How are you doing so far? Lots of nutrition information, meal planning information, eating window information, and calorie information! It’s a lot to take in. But just like starting a new class in school, those are the basics to Intermittent Fasting. They are a solid foundation that will help support your entire weight loss and health journey!

But, as you spend each day alternating between your eating windows and your times for Intermittent Fasting, you will also run into some obstacles here and there. That’s why I’ve set up an entire list of ‘Dos’ and ‘Don’ts’ to help guide you in this chapter 먹튀검증.

These are just a bunch of really helpful tips, and they provide the true keys to success when you decide to embark on this Intermittent Fasting lifestyle. How do you know what will bring you the results you need? How do you know what pitfalls to avoid, including many mistakes that I made! Here’s your first don’t: don’t skip this chapter! Learn from me and do it the right way.

DO: Ease Into Your Intermittent Fasting

Breathe with me. Just breathe. In … and out. Good!

It’s easy to get overwhelmed when you start a new dieting plan.

Intermittent Fasting is not a race! I know you want to lose the weight quickly and have that goal number on the scale.

But please don’t let impatience or eagerness cause you to bite off more than you can chew. Intermittent Fasting is going to give you the maximum success if you not only ease into it, but take your time to plan everything out. It’s not just a diet; it’s an entire lifestyle change. And it’s only a lifestyle change that will benefit you if it’s not rushed, if it really works the best with your schedule, and if you decide to put in the committed effort to make it work for you.

Patience is not just a virtue ? it’s also the key to losing lots of weight with Intermittent Fasting! Plan for your eating windows, prepare yourself for the hours of fasting, and spend as much time as you need finding the perfect eating window of time and the perfect meal plan schedule for you. Only then will you see the weight drop off … and you’ll be a happier woman on each step of the journey, too.

DO: Stay Hydrated While Fasting

While you are abstaining from all calorie consumption during fasting, you want to make sure you stay well hydrated. In one of the below tips, I mention to keep a food diary. As part of your food diary, track how much water you are drinking as well. It’s good to get in your eight glasses per day. Many of us don’t realize that we’re not drinking as much water as we should!

Water has so many other benefits, too. Your body is mostly made up of water, so every single cell needs it for optimum functions. To flavor plain water while you’re Intermittently fasting, try adding a squeeze of lemon or a few berries to infuse a fruity flavor.

DO: Rest As Much As You Can

When was the last time you woke up refreshed from an amazing night’s rest? It is one of the best feelings to be well rested. While you’re Intermittent Fasting, your body is working hard to repair cells, help you lose weight, digest the healthy foods you’ve been eating, and perform all of its different functions ? and it’s best when your body is able to do these at night, while you are asleep.

So, get as much rest as you can while on the Intermittent Fasting plan. Sometimes making sure to sleep enough is even harder than going to the gym! But your mental alertness levels, your mood, your overall health, and your best weight will all be improved by a proper night’s rest. How much sleep you need is completely individual! I need at least eight hours, while my husband seems to function well on only six or seven. Every person is different. Just make sure you’re getting the optimum amount of rest for you.

As a bonus, the more you sleep, the faster those hours of fasting go by!

DO: Listen to Your Hunger Signals

In the previous couple of chapters, I mentioned the ghrelin hunger hormone a few times. Some women have a more difficult time fasting because this hormone has not adjusted to your fasting schedule yet. Give it time to ease into your shorter eating windows. If you have to start with a longer eating window, like ten hours, that is perfectly fine. Pay attention to your own ghrelin levels and when your hunger is the most ravenous.

It’s a good idea to plan your eating windows around those peak hunger hormone times. This is all about working with your body’s natural processes. Pay attention to your inner hunger signals. That is when you can eat your largest meal, with the highest calorie percentage. Then you can custom tailor your meal plan around that largest meal.

What about when you’re hungry during times of fasting? You don’t have to suffer through on sheer willpower. Within your first month or two of fasting, especially while you are in the ‘testing the schedule’ phase, you are allowed to have a very tiny amount of calories to see you through. This is especially helpful at night, if you’re trying to fall asleep on an empty stomach. You can have a very small amount of nuts, one slice of cheese, half of a banana, half a glass of milk, or one other reduced serving of a food. This is not meant to satisfy your hunger, but to ease it. Only see these calories as a crutch.

As you spend more and more weeks Intermittent Fasting, the fasting will get easier. It also helps to eat plenty of protein, fiber-rich carbohydrates, and good, healthy fats to keep your tummy satiated between meals and eating windows.

DO: Meal Plan

Yes, yes, and more yes! You read about the sample meal plan templates in the previous chapter, so hopefully by now you’re thinking about which one will fit best into your lifestyle.

Once you’ve decided on your first eating window meal plan template that works for your schedule, then start to calculate your individual calorie count requirements. From there, you can search online or in cookbooks for healthy recipes. Build healthy meals from the suggested ingredients list in Chapter 4. Then plan out your meals each week in your day planner or calendar.

Meal planning can be a pain. I mean, it’s one more thing to do in my busy week! Meal planning takes a bit of time up front, but it saves you enormous amounts of time throughout the rest of your week. Since Intermittent Fasting is all about the clock, meal planning becomes that much more pertinent. It should be an essential part of your week. I’ll talk more about Intermittent Fasting preparations in Chapter 7. It’s so important!

DO: Keep a Food Diary

This is also really important. Every woman’s eating and fasting journey is going to be unique, so there’s no way you can compare mine to yours. I can give you plenty of tips, but I can’t walk the road for you! A food diary not only keeps you accountable, but it also provides the most helpful and useful road map for the daily changes in your body.

Use a food diary to track:

~Your daily eating windows

~Your daily fasting times

~Your calorie percentages for each meal

~What you eat each day and the calorie counts

~How many glasses of water you drink each day

~How you feel each day

~What you weigh each week

~What ingredients to shop for

~And more!

While I am old school and like to keep my food diary in a paper planner, you can certainly find an app for your smartphone that works just as well. Make it personalized to your lifestyle, and you’ll not only use it more, but it will be that much more helpful to you in the long run.

I’ve kept food diaries for years. It’s amazing to look back and see not just how many pounds I’ve lost, but the daily steps it took to lose those pounds. Every weight loss journey takes weeks and months of time. A food diary helps you see all that time at a glance.

DON’T: Force Yourself to Fast

Fasting is not the same as starving or food deprivation. Far from it! Fasting is more similar to a resting period between meals. You are helping your

body’s digestive processes work better by fasting. You are not starving your body of nutrients or kicking your cells into more harmful things, like diabetic ketoacidosis, muscle deprivation, organ failure, bone weakening, or anything else. Those are serious conditions.

But have no fear. So, don’t force yourself to fast, either. You don’t have to fast to be healthy and lose weight. It’s just one of the most natural ways to do so! If you are having difficulty with a particular fasting schedule or eating window, you can either cut back and only fast a few days a week instead of each day, or change your eating windows. To force your body to fast would only add more problems in the long run, so it’s definitely not worth it!

On the other hand, if you enjoy fasting and you love both your eating window and your schedule, then by all means keep on doing what you’re doing! If it isn’t broke, don’t fix it. Continue on the same path, use your food diary to monitor how you feel, and enjoy watching those pounds gradually and pretty effortlessly drop away. You’ll also look and feel a whole lot better, too.

DON’T: Wing It

Yes, it’s true. This is not an eating plan where you just wing it and hope for the best! It requires a lot of planning, consistency, and the ability to stick to the confines of the Intermittent Fasting schedule. That is why above I made the strong suggestion of meal planning. This is a diet where you are also watching the clock, so it’s that important to make sure you’re following a consistent routine. You need to be accountable to yourself.

So, once you have nailed down your ideal eating window / fasting schedule ratio, then please stick with it. Watch the clock, eat your meals on time, finish eating before the end of your eating window, plan for your one, two, or three meals per day, and just wash, rinse, repeat until you reach your weight loss goals.

This is definitely the kind of eating plan that works best with a consistent weekly schedule, but you can definitely do it if your life is crazy, too! That type of lifestyle just takes more planning.

If you are also following the Ketogenic Diet, which I’ll chat about in Chapter 10, you shouldn’t wing it with your Macros, either! Also, that is not a cheat day diet, where you can just jump off the wagon. It could knock you out of ketosis. So, when you’re combining both the Keto Diet and Intermittent Fasting, you want to put in your due diligence to stick with it.

DON’T: Go This Alone

Even if you’re doing Intermittent Fasting with a male partner or friend, his experience might not give you an accurate picture of this type of eating plan. So, find other women who are doing Intermittent Fasting!

There are thousands of helpful gals out there who’ve had success, who’ve also gone through what you’re going through, and they want to help you! Your feelings about how you live in your body each day are important. No one will understand that better than a fellow woman going through the same thing. She can also help hold you accountable to sticking to this!

So, in that light, don’t try to go it alone with this Intermittent Fasting. Join an online forum or a dieting group in the real world. Talk about what you’re going through. You might want to share your food diary, share your thoughts, and share your journey every step of the way. A blog could be a helpful place to just air your thoughts and experience with this. Any kind of outlet that helps you sort through your relationships between eating, fasting, and feelings is going to be so incredibly beneficial. You’ll not just feel better when you finally achieve your weight loss goals. You will also have a better day to day experience!

DON’T: Be Afraid to Tweak Your Fasting Schedule

Life happens! It’s okay to tweak and change your Intermittent Fasting schedule. If you become pregnant, are planning a huge life event like a wedding, have to take care of elderly parents, change jobs, move locations, suffer an emergency situation, or other big circumstances, that can certainly throw a wrench into your fasting schedule. There are just some times when being on an eating plan is too much work and one more thing to throw into an already overloaded schedule.

That’s perfectly fine. Just give yourself the space and time to tweak your fasting schedule. You can move your eating window up by a few hours, go back to three meals instead of two (or drop down to two meals instead of three), or other changes. Just keep listening to your body, paying attention to your hunger hormones, and you’ll still gain the benefits of fasting.

This has happened to me. I was on a two meal a day 6 hour fasting schedule, when I had an emergency situation happen in my husband’s family. Our whole life seemed to stop and was put on hold for a month. My fasting schedule suddenly didn’t work anymore, since our lives were so topsy turvy. I went down to OMAD and ate it in the morning, so I could attend and help out for the rest of the day without worrying about getting myself lunch or dinner. I could just be there in the hospital. After everything had smoothed over and I’d gone back to normal, I spent a few days tweaking my fasting schedule and increasing back to the 6 hour eating window.

So, if something happens to you, just know that your fasting schedule is not set in stone. It’s there for you to customize depending on how your life is going.

Do the Intermittent Fasting Your Way

Every woman’s life is different. We all have our own lives with our families, friends, work, home, hobbies, and other things that fill up our time. Intermittent Fasting is the most flexible eating plan you’ll ever be on, so take advantage of it and make it work for you. These tips in this chapter prevent most of the issues with Intermittent Fasting for women and are helpful signposts along the way as you navigate through your own dieting journey.

Oh, and one last do for you: show off your progress! Take those awesome ‘before’ and ‘after’ pictures that are so fun to see and share on social media. Take a picture of yourself each month and watch those pounds come off.

You’ll have so much success just by using Intermittent Fasting!