Here are eleven things our team secretly does on a fast day: brain tricks to stop thinking about food, mini yee-haw celebrations and quirky habits only an intermittent faster would understand! Enjoy a little comic relief and major #fastingfeels.
People have SO MANY QUESTIONS about intermittent fasting! What do you eat? – When do you eat? – How do you do it?
SuperFastDiet gives you everything you need to know about intermittent fasting as well as leaves room for you to make the diet accommodate your lifestyle. In the process, we have discovered a few oddities we do without fail on a fast day. Is it just us? Does anyone else share a similar experience?
11 things we secretly do on a fast day:
1. Look forward to it
It sounds weird, because fasting can be scary when you’re starting out, but once you’ve done it for a little while, you actually start to enjoy it. After a feast day, we look forward to the clarity, organisation and focus that comes with a fast day. And we like that we don’t have to think too much about food.
2. Tell ourselves we can have that tomorrow
If we have a craving, we tell ourselves that we can enjoy <insert craving here> tomorrow. Strangely, we almost never do, but the approach of: “I choose not to have that today, because I’m choosing to fast instead, but if I still want it, I can have it tomorrow” always works for us.
3. Wonder if we’ve lost weight
But force ourselves not to get on the scales, because we know it’s not healthy. And we know the result won’t be a true reading anyway.
4. Consider breaking the fast
We think everyone’s done this on a fast day. Some days your hunger gets the better of you, or you feel left out when every else is enjoying their smashed avo toast. We consider breaking our fast day momentarily at least a couple of times on a normal fast day. We think it’s healthy to acknowledge that what you’re doing is difficult and to recognise human (but ultimately self-sabotaging) thoughts like this. Constantly pretending that fasting is a breeze is tiring – and boring. It does get easier, bit we still definitely entertain the odd thought about breaking our fast and smashing down a pizza. The difference is that we don’t. But we know we can, if we want to.
5. Go to bed early (and sleep really well)
Sometimes you just want a fast day to be over so you can feast again. When this happens, we find an earlier bedtime works well. Besides which, who couldn’t stand to get a few extra hours of sleep, right? And we always wake up feeling amazing the next day too.
6. Chew gum like a crazy person
When you’re fasting, you’re more likely to go into ketosis, or ‘fat burning mode’ which produces ketones. Ketones can make you feel a bit buzzy, but they can also give you bad breath. We’re super-conscious of this on fasting days, so we always keep sugar-free gum in our bags and we pop a piece before a meeting or when we head out. Gum also helps distract us when we’re craving foods we’d prefer not to eat.
7. Have an extra coffee
Ok, so our java addiction isn’t really a secret, we’re loud and proud caffeinators. But we’ll often sneak an extra coffee in at around 11:00am when we find our energy waning. It doesn’t need to be strong or fancy, it just needs to be an option.
8. Amp up our makeup
Sometimes you need a little boost to get through those fast days. A little extra war-paint makes us feel like warriors women capable of anything. And hey, if our dark eyeliner and extra bronzer can stop us reaching for that piece of chocolate, then why not, right?
9. Save 80-100 calories for a treat
Whether it’s 30g of sultanas or raisins, a Jarrah hot chocolate, a couple of Redskin or a teaspoon of peanut butter – sometimes you just want something a little indulgent. We always make sure we have a calorie buffer of around 80-100 calories so that if we do feel like a little bit of a treat, we can have one without stressing.
10. Get surprised by how thirsty we are
We’ve been doing this for a while, and yet we’re still surprised by how thirsty we get on fast days. We try to keep a bottle of water on our desk throughout the day, but we tend to down it fairly quickly, so regular refills are a must.
11. Wear skinny clothes
We don’t know why we do this, but something about a fast day makes us feel a little more open to showing off our bodies. It might be the de-bloating effect, the fact that we know we’re doing something good for our health or just another version of our ‘warrior-woman’ approach to fast days. But we say, if it feels right, do it.
Over to you fellow Super Faster! What intermittent fasting habbits have you adopted? Please share them in the comments below!
