Three Week Challenge

When you decide you're tired of dabbling in fasting and doing it just kinda, here are the marching orders you need to find real success.

Three Week Challenge Summary:

1. You simply have to do the clean fast. If you’re not clean fasting, you’re not doing THIS challenge. While fasting, no: gum (even sugar-free), lozenges, cough drops, sugar-free Tic Tacs, No flavored waters (La Croix, Hint, etc), no lemon in your water, none of those flavored drops in your water, no cream in your coffee (when fasting), no flavored black coffee (hazelnut, French vanilla, etc), no Stevia or whatever other zero-calorie “natural” sweeteners in your coffee or in anything else, no diet sodas, no herbal teas, no Earl Gray tea (too many food flavors), no lemon green tea, etc. More ins and outs are explained below. Also, here’s a whole post that explains the rationale behind the clean fast.

2. For this challenge, I want you to cut out all artificial sweeteners even in your eating window. It’s just three weeks. No Diet Coke. No Stevia.

   “But Stevia is natural…” Don’t care. No Erythritol, Monk Fruit, Aspartame, Nutra Sweet, Sorbitol, sugar alcohols, xylitol. No Swerve, no Allulose, no Sweet-n-low, no Truvia, no Stevia-in-the-raw (puh-lease). Here’s a post on why zero calorie sweeteners are so bad.

3. Avoid “Keto” treats, keto snacks, Atkins bars, sugar-free jello, sugar-free yogurt, sugar-free pancake syrup🤮, and homemade keto fat bombs because they’re filled with inflammatory fake sweeteners.

4. Take a walk during your fasting window at least 4 times each week if possible, even if only for 10 minutes.

5. At your meals, first eat protein and plenty of healthy fat (butter, beef fat that comes in the ground beef, eggs with cheese, sour cream, etc.) Fill up on these foods plus non starchy vegetables (if desired) first before eating any carbs.

6. Don’t snack between meals. If you’re doing 16:8, do a big lunch, a big dinner, and don’t eat between meals.

7. Ignore other fasting advice for these three weeks to avoid confusion.

8. Take magnesium glycinate. Start with 200 mg and work up to at least 600 mg over time. For all the reasons you need magnesium, read the bottom of this post. Second, add extra salt to your food and if you’re doing longer fasts, you may need salt in your water. Fasting makes large amounts of water leave the body and electrolytes leave with the water.

9. SEED OILS BAD! Try to make it three weeks without any seed oils. Check salad dressings, mayo, and anything in a package. No soybean, corn, cottonseed, vegetable, grapeseed, or canola oil. Only avocado, olive, and coconut oil, and butter, ghee, lard, bacon grease, and beef tallow.

Why You Should Do the Three Week Challenge

Today, Tuesday, August 1st is a very special day for me.

Exactly one year ago today, I woke up in the morning and stepped on the scale. It read 180.2. I measured the largest part of my belly: 40 inches. I wrote the numbers down.

One year ago today I had migraines for one week each month—one-fourth of my life. I didn’t sleep well. I was 45 lbs above my ideal weight. I was sluggish. I craved sweets constantly. I was prediabetic. My blood pressure was elevated. I had gastritis (stomach inflammation) that presented with constant burping. I had interstitial cystitis, aka chronic bladder inflammation that no specialist or medication in 20 years did anything for.

Today all that is gone. That’s because one year ago today I made one of the best decisions I’ve ever made—I decided to go all in with fasting. I decided to stop doing it half-heartedly.

On August 1st, I wrote this on the calendar: today is the day I am finally going to get serious about fasting correctly. What does fasting correctly mean? I’ll get to it below.

But first, allow me to tell you two recent success stories to get you pumped.

So, I’ve started getting together with locals in person to give them tips on getting started with intermittent fasting (or, in some cases, the ketogenic diet for therapeutic reasons.) This just happened by word of mouth because I talk about fasting quite often, and people became interested. It’s hard to describe how much I enjoy coaching people.

Usually, when my husband and I get together with people, he has to give me a little reminder, “Now don’t talk about fasting and health the ENTIRE time.”

So we’ll be riding in the car, and I’m saying to myself, “You gotta be a good girl and don’t launch into one of your fasting speeches…but if you do, you gotta keep it real short, like just the 30-second version, or maybe you could get away with just a 2-minute fasting monologue, or…I wonder if they’d be okay with a quick 5-minute fasting oration?” I’m kidding, I don’t give 5-minute fasting orations…that often, at least…well, only if the person seems really interested. I mean, how can you not be really interested? 😉

So since I’m spending most of my life trying not to talk everyone’s ear off about fasting and health, you can imagine my reaction when someone calls or texts me and asks if I could get together with them and talk to them about fasting.

Who me? For real? You’re inviting me to come over and talk about fasting?

And then I’m like, I’ll be right over.

So I had a super duper week last week because I got together with six different people to talk about my favorite thing. For two of the cases, I had to do some research ahead of time on PubMed (which I LOVE to do) because we’re doing something therapeutic for the brain, and the studies I found were so encouraging.

BTW, I’m getting pretty efficient at finding random medical studies on just about anything. For example, a friend said to me in passing, “I had mastitis (a breast infection) in the same breast many times, and years later that was the same side I developed breast cancer in. I wonder if there’s any connection. But I doubt anyone’s done a study on it so I guess we’ll never know.”

To which I respond:

It took me a few minutes, but I dug this up:

Risk of Breast Cancer in Women with Mastitis: A Retrospective Population-Based Cohort Study published in the journal Medicina, July 2020.

(In case you’re interested, the conclusion reads: “This study confirmed that women with mastitis have a higher risk of developing breast cancer.”)

This could be a game. People give me a topic and see how quickly I can find the study.

But I’m getting distracted from the main point. I have two AMAZING stories to encourage you.

I got together with two people a little over a week ago and gave them a strict intermittent fasting plan to follow. Now that I’ve been doing this for a while, I have the confidence to be more strict with my recommendations because I want people to be successful.

That’s because a year ago when I was in very bad health, I needed someone to tell it to me straight. And when Megan Ramos on this podcast encouraged me to stop messing around with fasting and do it for real and do it correctly this time, that was the message I needed to hear. Fasting incorrectly can almost be worse than anything because your success is going to be somewhat limited. Then you’ll think you tried fasting and it didn’t work for you but really you didn’t try the real deal.

So here are two people’s results after following my strict advice for one week straight.

Are you ready for this?

One person lost NINE POUNDS in one week.

The other person only lost only 3 lbs on the scale BUT lost four inches off her waist in ONE WEEK! I had no idea that was possible!

Now before you get too excited, these kinds of results do not happen with everyone that quickly.

Results will vary!

But when this does happen, it means something.

When something THAT dramatic happens in your body, your body is saying to you:

Your poor body! It’s only trying to do the best it can do with the things you throw at it.

Here’s the deal. You were born into a toxic food environment. And it’s not your fault. But it is your problem. And you’re going to have to stick with me close for a while until we can launch you off on your own.

But before I give you the instructions, I want you to use your imagination and dream up where you could be in six months from now. Let’s take another look at three insulin resistance graphics. I couldn’t find a single graphic that listed all the symptoms in one place.

And here are some other signs:

Also, if you have many skin tags, that’s a sign of VERY high insulin. Not everyone with high insulin will have skin tags. But everyone with many skin tags has high insulin. They will suddenly disappear as insulin falls.

I want you to imagine what you could feel like 6 months from now. Open the notes app in your phone right now and write down any of the symptoms you have from these three graphics or any other negative symptoms you are experiencing. Do you feel tired after meals? Do you crave sweets? Do you need to eat every 2-3 hours? Are you losing hair? Do you have blood sugar swings? Have you gained weight around your middle? Do you have brain fog? Do you have achy muscles and frequent pains? Do you sleep poorly? Are you tired all the time?

I make no guarantees. But what if many of those things could simply disappear? You will never know unless you try.

I felt so yucky in this body above.

But something snapped in me, and I decided that I would do whatever I needed to do to change. Then I had someone give me marching orders telling me what to do. I followed them exactly.

I feel completely different in this new body.

And that’s what I want to happen to you.

Also, this is the perfect time.

August is a great time to start. That Memorial Day BBQ followed by the weekend away followed by the cruise and then you visiting family for a week followed by the 4th of July cookout and the wedding you traveled to and then the people visiting you and then the anniversary trip followed by those 17 outings to get ice cream/FroYo with the family are all hopefully winding to an end.

Write it in your calendar: “Today is the day I’m starting for real.” And please, please don’t skip taking your measurements as outlined in this post, especially your waist measurement. Write it down! You will thank me later. Take a before picture.

If you really want to be an A+ student, make an appointment with your doctor and get your fasting insulin done so you can see how it changes. That is so satisfying to watch it drop. A woman wrote into Gin Stephen’s podcast recently that her fasting insulin was 40 before she started and she got it down to 5. What an incredible change!

If you live in a metropolitan area, you can also get a fasting insulin without seeing your doctor through Marik Diagnostics. Their fasting insulin test is $11 but you have to go to a LabCorp location to get your blood drawn. (To those who live in my small town, it’s not offered here).

Here’s something that made me so happy. I keep in touch with fasters from out of town and many of them have a hard time getting their doctor to do a fasting insulin because some docs don’t know about insulin resistance. 😳 However, there’s this super great group of doctors in my town who run a clinic using Direct Primary Care. You pay a service fee each month to see them as often as needed, and it operates apart from insurance. When getting together with people in town, I kept sending them to get their fasting insulin taken and most of them use this group. And then one of them told me a few days ago: I just got my lab work done and they tested my fasting insulin automatically. She pulled up the results on her phone, and there it was, fasting insulin results.

My face was like:

There is hope for the medical establishment yet! I couldn’t believe it! This Direct Primary Care clinic is testing fasting insulin, and I didn’t even have to march in there and give one of my speeches. The doc I see (not part of this great group) had never heard of fasting insulin for metabolic purposes. But in her defense, she agreed to give me the test after she patiently listened to my insulin resistance speech.

So I ran into one of these doctors from the Direct Primary Care Practice the other day and I was like, “Dude, you be doin’ fasting insulin! That’s restoring my faith in medicine. How is it that you do this test that almost no other doctors do?”

He said that other docs aren’t doing it because of insurance reasons. If a patient comes in asking for it, the office will have a big insurance paperwork hassle. And if the doc did it as part of regular bloodwork for every patient, they’d have an insurance paperwork snarl every time. So we now live in a time when people working at insurance companies who didn’t go to med school are dictating to doctors what kinds of tests they should give to their patients.

But, if you really push your doctor, many will agree to give you the test despite the insurance paperwork debacle. Tell your doc that some estimates show that 75% of Americans are insulin resistant leading to most modern diseases, and that fasting insulin can rise 10 or more years before fasting glucose or A1c becomes elevated. Also, tell your doc that if your insurance won’t cover it, you’ll just pay for it. Depending on the lab, it usually costs about $10-$30.

Let’s Do This: The Three Week Challenge

So you’ve taken your measurements, you’ve written down the health problems you’re having, and you’ve possibly even had a fasting insulin test taken. Now you’re ready for instructions.

MARCHING ORDERS: FOLLOW THESE RULES EXACTLY

1. You simply have to do the clean fast. If you’re not clean fasting, you’re not doing THIS challenge. There are many other fasting challenges online you can join if you refuse to try clean fasting. Why clean fast? Flavors trigger insulin. I cover this in-depth here.

So for this challenge, when fasting:

• No gum (even sugar-free), lozenges, cough drops, sugar-free Tic Tacs, etc

• No flavored waters (La Croix, Hint, etc), no lemon in your water, none of those flavored drops in your water.

• No cream in your coffee (when fasting), no flavored black coffee (hazelnut, French vanilla, etc)

• No Stevia or whatever other zero-calorie “natural” sweeteners in your coffee or in anything else.

• No herbal teas, no Earl Gray tea (too many flavors), no lemon green tea, etc.

• Beware of the cold brew coffees (even the black ones) in the gas stations. Most of them say “natural flavors” in the ingredients. I don’t trust it. Make your own iced coffee.

• But can I have _____? NO! The answer is no!

• Water, sparkling (unflavored) water, black coffee, black tea ONLY. That’s it! Just try it.

• Hot tip: take some chilled San Pellegrino or Topo Chico sparkling water and pour it into a wine glass. Sit in the sunshine for a minute and sip away. It makes fasting feel indulgent! (There’s this amazing old book called Fasting and Sunbathing written 100 years ago by a doctor who healed most of his patients simply by telling them to fast and sit in the sun!)

2. For this challenge, I want you to cut out all artificial sweeteners even in your eating window. It’s just three weeks. No Diet Coke. No Stevia.

   “But Stevia is natural…” Don’t care. No Erythritol, Monk Fruit, Aspartame, Nutra Sweet, Sorbitol, sugar alcohols, xylitol. No Swerve, no Allulose, no Sweet-n-low, no Truvia, no Stevia-in-the-raw (puh-lease). Don’t fall for this marketing ploy:

   

   “Wholesome” ??? 🙄 “Keto certified” “Organic.” Poison is still poison even if it’s organic. Not gonna!

   However, when you’re in your eating window, it’s fine to have lemon in your water, herbal teas, any of those flavored sparkling waters (unsweetened), and cream in your coffee. Just no zero-cal sweeteners.

3. No “Keto” treats, keto snacks, Atkins bars, sugar-free jello, sugar-free yogurt, sugar-free pancake syrup, homemade keto fat bombs, etc. I realize that number 3 is pretty much a repeat of number 2 because all these keto snacks are filled with ingredients from rule number 2 but I just want to make sure that you realize what’s in all those keto products.

4. Take a walk during your fasting window at least 4 times each week. Get sunshine on your arms and legs. If you’re worried about wrinkles on your face, you can wear a hat and/or use a zinc-based barrier sunscreen (not chemical), just make sure you have other parts of your body where you are getting direct sun exposure without sunscreen to make vitamin D and for hundreds of other vital processes.

5. At your meals, first eat protein and plenty of healthy fat (butter, beef fat that comes in the ground beef, eggs with cheese, sour cream, etc.) Eat these foods first before any carbs. If a burger (try a lettuce wrap) doesn’t sound good, you’re not truly hungry. Keep fasting until meat sounds good. Don’t worry about portion control when it comes to protein/fat. Eat as much protein as your body tells you it needs. Stop when you feel full. No one has ever binged on chicken breasts like they were potato chips—your body tells you when to stop. If you want a little fruit or something after, that’s fine. But eat protein/fat first. Don’t count calories, or macros, or enter your food into a phone app (unless you’re one of my therapeutic patients—you know who you are. We’re going for macros because of how ketones can heal the brain). But the rest of you, let’s make this easy. Listen to your body when it comes to protein.

6. Don’t snack between meals. If you’re doing 16:8, do a big lunch, a big dinner, and don’t eat between meals.

7. Ignore other fasting advice for these three weeks to avoid confusion. You can always try other advice later if you don’t like this plan. Women, no matter where you are in your cycle, you can still fast. Some gurus are advocating different fasting lengths for different times of the month. You can try those ideas another time.

8. Let’s talk electrolytes. First, you need to take magnesium glycinate. Start with 200 mg and work up to at least 600 mg over time. For all the reasons you need magnesium, read the bottom of this post. Second, add extra salt to your food and if you’re doing longer fasts, you may need salt in your water. Just beware of using flavored electrolyte powers such as some of LMNTs products while fasting. If you want to buy electrolyte powders, there are unflavored versions (LMNT also makes an unflavored one). The cheapest option is to put 1/4 tsp of salt and 3/4 tsp of cream of tartar in your water. Cream of tartar has potassium.

9. SEED OILS BAD! Try to make it three weeks without any seed oils. Check salad dressings, mayo, and anything in a package. No soybean, corn, cottonseed, vegetable, grapeseed, or canola oil. Only avocado, olive, and coconut oil, and butter, ghee, lard, bacon grease, and beef tallow.

   

   The way I’ve been dealing with this is I make my own salad dressing/mayo most of the time, but I get some dressings/mayo from Thrive Market occasionally for when I don’t have time to make my own. Thrive also has avocado oil corn chips. I went about four months without eating a single chip, even when I make Mexican food, which is often, because I just decided to go completely seed oil free. But I just recently bought some avocado oil chips from Thrive, and it felt Christmas morning to have a chip again. So we’re not going to eat them all day long because of the price, but they’re nice for a special treat. We’ve cut way, way back on the processed foods we have lying around, and that is the cheapest way to cut seed oils. But if you’re having company or it’s someone’s birthday, it’s nice to “get out the chips.”

   Avoid fast food and most restaurants. Absolutely no fries (one of the worst things you could ever eat). Fried foods are the den of all rancid, oxidized, toxic, havoc-wreaking seed oils.

10. Lastly—how long should you fast each day? I’m leaving that completely up to you. It’s more important for this challenge to fast right than that you fast long. I’d rather you fast shorter and follow all the rules than fast longer but not do it right. If you’ve done little to no fasting, you can start at 16:8. That’s all my two fasting success stories above did. But if that seems too easy, challenge yourself to do 18:6 or longer. See how you feel. Just make sure you fast for at least 16 hours every single day. No days off for these three weeks.

Why All These Rules—Why Do Everything at Once?

Because I mentioned above that you were born into a toxic foodscape with carbage everywhere you turn. I want to time-warp you back to Little House on the Prairie to live 1800s style for three weeks because I want you to feel a new baseline. I want you to have a taste of what it’s like to detox your poor abused body from the modern world.

Look around your grocery store. Did Ma and Pa have this stuff?

Here’s a tip for navigating the grocery store: if Ma and Pa and Laura and Mary Ingalls didn’t have it, then I don’t want you to have it for three weeks to see what happens. They ate free-range eggs, raw whole milk, butter, cheese, meat, and vegetables that they grew themselves. They did eat some grains but along with eating the grains, they also did quite a bit of manual labor. I could eat more grains too if I scrubbed my clothes by hand and carried water and walked everywhere and chopped wood. But seeing as I don’t do those things, my carb tolerance is much lower and my need for fasting is much higher. Yours might be too.

Fasting helps our body detox from the barrage of modern assaults on our bodies—the car exhaust we breathe, microplastics, heavy metals, WIFI and 5G signals, electromagnetic fields, pesticides and other agricultural chemicals, preservatives, spike proteins from viruses created in gain-of-function labs courtesy of our own government. (The FLCCC is recommending fasting here as a way to deal with both long COVID and vax injuries.)

Therefore, part of this time-warp is that fasting is going to compensate for the toxic modern world.

Let me tell you a little secret. When I met with those two people last week and gave them these boot camp instructions, I had no idea the wild success they would experience in just one week. I would have never dared hope for that outcome. Four inches off of someone’s waist and nine pounds gone from another person? I am blown away.

And you have no idea what this could do for you either. Until you try. And even if your results are not nearly that dramatic, (most people’s probably won’t be, and some even gain a little weight at first as they gain some muscle), something is bound to happen.

If you are in, will you leave a brief comment below?

You could simply say, “I’m in.”

Or, if you want, you could say, “I’m in and hoping to lower blood pressure, get off ibuprofen for joint pain, have more energy” or anything else that pops into your head.

And then, next week, maybe you could drop a comment about anything you’ve noticed: triumphs, struggles, pounds or inches lost. A friend told me last week that she was really hangry while fasting all week, and I said to give it time. She texted me yesterday and said she’s not hangry at all, and she’s out playing golf. That makes me so happy I could cry. People can transform, change, morph, become revitalized.

Perhaps you’ve been doing a lot of reading about fasting. But today’s the day to finally put the boots on the ground. Are you ready?

Fast and Feast, and do it well this time! And report back.

Leslie

For the three-week challenge part 2, click here. Here’s part 3, and the conclusion.

[This newsletter is for informational purposes only and is not designed as a substitute for medical advice. Talk to your doctor before beginning any dietary changes, especially if you are on medications for diabetes. Fasting while taking certain medications such as Metformin and especially insulin can lead to dangerously low blood sugars. If your doctor does not support fasting, search for a physician who will support your fasting journey. Fasting is not recommended for those pregnant, breastfeeding, or for children and teens still growing and developing. For those with diabetes, personal fasting coaches are available through TheFastingMethod.com. I receive no compensation or ad revenue for anything in this newsletter including links to books, videos, websites, coaching services, podcasts, or supplements.]