Before Adventures In Fasting was born, there was Motivational Fasting. This episode is from that era, hence the different name. .................................................. Get your free video course I first tried intermittent fasting (IF) in 2018 during a month off work. I loved how it reduced my mobility issues, but felt at the time that it would be difficult in my usual working life. It lay forgotten for three years, an interesting - but ultimately unsustainable - experiment. Fast forward to spring 2021. I had just been through a year of increasingly compulsive eating, a not-very-fabulous COVID coping mechanism. This was aggravated by the fact that I was a binge eating coach with a popular podcast, The Eating Coach. Those 200,000 plus downloads felt like a big lie. I got to this day in February 2021 where I simultaneously admitted my compulsion to myself (as well as my audience) AND made a decision that something had to change. I had to do something different. I decided to try IF again. My First Day Intermittent Fasting I remember the fear I had beforehand: the terror of being hungry. I gave myself a get out clause: if it is too terrible, I can just eat. But a strange and rather marvelous thing happened: about four hours in, I noticed I was hungry, but it was a new kind of hunger. Flat, abstract. A hunger that I had absolutely zero interest in. I had never felt like that in my entire (almost 50 years) life. In this episode, I talk about Turning Food Compulsion on Its Head This was an inversion of how binge eating urges operate. When you are compulsive, you are not hungry - but your urge to eat is overwhelming. But here I was, hungry but with no interest in eating whatsoever.   The Progression From Intermittent To 24 To 36 Hour Fasts and Beyond This inner game, this low-commitment experiment, this careful navigating of my fear of hunger - thus set me in a trajectory for falling in love with fasting. In March, I did my first 24 hour fast. I have gone on to longer fasts of up to 100 hours (just over 4 days).   Turning Fasting Into An Inner Gym Membership I realised pretty quickly that fasting is a skill. It is a skill to tolerate hunger until it recedes – a skill you can develop.   Results So Far Huge improvement in mobility Big reduction in my food compulsion Looser clothes Improved cognitive function Improved wellbeing     Harriet Morris Info {at} theshiftinside.com