Discussion/Journalling Exercise

Reflecting on day one 

What went well?

What felt challenging or problematic?

What has day one taught you?

Day Two Guidelines

#1 Plan and prepare three decent nutritious meals,

or

two full meals and replace breakfast with a small breakfast plus mid morning snack

#2 Have breakfast between 7 and 8am

#3 Aim to start eating your last meal between 3pm and 3.30pm

Fun Guideline: Avoid restriction when it comes to meal planning. The time restriction of the eating window is challenging enough if IF is new to you.

If you want to add dessert, add dessert. You are free to snack between meals.

This indulgent dessert tastes luxurious, but is sugar free

https://www.theshiftinside.com/pudding/

Here is sugar free cake recipe.

https://www.theshiftinside.com/ffs-chocolate-cake/

Discussion: What questions, doubts etc do you have about day two?

If you were not able to attend session two, be sure to read my thoughts below and  email me any questions.

My Thoughts On Day Two

including answers to common objections

Objection: This eating window just doesn't work for me

One thing I have heard from just about everyone I have spoken to (and I mean my podcast listeners ie people with a history of food compulsion) is this:

I just don’t feel like eating in the morning. I never really get hungry before 11am or noon.

I would like to address this, because I feel that the start and end times of the eating window are very important.

I want to challenge the idea of using what feels good as your guide.

I understand that having a time of day when you have a natural lack of interest in food feels empowering. It is so convenient too!

I urge you to mistrust that feeling.

Why do I say this?

#1 The science does not back this up. This page on eating rhythm

IS Sumo Eating Rhythm

explains how your body is built to have most of your nutrients in the first half of the day. Breakfast at 11 or 12 deprives your of 50% of your metabolic power. The likely result is hunger pangs or junk food cravings later in the day...when your metabolism is sluggish anyway. This is a great way to put weight on.

#2 Struggle Getting Going. Everyone who contacted me with their IF success stories all said they had an eating window that started late morning...or later. What I heard time and again was how it was a long process to get to that point. I read so much struggle between the lines. If not eating in the morning is as great as everyone feels, then why didn’t they experience what I do, which is that right from day one, it is SO EASY not to eat after 4pm.

#3 Trust data more than your feelings. Knowledge assumed via what you feel can never match up to data gathered from experimentation. This is not a universal principle, but it DEFINITELY applies to IF. Your optimal IF day may not look like mine, but you are worth more than basing it on assumptions and feelings. You absolutely must arrive at your perfect IF plan via your own experimentation.

#4 Stop Predicting How Hard Something Is Before You Try It. When I was learning to drive, I had so much trouble doing all the various component parts of driving a car at the same time. I could not imagine ever being competent, never mind enjoying it. When I passed, however, I had a completely unexpected feeling of independence.

It was only after trying the 7am - 4pm window that I realised that it was really doable for me. Just think if I had dismissed it out of hand without...yup, you know what the next word is: experimenting.

#5 One Day At a Time. Not a fan of breakfast? Remember that this is one day. Eat breakfast anyway. Maybe you have trained yourself to not be hungry at this time, because you eat later in the day. If you stopped eating earlier in the day, you may well get hungry by the time you wake up. This is what your body wants and will reward you for it!

One thing you can do is have a smoothie using this recipe

https://www.theshiftinside.com/ffs-smoothie/

at breakfast time then have something else mid morning should you be hungry.

#6 The Alabama Study. Read this quote from  this Harvard University blog post 

...researchers from the University of Alabama conducted a study with a small group of obese men with prediabetes. They compared a form of intermittent fasting called “early time-restricted feeding,” where all meals were fit into an early eight-hour period of the day (7 am to 3 pm),or spread out over 12 hours (between 7 am and 7 pm). Both groups maintained their weight (did not gain or lose) but after five weeks, the eight-hours group had dramatically lower insulin levels and significantly improved insulin sensitivity, as well as significantly lower blood pressure. The best part? The eight-hours group also had significantly decreased appetite. They weren’t starving.

Objection: This Is Too Inconvenient

Finishing your last meal at 4pm will be for some people incredibly inconvenient. Certainly the ability to eat dinner with my kids at 5pm dictated my first IF experiment.

Some thoughts on this:

#1 With any new change like this, it is a question of weighing things up, in a cost-benefit type way. And you can only do that via experimentation. You need to work out the things in your day that genuinely make a 3-4pm meal out of the question (say client appointments), and obstacles you are placing in the way of that meal because it makes you nervous/you’d just rather not do it.

Interesting question: If you could take a magic pill that made hunger an impossibility until bedtime, but the only time that pill was available was 4pm, would you at least try it out?

#2 I have found that a great way to have dinner with my kids outside my eating window is to make a bowl of stock soup. I dissolve a stock cube in boiling water and eat as soup. This feels far more like a meal than it has any right to! It fulfils my bonding via eating with my kids needs surprisingly well.

#3 I believe that many women especially are so used to putting the needs of others before their own, that they over prioritise the perceived negative impact of IF on others when deciding their eating window.

How much food stress have you had to carry in your life in the name of others’ demands? Whether it was

our carers who made you clean your plate even when you were not hungry,

having to ignore huge piles of junk food at work meetings,

or

children tantruming over treats in the supermarket

...it is all BLOODY HARD!

Nobody ever acknowledges the massive load that compulsive eating creates. Nobody would expect a recovering alcoholic to get a job in a pub, but somehow you should have to deal with these issues on a daily basis.

Isn’t it time you put yourself first?

Someone in the first session made a really smart point. She said “I am not committing to my day one to go a particular way. Instead I am committing to this experiment”.

The potential benefits of this commitment are huge. Just think of all the benefits of IF you crave.

Are you going to let the perceived inconvenience of it stop you doing something that is potentially life changing?

By now I hope that you are NOT  Ok with relying on the word ‘perceived’. How do you know the real impact until you have experimented?

My Meal Planning Resistance 

I had massive resistance to planning three big meals and I realised in my own experimental first days that this was all a back door way to try to allow myself to snack. Snacking was alot about oral comfort for me and a baseless fear of being hungry.

In 160 odd episodes of The Eating Coach, I have never once mentioned snacking! Interesting eh!?! Ditto hunger.

I was shocked to find that both snacking and hunger became non issues, neither of which are big deals for me anymore.

At the time of writing, about 3 weeks later, I still resist meal planning - but I have done my shopping lists so that there is always enough nutritious food to make the snacking and hunger issues , well , non issues.