 Hey everybody, Dr. O'Hare. Welcome to my new series on how to get started with Alternate Day Fasting or ADF, or how to start over if it hasn't gone well in the past. I am completely humbled by the fact that I've helped thousands of people see results with ADF between my videos, my courses, my Facebook group, and my private coaching. It truly makes my day whenever I hear from one of you, from someone who has used Alternate Day Fasting to transform their health and turn their life around in the same ways that I have. It's one of the greatest feelings in the world to be able to help. But this video series is for the people I don't hear from, the people who can't get started or don't stick with it long enough to see results. So people who struggle with ADF generally fall into one of two categories. Number one, you try to do too much too soon. You make plans and set goals that you aren't physically or mentally prepared to achieve. This is you if you struggle to even get started. You might make a little progress for a week or two, but the slightest bump in the road causes you to fall off your plan. Or, number two, you start out with plans that you can't stick with long enough to reach your goals. This is you if you're able to make really good progress for a few weeks or months. Maybe you lose 20 or 30 pounds and you're cruising, but then your old habits start to creep back in. A missed workout turns into a missed week of workouts, a cheat meal turns into a cheat month, and the next thing you know, you're right back where you started. You may even end up heavier than when you began, right? I covered why this happens and how to keep it from happening in my Fat Loss Sweet Spot series, one of my favorite video series that I've done. I know this was the case for me, for sure. The guy in this picture had probably lost 500 pounds over the years. Years of failed weight loss attempts did nothing but make me fatter, weaker, and more metabolically broken than ever. So the old me was a cautionary tale of what can happen if you keep trying and failing and trying and failing without figuring it out. But now I'm living proof that of what is possible when you find a plan that you can stick with and you never give up. I use alternate day fasting to lose 49 pounds in 10 weeks, 101.2 pounds in 6 months, and 165 pounds in a year. So we know that intermittent fasting can work amazingly well once you adapt to it, but getting started can be the hardest part. So here, perhaps your goal is to get to an alternate day fasting schedule that looks like this. If you're anything like me, you want to get there or want to get close. You know that I kind of modified my approach, but it was really similar to an alternate day fasting approach. But if you're anything like me, you're starting with a plan that looks more like this. Way too much food, way too many meals, way too much snacking, way too much junk food, way too much soda, all things I'm going to cover in this series, how we need to deal with it. But this is definitely going to be a process for most of you, just like it was for me. So in this series, I want to highlight the strategies that will help you get started the right way and stick to the plan long enough to see results. The videos in this series will each address one or more of the following topics. How to ease into fasting, which will be our big focus today. How to prepare your body for fasting, just as importantly, how to prepare your mind for fasting, and then how to eat to fuel your fasting success. I have one goal in mind for this series. I want each and every one of you. I want to help you make this the last time you ever need to begin an alternate day fasting program to lose weight and transform your health. So I want to hear from you before we dive in, but I want to hear from the ADF veterans that are out there watching this video. What's worked for you? Did you ease into fasting or dive right in? What tips do you have for someone who is just getting started? What would you do differently if you were starting on your weight loss journey today? So we're all in this together. I would love to hear your thoughts and maybe I'll even add them to future videos in this series. First, why should we even ease into fasting? Let's start with this quote from Benjamin Franklin. If you fail the plan, you are planning to fail. I truly believe that in all areas of life. This video is about easing into fasting, but some people prefer ripping the bandaid off and jumping right into ADF. There is nothing wrong with that if it works well for you. Nothing at all. There are certainly pros and cons, though, to both approaches. Jumping right into longer fast will actually speed up the fat adaptation process, but it can make the first few days or weeks really tough. It's high risk, but also high reward. I've done both because I've had periods where I've gone away from longer fast and then eased back into it. When I first started, yeah, I had started just by diving right in and I was able to do it, but I tried and failed a few times before it finally stuck and there were some really, really rough moments, no doubt. So lots of people find that easing into fasting is a more sustainable approach. Allowing your body to get used to fasting over time will decrease the chances that you experience any negative side effects like hypoglycemia, which is low blood sugar, dehydration, electrolyte issues, etc. It will also give you in your doctor time to adjust any medications like insulin or blood pressure pills if needed. You should obviously always work with your doctor if you have any underlying health issues. I've worked with enough people to know that both strategies can work. The key is to know yourself well enough to decide the best path for you. So why? Why is it so hard? Why can't we just start fasting? Why can't we just go 36 hours without food? Why is it so hard in the beginning? To put it as simply as I can, you need to transform your metabolism and rebuild your metabolism from running on sugar to running on fat and ketones for fuel. This is a life-changing process, but it takes your body time to adapt. Your cells need to build more mitochondria, the powerhouses of your cell, because you need more than if you're going to be running on fat. Your cells need to increase the number of fat-burning enzymes. And just in general, your cells have to get better at running on ketones and fatty acids for fuel. The old fat-burning machinery hasn't been busy because your body's primarily been running on glucose for fuel if you've been eating the standard American diet. So it also takes time for your body to go from the fat storage mode that we hate to the fat burning mode that we love as our high insulin levels start to return to normal. So it takes time for these adaptations to occur, maybe you've heard of the fat adaptation process. So here's my favorite study that explains why fasting gets easier and more effective over time. So what does the science have to say? Alternate day fasting in non-obese subjects, effects on body weight, body composition, and energy metabolism. So I'll probably cover this video in other ways moving forward, but there's a few things that I want to highlight and pull out of here. This study looked at something called the respiratory quotient or the RQ. You may also hear it called the respiratory exchange ratio or the RER, but don't worry, there won't be a test. This respiratory quotient determines whether your body is in carb burning mode or fat burning mode. It's actually determined by measuring how much oxygen you take in and how much carbon dioxide you take out. So I actually get this done every time that I get my resting energy expenditure test done that I've talked about in multiple videos over the years. So an RQ of 0.7 means that your body is burning 100% fat for fuel. An RQ of 1.0 means your body is burning 100% carbs for fuel. And an RQ in the middle of 0.85 means that you're 50-50, you're burning a combination of both. So we'll look at what happened to the respiratory quotient of these trial participants real soon. So here's a quote, respiratory quotient or RQ did not change significantly from baseline to day 21, but respiratory quotient decreased on day 22, which resulted in an average daily increase in fat oxidation. So that means that over time, they got better at burning fat for fuel. They became fat burning machines and that's what we're looking at here. So let's actually take a closer look at the changes that occurred to get these people into fat burning mode. Alright, so lots of neat stuff going on here. So you'll see that the white bars are a baseline and then the striped bars were day 21, which was an eating day, remember it's alternate day fasting, and day 22 was a fasting day. So you can see that their blood glucose levels stayed pretty similar. They dropped down just a little bit. This is actually a good sign. That means they trained their body to fast for 36 hours at a time without seeing blood sugar crashes. And this is something that can occur when people first start fasting if they dive right in. Glucose changes I would say are what's expected. Next we see insulin. Fasting insulin decreased an average of 57%. This is an amazing improvement since insulin is our key fat storage hormone and most people are dealing with too much insulin. So their insulin levels came way down. Next, you can also see that fasting put them into a state of ketosis and that fat was being mobilized for fuel. So you see that the black bar there, that's beta hydroxybutyrate, the most important blood ketone, and then you see on the right we have more free fatty acids. So this means that their body was releasing free fatty acids, converting fat into ketones to fuel the brain and other parts of the body, and these fuels were being released and they were being burned. So the corresponding change, remember we talked about how their respiratory quotient or RQ went down, it actually was at 0.85 at baseline when they started, and on day 22 it had dropped down to 0.79, so they'd become better fat burners. So as a result, fat oxidation increased from 64 grams per 24 hours at baseline the first day to 101 grams per 24 hours on day 22. That's a 57% increase in fat oxidation. So I'm going to come back and talk about that in a later video, not even part of the series, but I'm super excited about it. I've been doing tons of research. Many of you have watched the video that I put out about how much fat your body can release every day, but I do think that there are ways that we can up-regulate that. So I want to look at all the science I can find and really dive in and say how much fat can we burn today? How much fat can we burn a week? So I'll be sharing examples from studies like this. So the change from 64 grams for 24 hours up to 101 grams, that's a 57% increase in fat oxidation. So just to give you an idea of the difference, if you burned 37 more grams of fat per day, that's 13,505 more grams of fat per year, that's almost 30 pounds of fat being burned, but just from this increase in fat oxidation that we saw. So this here, these changes, this is what a fat burning machine looks like, and that's the whole point of alternate day fasting is to become a fat burner. The point I'm trying to make here is that you can completely transform your metabolism in a few weeks if, if, if you can stick with the plan long enough to see these results. I want to share a bonus tip from the study that will be really helpful as you're getting started. Look at the weight loss during the study. So they weighed them every day and you're seeing weight loss as a percent of their body weight. The scale goes down on fasting days, but then it goes back up on eating days. This actually makes sense. People get real terrified by this, but this is because your muscles and your liver are filling back up with glycogen and water after you eat. You also have the weight of the food that's passing through you in your GI tract. So you are doing great as long as the overall trend is going down, but it kind of looks like a saw blade here. If this image gives you anxiety of watching your weight go down and then back up every other day, just weigh yourself at the end of your fasting windows and skip your weigh-ins on your eating days. This is what I do. It's better for my mental health. I didn't like seeing the scale go up even though I understood why it was happening, so I only weigh myself at the end of my fasts. All right. How to ease into fasting. Now we understand why you might want to ease into fasting, but let's focus on the how. So again, I've worked with hundreds and hundreds of people and these are the tips that primarily have helped. So here are six steps that can help you ease into the fasting lifestyle. So we'll go through them all, but step one, stop eating after dinner. Step two, skip the snacks. Step three, slowly shrink your eating window. Step four, try a modified alternate day fasting or five to approach. Step five, prepare for your first full 36 hour fast. And then step six, use crutches if needed. So step one, stop eating after dinner. No food after dinner. Bonus points if you skip dessert as well. This is the perfect place to start for several reasons. We already fast overnight while we sleep, right? Hopefully you're sleeping seven to nine hours a night. So you're already fasting every day. That's why they call it breakfast because you're breaking a fast in the morning. So avoiding food after dinner is the simplest way to extend the fast that you're already doing every night. Another reason that choosing to extend your fasting window by avoiding food after dinner is better than maybe pushing your breakfast back in the beginning is we often make very poor food choices at night, right? Most people don't binge on kale while watching TV before bed. They eat a few hundred calories of cereal, ice cream, chips, cookies, those types of things. Avoiding food too close to bed will also help you sleep. You don't want to be digesting a belly full of food or riding a blood sugar roller coaster while you prepare for sleep. This is a win-win since sleep is one of our biggest fat loss superpowers. This is why sleep is one of my favorite topics to talk about. If you need another reason to skip the midnight snack, let's go ahead and look at this study that showed that eating late decreases fat burning. So what's the science have to say? Eating breakfast and avoiding late evening snacking sustains lipid oxidation. So this study showed that people that eat late at night burn 15 fewer grams of fat per day. So it doesn't sound like a huge number, but that's 5,475 grams per year. That's over 12 pounds of fat per year. So we're looking at just by eating later. And we're not talking about more calories. Just by changing when people eat, you can impact how much fat they're burning for fuel. All right, so that's step number one. Step two, skip the snacks. Save your calories for your meals. You're trying to teach your body that it doesn't need to be fed every two to three hours. We're trying to break that cycle. This will also make your meals larger and more filling and satisfying. So skip the snacks. So if you follow these first two steps, you should now be eating two to three satisfying meals per day with no snacking and no food after dinner. We are building momentum in the right direction. So a quick bonus tip before we move on to step three, eat until you're satisfied. Give yourself some wiggle room here, especially in the beginning. You might feel like you're eating more than normal and that's going to be okay. You are not on a diet at this point. We are focusing on getting good at fasting. So don't limit your food intake for the first few weeks. Give your body time to get fat adapted and then you will naturally start to consume less as your appetite gets regulated. So here's the key. Make sure you are eating enough to recover from your last fast and prepare for your next fast. That's the absolute key. That's why it's super important to be eating enough. Under-eating will cause more problems than overeating at this stage. Fasting is where the real magic is happening. So we have to allow it to occur. All right, so eat until you're satisfied. So step number three, slowly shrink your eating window. Now our goal is to shrink our eating window until you're fasting for at least 16 hours per day. You can do this by pushing breakfast back a little bit by a couple of hours, having dinner a couple of hours earlier or a bit of both. So a good schedule for a lot of people here in this place is going to be eating two to three meals from 10 to six or 11 to seven. Because that keeps you from eating too close to bed and then you've pushed back your breakfast. A lot of people aren't super hungry when they wake up anyways. So pushing back their breakfast is generally easier to do than pushing dinner earlier. And then also if you're eating your dinner at three or four o'clock, that might impact your family. All right, so you can track your fasting progress. I personally don't use a fasting tracker because I don't restrict my eating windows on eating days. I practice 36, 12 fasting. So I have days that I eat and days that I don't. But if tracking motivates you, then I 100% think that you should do it. It can be especially helpful as you are extending your fasting windows here in the beginning. You can focus on fasting a little longer every few days or maybe every week. Here are my two favorite fasting trackers based on the little bit that I've played around with them and then feedback from people I've worked with. So you have zero, the fasting and health tracker, and then you have the life fasting timer and tracker. But I don't have a lot of experience with these. So please share your thoughts if you do. If you track your fasting windows, if so, what's your favorite way to do it? How do you track your fasting windows or maybe explain why you don't? All right, so we're trying to slowly shrink our eating window. But what if you're really struggling to do that? What if you're having a real hard time getting your eating window down to an 8-hour eating window, for example? The first thing to do is to make sure you're properly hydrated with water and electrolytes. This is the solution to most of the problems that people deal with in the beginning of their fasting journeys. So check out these videos for more details. Another trick is to try a fat fast. Fat fasts are where you add fat calories during your fasting window to help your body get used to burning fat for fuel. Adding a little fat can really help control hunger while flying under your metabolism's radar. This is because fat doesn't stimulate insulin and mTOR the same way that carbs and protein do. You can use any fat you want, but I recommend using MCT oil. MCTs are medium chain triglycerides. MCT oil is a great fuel source for the body. You don't need bile to absorb it or digest it, and it's burned for fuel better than other fats. Specifically, the C8 MCT oil is called caprylic acid. It's the most ketogenic of all the MCT oils and will boost your blood ketone levels. This is where the hunger control comes from. I personally use or recommend the Bulletproof Brain Octane since it's 100% C8, which is the best type of MCT oil in my opinion. Try adding some to your coffee or your tea to help you make it to the end of your fasting window. You're trying to get to 11, it's 9 o'clock, you're ravenously hungry. Try adding a little bit of fat to see if it can help you get to your fasting window. I'm not saying you're going to do this forever, but it's a nice little way to help you reach the end of your fasting windows. You can also use an MCT powder if the MCT oil causes any GI distress. So some people don't do well with MCT oils, people typically tolerate MCT powders better. Speaking of ketones, you can also go straight to the source and take exogenous ketones. So I've used several exogenous ketones, but my favorite is Keto Start from Audacious Nutrition. It has only 52 calories and causes my ketone levels to jump more than when I use MCT oil. This does not need to be a permanent solution, but combining MCT oil and exogenous ketones will crank up your ketone levels and help your body adapt to fasting until you can rely on your own body fat for fuel instead. Alright, so step four, try a modified ADF or 5.2 approach. So now that you're comfortable with a 16.8 schedule, it's time to try a modified fast a few days per week. So here, this is the original 5.2 plan. You can see that there's five days a week you eat and on two days a week you consume around 500 calories. I would still eat in the 16.8 window on your five regular eating days. I wouldn't do that if you were just going to use the 5.2 program forever, but you don't want to lose the progress you've worked so hard for. We're trying to get better at fasting so we can go to full 36-hour fasts. So keeping this tighter eating window will help you, I think. So you have five days a week where you eat in that 16.8 eating window. Then choose two days per week to have one or two small meals that total 500 calories. We're trying to stress our fasting machinery to see if and when we're ready for a full 36-hour fast. So definitely go and check out this video. I covered that in great detail. I'm a huge fan of 5.2 fasting, so check out the video for details. This is one example of a modified fast you can use. The other one, so here's the modified alternate-day fasting approach. So instead of eating one day and fasting the next, you're eating one day and then you're doing a modified fast where you consume 500 calories in one or two small meals on your quote-unquote fasting days. So some people end up seeing such great results that they stick with modified ADF and don't see the need to go any further. For example, a member of my Facebook group has already lost 100 pounds using this plan that I lay out in this modified ADF video. Pretty exciting to hear. All right, so now what have we done? We've stopped eating after dinner. We've cut out the snacks. Then we've shrunk our eating window. Now we're doing these modified fasting days. So now we're ready. So step five, prepare for your first 36-hour fast. So let me read this quote by Lao Zhu. I hope that's right. Mastering others' strength, mastering yourself is true power. And I feel like there are real mental benefits that come with being able to complete your first 36-hour fast. This is the moment you've been working for. You've trained your fasting muscles. Your body has become a better fat-burning machine. So as Ronnie Coleman would say, there's nothing to it but to do it now. All right, so here's the best advice I can give you for your first 36-hour fast. Have a busy day planned. We've all been too busy to eat before. Let's take advantage of that for your first fasting day. So keep yourself busy to keep your mind off of food. So hopefully this is the first of many powerful and effective fasts for you in your future. But what if you're still really struggling? If you've done all five of these steps and you're still really struggling, what do you do? So step six is to use crutches if needed. I never tell people to, but I certainly allow it, right? You can skip this step if your ADF is in cruise control. I don't do any of this anymore, but I used a lot of crutches in the beginning. Most of you know my story. But I don't see any problem with adding a few fasting crutches if they help you stick to your fasts long enough to get used to them. I've worked with dozens of people who have told me that they would have given up on alternate-day fasting if it weren't for little things like sugar-free gum, a splash of cream in their coffee, or some broth when they were about to throw in the towel. That was me in the beginning, right? A warm cup of broth, a piece of sugar-free gum. They kept me fasting on days when I felt like giving up and I still made amazing progress. That's what we're looking for. We're looking for progress, not perfection. If you have to choose between a piece of sugar-free gum and a large pizza because you gave up on your fast, then choose the sugar-free gum or the bone broth or whatever it is. So clean fasting may matter. Absolutely. I've been clean fasting for months and months now. If you can do it, it's a smart move. But sustainable fasting matters a lot more. I am not the fasting police. My goal is to help you work towards the ADF plan that will work best for you. And if it involves some crutches occasionally, to keep you fasting, then I'm all for it. But keep in mind, what works well for one person can be a terrible idea for someone else, right? Don't add anything to your fasting window if it increases your hunger or makes you feel worse. If something helps, then use it as long as you need to. Skip it if it doesn't. All right, so there you have it. How to ease into fasting. Start slow, start smart, and take every easy victory you can get. But give it time. Don't forget who won the race between the tortoise and the hare. You need to focus on the next 24 months, more than the next 24 hours, if you want to see long-term results. So this is as far as some people need to go. Some people make amazing progress by only focusing on when they eat. But a fasting is still difficult for you after this process, or you want to see even better results. It's time to focus on what you are eating as well. That's what I'll be covering in the next few videos. I hope this one helped. Have a wonderful day. Be blessed.