The Weekday Fast plan is NOT a diet – diet’s don’t work. “Diets” mean you are eating things you might not like, while abstaining from foods you love, day after day. This sort of drudgery will never be a long term solution, because people simply do not stick to diets. And as soon as you go off your “diet”, any lost weight quickly comes back on.
In contrast, this is a LIFESTYLE change; I will follow this plan for the rest of my life, because it is “SEHR”.
For any plan to work it has to be SEHR – Sustainable, Easy, Healthy, & Rewarding.
A plan must be sustainable, or you can simply not do it long term. If you do stick with it long enough to lose weight, once you go off the diet you’ll gain it back. Therefore any long term lifestyle change has to be enjoyable long term, or at least require a relatively small amount of “less enjoyable time” to make up for the benefits. As an example, a vigorous workout may be hard in the moment, but after you are done, you feel great and a sense of accomplishment. Their are times on the Weekday Fast plan when you may have to abstain from a desired treat for a brief time, but the resulting outcome (good health and weight loss) will make it more than worth it.
A plan must be easy, or most people simply won’t stick with it. Our lives are busy – full of work, school, family, and extracurricular obligations. The next time a busy day comes along and you are running low on time, your complicated diet will be the first thing to go by the wayside. But on the Weekday Fast plan, you plan your day and week to make it easy — in fact you will spend less time and money than you do now.
A plan must be healthy, because your body is your one and only vehicle to transport you through this life. You have to take care of it, and that means making healthy choices and not doing anything that is harmful. There are plenty of unhealthy ways to lose a lot of weight, but if you damage yourself physically or deprive your body nutritionally in the process, you are not making a good decision towards your longevity. A healthy body will naturally return to it’s ideal, healthy weight. Our number one focus on this plan is getting healthy, the weight loss is a “happy side effect.”
A plan must be rewarding, or you will lost the motivation to continue with your new lifestyle. Tony Robbins famously pointed out that humans make choices for one of two reasons – to seek pleasure or avoid pain. If you are on a diet that requires you to eat foods you dislike or avoid foods you love, you are not going to be motivated to continue it long term. On the Weekday Fast plan, you get to eat the stuff you love, you don’t have to eat anything you don’t want to, and you will feel great and experience steady weight loss.
This plan is SUSTAINABLE because unlike other diets that ask you to change your eating habits for days upon end and probably forever, you only have to modify your behavior radically on two days a week. These will be your Fast 5/2 days which we’ll get to below. (Later on maintenance mode you will drop back to one day a week.) How many diets have you started with tons of enthusiasm and motivation, only to bail out of after a few days because it’s the same boring thing day after day and you miss your favorite foods? That’s not how it works on the Weekday Fast plan! Only on your two Fast 5/2 days per week do you have to abstain from eating whatever you want, but “There is always tomorrow”. Once you see that you are making steady progress, it’s easy to tell yourself “I choose not to eat ____ today, but I can have it tomorrow! (And the next day, and perhaps the next day….). Therefore, you do not have to give up any foods you love! Steak, pizza, chips or chocolate or ice cream, you can have it. You just have to make sure that you are eating reasonable amounts, at the right times, and that you are eating plenty of other healthy food too. (This is the “Live Your Life” part.)
I believe this is one of the greatest features of the Weekday Fast plan, and one of the most important reasons it is sustainable. You DO NOT have to adhere to the same boring routine and food choices day after day. Just as in real life, you have “work days” and “days off”. It’s called a “plan” because you have to plan. But once you develop a new habit to plan your day and your week it will become second nature, and that will be your natural way to eat. And once you realize that YOU are in control of your food choices and by following this plan, you CAN lose and maintain weight while simultaneously improving your overall health and reducing your chances of developing Cancer, heart disease, Alzheimers, the list goes on. You will enjoy a sense of peace about your body and weight that you may not have ever enjoyed before. That has certainly been the case for me!
This plan is EASY because…well because it’s NOT COMPLICATED. The guidelines are simple and you can start tomorrow. There are no special foods, powders, pills, or elixirs. There are no weekly meetings, monthly costs or time consuming and exhausting exercise routines. You simply change when you eat, and how much you eat a couple days a week. All you have to do is plan ahead for your week, execute your plan, and track your progress.
This plan is HEALTHY because Intermittent Fasting is healthy. In fact, that is the real reason to do it! Weight loss is just a “Happy Side Effect” of the Weekday Fast plan. As your body gets healthier and you reduce the amount of food you are making it digest to correct, healthy levels, your body naturally returns to it’s correct, healthy weight.
This diet is REWARDING because you will feel great as you get healthier and lose weight. You will not lose a radical amount of weight in a short period of time, but you will make slow, steady, measurable progress every week. Further, you will FEEL GREAT. After adopting the Weekday Fast plan, I feel better, sleep better, get up earlier and have more energy than I have had in many years. While I am fasting during the morning hours, I have a mental clarity that I have not experienced in years.
You Don’t Lose Weight to Get Healthy – You Get Healthy to Lose Weight! This concept here is really the revelation that changed everything for me. Once you understand this, you will have all the motivation you need to go on and stay with the Weekday Fast plan. In fact, it inspired me to create this document to share with all of you – because I realized exactly how powerful this idea this is. What follows is a very high level and general description, but for more information you can and should read the FastLife book by Dr. Michael Mosley.
Your body’s natural, healthy state is to be at a healthy weight. If you are carrying extra pounds, it is a SYMPTOM of the fact that you are not as healthy as you could be. There are other symptoms too – Cancer, diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, skin conditions, chronic headaches, digestive issues and many more. However your body has the natural ability to take care of itself if we will only allow it to do so. Unfortunately, western medicine tries to treat the symptoms of all of these conditions and diseases without addressing the true cause of the issues.
Very generally speaking, your body is in one of two modes at any given time – “Digest & Store Fat” mode or “Repair & Restore” mode. In order for your body to work, it must have energy. Therefore it must spend part of it’s time digesting and processing the food we give it to get that energy. When you eat, your insulin goes up, and this triggers your body to into Digest & Store Fat mode. Once it is in that mode, it is busy digesting food and storing fat, and does not do much else. So if you have an infection or skin rash or perhaps something more menacing like some Cancer cells, your body is too busy digesting food and storing fat to deal with healing your skin, or fighting the Cancer.
There are only 24 hours in a day. Think of it this way – Digest & Store Fat mode is like being at work. Repair & Restore mode is like being at home. If you only work eight hours a day, you have plenty of time to work around your house & yard, so you can keep it in good repair and looking great! But if you work all the time, come home exhausted and go straight to bed then go right back to work, you don’t have the necessary time to tend to things around the house. Soon it falls into disrepair, the paint starts to fade, the grass gets long and overgrown…if you’re not careful the city might put a notice on your door telling you to clean up your act or they’ll condemn your house! Perhaps you’ve heard the old saying “On their death bed, nobody ever wishes they’d spent more time at the office.”
By focusing on getting our body to spend more of the day in Repair & Restore mode mode, we are empowering the body to naturally get healthy. And, as a “Happy Side Effect”, you will gradually return to your ideal, healthy weight. This is why I will be on this plan for the rest of my life – because I want it to be as long of a life as possible and I know I need to take care of my body! Focus on your good health, and a healthy weight will naturally follow.
Cheers,
Markus