Advanced Fasting Challenge in Three Steps
Are you ready to take intermittent fasting to the next level, see results, push through a plateau, and find radical healing? It's time to step it up a notch and breakthrough to the new you.
(Note: if you’re brand new to fasting, you need to go back to The Three Week Challenge for beginners. Learn how to nail the clean fast, eat more protein at meals, cut seed oils, and more. Then come back to this post.)
If you have a grasp of the basics of intermittent fasting, now is the time to make this fasting thing permanent and life-changing.
If you’ve done a bit of fasting, and you liked it for a while, but then you lost momentum and stalled out, then this challenge is for you.
If fasting seemed to work at first but then you weren’t getting the results you expected, so you stopped or limped along half-heartedly doing it some days and not others, then this challenge is for you.
There are three objectives to this challenge:
Commit to Three Months
Practice Consistency
Choose Your Own Advanced Fasting Adventure
Step 1: Commit to Three Months
Why three months? Because the most common reason people quit is they didn’t stick with it long enough to get the results that make one love fasting for life.
Many of the life-changing results—increased energy, reduced carb cravings, better sleep, a clearer mind, reduced inflammation, a more positive mood, appetite correction—don’t even begin until after 3 or 4 weeks. Then it takes several more weeks until you feel the full effects.
As I mentioned in last week’s post, you need to go into autopilot and trust the process—for three months.
Don’t overthink how you feel, and whether or not you like it, and what others think, and how you’ll navigate the cruise next August, and yada, yada. Just buckle down and press on. You can evaluate the whole scheme come March 31st.
Step 2: Practice Consistency
This advice may seem to contradict what I said in Weight Loss Advice for the Holidays where I encouraged you to learn to flex a bit from your fasting schedule to accommodate special events. However, it’s not contradictory if you realize that we were practicing a different skill between Thanksgiving and New Year’s than we are practicing in January through March.
During the holidays, we were learning how to flex from our fasting schedule without going all: “Since I can’t fast today as I planned, I might as well eat a whole cheesecake.”
Learning how to flex out and then return to the original schedule is a skill that everyone needs.
But we’re done practicing that skill for now. When you reach maintenance, or reach your health goals, or next December rolls around (whichever comes first), you can work on that skill again.
January through March we’re going to focus on sticking with something no matter what.
We’re going to focus on learning to say no to food outings that interfere with our plan.
We’re going to focus on learning how to sit at a meal with others and sip black coffee and seltzer water and be completely fine.
We’re going to focus on scheduling social eating around our chosen fasting regimen instead of always adjusting our fasting to social events.
Ecclesiastes 3:4 tells us that there’s “a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance.”
Similarly, there’s a time to be flexible with fasting and a time to be rigid.
The doggedness, toughness, and stick-to-it-ness that is required of you for these next three months will not be required of you forever. This is because after you push yourself to change, fasting will not only become easy, it will become enjoyable. You will choose it. You will even prefer it. But that comes later.
There are times in life when you have to do hard things. The hard work that you do fasting for the next three months will delay the pain of chronic disease later.
Slight discomfort wards off a world of hurt. It’s not discomfort for discomfort's sake: masochism. It’s exchanging a small amount of discomfort for better mood, energy, lower chance of heart disease, diabetes, dementia, etc.
Step 3: Choose Your Own Advanced Fasting Adventure
For the average person, there are four advanced fasting options to choose from:
Plan A: OMAD (One Meal a Day)
Plan B: OMAD Hybrid Plan
Plan C: Alternate Day Fasting Light (ADF-L)
Plan D: Alternate Day Fasting Advanced (ADF-A)
Bonus Plans: there are two additional options for special circumstances that will be explained in detail below.
Plan K (Keto): 2MAD (2 Meals a Day) Keto or Carnivore/semi-carnivore
Plan AB for Autophagy/Brain Power: NO CARBS UNTIL DINNER (NCUD😂)
Note: after you pick a plan, stick with it for one month before switching to another plan. It takes your body time to adjust, notice the benefits, and feel out the pros and cons.
Why so many options? Because people have unique bodies, goals, life situations, health challenges, eating habits, and metabolic rates. Because of our modern toxic foodscape, people need therapeutic fasting. But there are a number of different ways to step up the fasting so it truly becomes therapeutic.
Plan A: OMAD One Meal a Day
This is one of the most popular advanced fasting methods because it features the following Pros:
It’s the least complicated method.
You can easily fall into a routine.
The predictability means other members of your family always know when you’re eating.
Over time, your body becomes fat adapted and you’ll be able to have amazing brain clarity and productivity while fasting.
This plan works especially well for those employed outside the home. While at work, you can get down to business and not think about eating. You don’t have scurry to make breakfast before leaving in the morning, and you never have to pack food or eat fast food. You get to look forward to the end of the day when you can go home, relax, unwind, and cook some delicious food. This plan makes cooking so enjoyable because you’re hungry.
Many people who are home all day can also enjoy this plan. They just avoid the kitchen until dinner and this saves tremendously on time. If you have kids to feed, you can get used to sitting with them and helping them eat.
A few cons:
Some people get bored with the same eating schedule every day and prefer to mix things up.
It doesn’t allow the flexibility to occasionally go out to lunch or brunch like the other plans do.
It’s possible to eat so much in your eating window that you never go into fat-burning mode. I had this problem with OMAD but many people don’t. In order for OMAD to be therapeutic, you need to first burn through all the carbs and fatty acids that were consumed in the eating window, which takes a number of hours. Then you start on the liver glycogen (your temporary fuel) source. Only once that is gone, does your insulin lower so you can tap into fat stores; then the therapeutic fasting effects begin. This won’t happen if you consume too many carbs.
Even though it’s called OMAD, you can spread your eating out for up to three hours, which may seem like a long time to eat “one meal.” But think of it like going to a fancy restaurant: you have an appetizer, a salad, the main course, then sip a coffee or a glass of wine afterward.
If you can spread the meal out, eat slowly, and enjoy each bite, you can make it work without overeating. If you stuff yourself with junk food for three hours, this plan might not work.
Plan B: OMAD Hybrid
This is for someone who enjoys OMAD but wants to add a bit of extra challenge.
Pick one day a week to be your meal-less day. Most people pick Monday but that’s not required; I’ll use it as an example though.
You finish eating Sunday night around 7 pm or so. You don’t take a bite of food all day Monday. The next time you eat is Tuesday morning. If you eat at 7 am, you just did a 36-hour fast which is a good starting point.
If you can wait until 11 am (which becomes surprisingly easy when you’re so deep into fat-burning mode) you just did a 40-hour fast (my personal favorite length).
The meal-less day is called a “down day” (think of the scale going down) and it must always be followed by an “up day” which means a day where you eat at least two, large protein-heavy meals. What goes down must come up (the reverse law of gravity). You never do a meal-less Monday followed by OMAD on Tuesday.
Instead, with this plan, you do no food on Monday, Tuesday is up day with two meals, and the rest of the week is OMAD.
The upside of this plan: you can change the day you don’t eat based on your schedule. Let’s say friends or coworkers want to go out to lunch on Wednesday. If you make Tuesday a down day, you are then required to eat lunch on Wednesday to compensate for the longer fast. Move the down day around as much as you’d like.
Plan C: Alternate Day Fasting Light (ADF-L)
Pick three days a week to eat all your food in a one-hour eating window such as Mon/Wed/Fri. On the other four days, do 16:8 or 18:6 or 19:5 fasting eating two meals (TMAD).
To make this work, the food eaten in the window must be protein-heavy, with healthy animal fats.
Some people do a version of this they call modified alternate day fasting or MADF where they keep that one-hour meal to 500 calories and make it high-protein/low-carb. This is an option to try if you want, but I came up with ADF-L because I want to give people a light ADF option that doesn’t require counting calories. If you do MADF, do a 16:8 up day to get enough calories.
(Note: people are different and my personal experience is that it’s way easier for me not to eat at all than to eat either a 500-calorie mini-meal or a small meal in a one-hour window. But I’ve always been a volume eater so know yourself. Some people do much better with a small amount of food than none. So that’s why I’m giving people options.)
Plan D: Alternate Day Fasting (ADF) Classic
(Note: I’m calling this “classic” to distinguish it from the light plan above but in the fasting world, this plan is what people mean when they talk about ADF.)
You pick three days a week to have zero calories such as Mon/Wed/Fri. Then you have four “up days” each week where you eat two or three hearty, protein-heavy meals.
Beginner ADFers often start with 36-hour fasts and eat three meals on the up days. Here’s a chart that explains:
As people do ADF longer, they sometimes move towards 40-hour fasts and two meals on up days. I’m showing you a chart below that has 42-hour fasts and 6-hour eating windows on up days only because I’m not techy enough to make a 40-hour chart. But if you pretend it says 11 am instead of 1 pm on the right, then it’s the 40-hour schedule.
(Note: I don’t recommend the 42-hour fasts because 6 hours isn’t enough time to eat 2 meals before you start fasting again.)
Focus on nutrient-dense foods such as red meat, cheese, egg yolks, full-fat dairy, and butter. These foods signify to your body that even though you didn’t eat for 36 hours, there is not a famine in the area, you just didn’t have a chance to eat for a while. But abundant food does exist.
Hearty animal products are rich in fat-soluble vitamins A, D, and K. These vitamins are not readily assimilated in pill form and are best obtained from animal products associated with reproduction. They signal abundance to the body and give the body permission to burn through its own fat stores when fasting.
When the body perceives calorie restriction which can come from fasting and then eating light meals with too many carbs and not enough fat and protein, the body slows your metabolic rate.
Bonus Plans For Special Circumstances
Plan K: 2MAD Keto or Carnivore
Who it’s for: those who need therapeutic ketosis or a carnivore diet for autoimmune diseases, mental health challenges, migraines, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, ALS, or MS.
How to do it: Eat two meals in a 16:8 or an 18:6 time frame with no starches, flour, breads, carbs, or sugar. For the keto version: eat Meat, fat, and non-starchy veggies. Measure ketones to keep them close to 1.5.
Those doing carnivore simply eat meat, eggs, butter, milk, and seafood. Some people like to do carnivore light where they still eat mushrooms (technically not in the plant kingdom) and a few non-meat things such as lettuce/pickles on a lettuce-wrap burger, mustard, sauerkraut and drink coffee/tea. Some call this 90% carnivore.
Why do it: if you need to eat a keto or carnivore diet for health reasons, most people need two meals a day. This is because keto and carnivore foods are so satiating that it’s often hard to eat enough of them at one time to just eat one meal a day.
Many people doing this approach eat breakfast foods for lunch such as bacon, sausage, and all manner of yummy egg dishes, scrambles, and omelets. Then red meat for dinner.
Plan AB for Autophagy/Brain Power: NO CARBS UNTIL DINNER (NCUD😂)
Who it’s for: people who don’t need to lose weight but want the health benefits of autophagy and the brain clarity of ketones. This is for people who don’t have major health problems but just need a little health upgrade.
How to do it: Do 16:8 fasting. Eat a very low-carb lunch such as a lettuce wrap burger or eggs with bacon. The only time carbs are eaten is at dinner. Ideally, fat and protein should be eaten first.
Benefits: prevents that afternoon brain slump but unlike OMAD, the no-carb lunch will give extra calories for those who need them, (especially helpful for the guys who don’t want to slim down too much). You get many of the health benefits of fasting without too much weight loss.
Important Notes that Apply to All Plans:
Do Not Restrict or Count Calories!
(The only exception is the 500-calorie down day mini-meal option when you’re only restricting calories just for the mini-meal, not your up day).
This is very important as all the magic of fasting happens when you embrace a fast/feast cycle.
If you fast well but don’t feast well, or if you fast.diet.repeat, you will be putting yourself into starvation mode, will lose muscle, may temporarily mess up your hormones, and may even lose some hair. This will not happen if you follow the next rule.
The More Protein you eat, the more you will lose actual fat and not muscle.
This concept is more important than ever when you are doing advanced fasting. You need the fat-soluble vitamins in butter, and the amino acids in animal protein. Consider adding glycine, bone broth, or collagen to your drink. (Click here for more info on why). Aim for high protein, moderate animal fat, and as many low-starch/low-oxalate veggies as you want (cabbage, lettuce, broccoli, cauliflower, brussels sprouts, etc).
You may reduce carbs and sugar all you want, whether or not your plan requires it.
Reducing carbs is not the same as reducing calories. In fact, the fewer carbs you eat, the more room you’ll have for truly satiating foods.
Consider using a free fasting app.
I believe that both Life and Zero still have a free option (I think I liked Life better). Start tracking your fasts to make sure you’re actually sticking strictly to the plan.
Numbers can get fuzzy when they’re all in your head. The fasting app needs to take only 5-10 seconds of your time (since no one’s resolutions are to spend more time on your phone).
Open the app, click “start fasting.” If you forgot to click start exactly when you finished eating, you can set the time for when you started. The next day when you start eating, open the app and click “end fast.” Then it generates a graph showing you exactly how long you fasted each day. You can view the whole month at one time. (I never bothered with any of the extra features.)
Go ahead and mark eating and fasting windows on your calendar right now! This will help you stick to it.
Lastly, please leave a comment below saying something like: “I’m in. Trying OMAD for January.”
Leslie
I’m in! Have been doing IF for almost 2 years and it has changed my life. I have broke the yo yo diet cycle that I was on for over 30 years! Down 40lbs. I have been doing Mealless Mondays the last couple of months and will continue with that and do ADF- L! Thanks again Leslie for your research and support!
I'm in!! Going to do OMAD-Hybrid! I have lost 60lbs so far doing OMAD and IF. I have 70lbs to go. This challenge will get me there!! Thank you for the challenge!!