have a high chance of burning fat. In fact, your fat-burning period extends way longer than eat-stop-eat or the 2-2-2 protocol. Still, a lot of this has to do with how much carbohydrates you have in your diet. If you adopt a low-carbohydrate or ketogenic diet, 3-3-3 can work wonders not only for weight loss but also for fat loss and looking better.

 

If you are struggling with your weight, you know full well that a large part of your physique is covered by fat. When you adopt the 3-3-3 protocol and trigger ketosis, a lot of that fat layer starts to melt away, and you can start seeing the muscle mass you have underneath. If you pair this up with a little exercise, you’d quickly realize how good you look under all that fat. Sounds awesome, right?

 

Well, there’s one missing piece. Keep reading.

 

You May Want to Consider This

The secret to burning belly fat is not sweating buckets at your nearby gym. It also doesn’t mean that you have to run an Iron Man triathlon every other month.

 

To lose belly fat, you have to focus on your diet. For the longest time, scientists thought that people pile on fat in their midsection or butts or the back of their thighs because they eat a lot of fatty foods.

 

This has been debunked fairly recently. It turns out that when you eat a lot of carbohydrates in the form of rice, white bread, pasta, soda, drinks, mashed potatoes, or potato chips, your body turns the excess sugar from all that starch into fat. Since you’re not a plant, your body cannot store it in the form of sugar or starch. Instead, it stores all that extra energy in the form of fat.

 

If you live a very sedentary lifestyle, it can take years for your body to burn all that stored-up energy. This is why you have that nasty-looking spare tire around your midsection. You can trace a lot of that to your sweet tooth, your taste for candy bars, cookies as well as staples like rice, corn, and other starchy food.

 

Thankfully, there is a solution to this. Adopt a low-carb, high-fat diet. Please pay attention to what I just said. I did not say “low-carb, high-protein diet.” I said, “low-carb, high-fat diet.”

 

The reason why you can’t go too crazy on protein is that your body converts protein into sugar in a process called glycogenesis. Your liver turns protein into sugar, which then stores as fat. When you eat a lot of fat, you train your body to use fat as its main source of energy. You remain in ketosis for a longer period and, before you know it, you burn your stores of fat.

 

Another great advantage of adopting a low-carb, high-fat or ketogenic diet is you feel less hungry throughout the day. If you don’t believe me, try ingesting a tablespoon of olive oil. It isn’t all that pleasant, but your body reacts to that ingestion of calorie-dense fat in a very predictable way: it feels fuller for a longer period.

 

Adopt a Mindfulness Routine

Regardless of whether you are sticking with the classical 8- to 10-hour feeding window, or you have ventured into eat-stop-eat, 2-2-2, or 3-3-3, you would be doing yourself a big favor if you adopt a mindfulness routine.

 

This doesn’t have to be anything fancy. You don’t have to adopt some sort of formal meditation practice. Just get into the routine of practising mindfulness. When you do this, you are able to control your thoughts better and practice more effective self-discipline.

 

Please understand that this doesn’t happen overnight. It takes quite a bit of practice but, before you know it, you are less likely to give you in to your hunger pangs and stick to your feeding schedule. Once you achieve that kind of momentum, eventually, it feeds into itself and reinforces itself and helps you become a more disciplined person.

 

By using mindfulness practice, you become more disciplined with your intermittent fasting, and your discipline spills over to the rest of your life. That’s right. A bit of self-control in one area of your life makes your whole life all that much better.

Conclusion

Now that you have all the information you need to start intermittent fasting, you have to now make a decision. This is the hardest part. A lot of people approach weight loss programs like they would when they’re trying to make a decision at a fast food joint. Maybe today you’ll get the quarter pounder and a few hours from now, you’ll get the two-piece chicken meal.

 

It doesn’t work that way. You have to make a decision regarding where you want to take your life.

 

Please understand that intermittent fasting is not just about losing weight. If you think about it hard enough and you pay close attention to its inner workings, it really is all about retaking ownership over the internal processes of your life.

 

Everybody eats. Everybody has an eating schedule. However, the problem is they let these factors take over their lives. Before they know it, their belly rules their brain, and their hunger has taken over their willpower.

 

They eat, eat, and eat, and they’re never full. They drink, drink, and drink, but their thirst is never quenched. They never feel complete. They’re always feeling inadequate. They’re on edge.

 

I know this sounds like I’m talking about something bigger than a simple dietary choice, and I am. I don’t mean to be the bringer of bad news here, but your weight problem and challenges are all symptoms of something bigger.

 

Intermittent fastening, when done properly, enables you to develop self-discipline. Self-discipline leads to self-control. Self-control leads to renewed self-ownership.

 

It’s very easy to feel powerless when you look in the mirror and you see that you’ve let your body go. It’s tempting to think that there’s really not much you could do about it. It just happened, but you know that’s a lie. Life doesn’t just happen. At some point in time, at some level or other, you let it happen.

When you adopt intermittent fasting and achieve a breakthrough, you start the process of retaking ownership over your life. Who says you have to be the guy or gal who constantly keeps saying, “What happened throughout your life?”

Retake your ability to make things happen. I wish you nothing but happiness, success, and health!