Ep. 136 - What is Fast Cycling? | Successful Weight Loss, Health Regain, Diabetes Reversal and so much more | Free Intermittent Fasting Plan for OMAD

In this episode, Dr. Scott and Tommy discuss Fast Cycling. Fast cycling can be defined as the repetition of varied fasting windows and how they lead to a successful fasting lifestyle. 

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Fasting For Life Ep. 136 Transcript

[Dr. Scott Watier]
Hello. I'm Dr. Scott Dr. Watier.

[Tommy Welling]
And I'm Tommy Welling. And you're listening to the Fasting for Life podcast.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
This podcast is about using fasting as a tool to regain your health, achieve ultimate wellness, and live the life you truly deserve.

[Tommy Welling]
Each episode is a short conversation on a single topic with immediate, actionable steps. We cover everything from fat loss and health and wellness to the science of lifestyle design.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
We started fasting for life because of how fasting has transformed our lives, and we hope to share the tools that we have learned along the way. Hey everyone, welcome to the Fasting for Life podcast. My name is Dr. Scott Water and I'm here as always, and my good friend and colleague, Tommy Welling. Good afternoon to you, sir.

[Tommy Welling]
Hey, Scott. How are you.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
Doing? Fantastic, my friend. Excited for today's episode. Shout out to all of you listeners. Thank you so much for your comments, your encouragement, your reviews. We just want to welcome all of the new listeners in specifically, if you're new to the Fasting for Life family and you are coming to fasting to lose weight, improve your quality of life, get control of your health, you are absolutely in the right place.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
And also a shout out to the OGs, the fasting for life. Sam, you've been on this journey with us. We're super appreciative of you as well, coming here for some fasting insights and some fasting conversation. So Tommy, they want to learn more about our stories. They can head back to the first couple of episodes. If you've listened to all the episodes, we are going to continue to pump these out once a week.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
We talk about increasing that, but then the time in the research and we just haven't gotten there yet, but we promise that up until this point we have not missed a week and we're going to continue to deliver these episodes to you weekly. I know for me, sometimes I get lost in the Rolodex now, right? Yeah. Of episodes.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
And I'm like, wait, do we talk about this? All right, let me go.

[Tommy Welling]
So we talked about this. Yeah, yeah. We should talk about things.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
We need to talk about this. So if there's any topics that we have not talked about, if you've binge the episodes and you've gone through them all and now you're going back and listening to some again as as I have actually. Yeah. Which is weird. Listening to us the sound of my own voice. But if there's anything out there that you guys want us to talk about, an article you come across or a conversation, please feel free to send us a message.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
Info at the fasting for life dot com info at the fasting for life dot com and write on me. So today's conversation is not going to be a research nerdy type convo. It is going to be more 30,000 foot. It is going to be more around the concept of the fasting lifestyle and the concept part of what we call fast cycling.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
So the two part equation, the left hand versus the right hand, the black versus the white, the opposites, the two things that you need and you have a success. A yin yang, a successful weight loss health regain diabetes reversal fasting lifestyle long term sustainability result driven approach to weight loss and health. You need to have these two things together.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
You need to have your fasting and you need to have your feeding. I don't like using the term feasting, but feast and famine. It's right. It's an age old kind of yin and yang, right? Yep. Periods of feasts, periods of famine. And we want to cycle through these different fasting windows and making sure that we are not undermining the time when we are not consuming calories and insulin is low and then we're not overdoing it during our feeding or feasting windows, because then you're you're really undoing some of the work and the effort and energy that you put into the fasting.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
So these two things go hand in hand. So 30,000 foot view, we're going to unpack what fast cycling is and just give you some things to think about in terms of health benefits, weight loss, etc., of why fasting as we feel fasting can be the solution for so many that have been struggling to lose the weight and get healthy.

[Tommy Welling]
Yeah, even that idea that you just mentioned of cycling through can be one of those limiting thoughts. You know, for a lot of folks, especially if you've been on the diet yo yo diet roller coaster for a long time, it can be hard to imagine myself cycling through anything when I just feel like, Oh, I just need to do more.

[Tommy Welling]
I just need more fasting, right? I just need to move the needle faster. I feel like I've lost out on a lot of time or I'm not where I wanted to be for the year as far as my weight loss goals are yet, I just feel like I need to do more. But actually taking a look at it and going through a cyclical, more of a cyclical nature to it can actually have really good physiological and psychological reasons behind it, right?

[Dr. Scott Watier]
Yeah. We get the question like, okay, well, when do I fast how long should I fast? What should I eat? Right. Like all of those questions. How long shy eating questions? Yeah. Is it a window or is it a meal? How am I going to get all my calories in? What about my macros like you can just or do I have to eat keto?

[Dr. Scott Watier]
Do I have to insert, you know, low carbohydrate, whatever. Right. Cool thing about fasting is that it has so many other benefits and can adapt and be applied to however you envision your sustainable weight loss journey to be. And we've talked over and over on this podcast and very specific episodes and very specific research articles about, you know, the 12% of people that are metabolically healthy and the 5% of people that actually sustain the weight loss.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
Right. For more than two years, which is like, you know, the metric. It's like 5% of people, 95% of people fail, 5% of people succeed on keeping the weight off. If that's the whole goal, why are we even trying like, holy moly, after so many failed attempts for so many of us? And I say us because that was our journey as well.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
Tommy For sure. It's kind of like, Well, is this going to work? But fasting, I mean, physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually fasting has so many additional benefits. And I just want to list some out here and then we'll get into some more of the nuance of the conversation, you know, stimulating fat burning, improving energy levels, reducing inflammation, giving the digestive system a break, stimulating cellular autophagy, or that regenerative process, improving genetic repair mechanisms, stem cell stimulation, especially in the gut at 24 hours, brain drive nootropic factor, which is that euphoric lifting of the brain fog, increasing or improving insulin sensitivity, which is what we want.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
Insulin to do. We want it to be more effective at processing the energy and the sugar and the glucose in our body, reducing the risk of chronic disease. Improving your relationship with food, dare I say? Right. There's fasting and feeding, right? They go hand in hand, enhancing your mental health. There's just so many things with fasting, additional benefits, right.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
But if you can't seem to get the cyclic nature or the rhythm of fasting, it kind of almost could feel like you're doing that whole start stop thing.

[Tommy Welling]
And that gets super frustrating. And, you know, like some of the the weight gain problems that we have and then the blood work imbalance and all of these, you know, co-morbidities that we're faced with as a nation and as a world now are stemming from the fact that we have so many feeding opportunities that then become feasting opportunities.

[Tommy Welling]
Right. It just be.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
If snack monster, the convenience monster, we can literally get shipped to our door any time, within.

[Tommy Welling]
Minutes.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
Minutes before you at least had to make the decision to put on the sweatpants. Put on the slippers. Right. Late night snack attack. Go to the gas station, the convenience store, and actually make the purchase. Now it's like, Oh, I want a snack attack. Beep, beep, boop, boop. Oh, here we go. Done thing. It's arrived.

[Tommy Welling]
It's crazy easy.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
It's how convenient it can be. But the important.

[Tommy Welling]
Thing things to.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Non satiating calorically dense ultra processed which we know leads to weight loss issues and hormone imbalances and cravings and all those different types of things. But the feasting or feeding portion of fasting is just as important.

[Tommy Welling]
Yeah.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
As the fasting portion. We need to be stimulating the opposite pathway. We need to be stimulating the mTOR pathway in the insulin pathways to be able to produce energy on a regular basis for our bodies. And not just being in a, in 800 to 1000 calorie deficit. Yeah. For 20 years that's going to tank our thyroid and our sex hormone balance and our hormones and our energy and, and all of these different types of things.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
There needs to be that balance where we have the ability for our body to get nutrient dense foods, to get fed, to grow, rebuild and reproduce the healthy cells that we need. So it's that balance or that cycling that we talk about that's really important.

[Tommy Welling]
Yeah. You know, and like years and years of dieting like that and calorie restricting and calorie counting. I remember being almost like hesitant, almost afraid to like, put more food on my plate, you know, because you get used to the smaller portion sizes over such a long period of time. And it's like, I don't know, I know that has another two or 300 calories in it.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
I used to call them Smells like snack meals. There were meals, there were small meals, meals, slight smells. There were small little like snack meals. Meals like this is in a meal. Like I'm just going to have just enough food to satiate me for a little bit and then I'm going to have to, like, be ravenous again in a couple of hours and I'm going to need a protein bar or another chicken breast or another thing, a chicken and broccoli.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
Like now like this meals just don't cut it.

[Tommy Welling]
Or 400 calories per meal. Yeah. Good luck.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
Oh, and you. £260 and you get £170 of lean muscle. Yeah, that is. No. Even if it was 2800 calories a day which at one point I was on with the macros zooming out here, you don't have to do that. I'm going to give you some things here on the click nature of it. Like it's still like, okay, maybe it's not a meal, but it's, you know, 2100 break it down in a 500 calorie, you know, eating opportunities like those are a little six of them.

[Tommy Welling]
Yeah. You got five or six of them. But here's the other thing. Those were spiking your insulin every single time. You did it all throughout the day, three, four or five, six times a day. However you slice it up, the insulin was spiking every single time. Regardless of the calorie restriction, it wasn't going to be effective at moving the needle.

[Tommy Welling]
So we have to understand that there needs to be boundaries between when we're fasting and when we're actually feeding or eating. If you use that term feasting, you probably want to just drop that out of your vocabulary, especially if you're on a weight loss or fat loss journey here because it doesn't induce good visual representations in our mind when we think about that.

[Tommy Welling]
Like, I don't need to be feasting, I already feasted, but I need to be doing is eating to satiety nutritionally and then I need to be setting my fasting timer, right? I need to be doing this.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
Yeah. And that's one of those things I was like, Oh, do exactly what I do. What we cycle between hours, you know, intermittent windows of 16 hours of fasting all the way up to 48, sometimes 72 hours of fasting. Sure. Right. If you've got a lot of weight to lose and you're metabolically imbalanced and you've got blood sugar related conditions or blood panels that are off like you're going to need to be doing some some shorter to moderate extended fasting.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
We're not talking multiday multi wheat things here. Right? Like, sure, two, two and a half, maybe three day fast. You're going to be needing to doing them a little bit more frequently. But if you are on the weight loss journey, 20 to £30 to lose, people say, well, what do I do? Well, there's a ton of different strategies out there.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
There's ADF, modified ADF, there's fast mimicking, there's the 511 strategy, there's the warrior fast. But one meal a day is the team adds, okay, now listen, you're going to have to try some of this stuff out because the benefit here is, is that when you intermittent fast, when you eat sufficient calories during your nutrition, we like to call it a nutritional eating window.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
Yeah, right. That is going to improve hormone sensitivity. It's going to support your thyroid, it's going to improve your insulin's effectiveness. It's going to support your adrenal glands. It's going to improve your sex hormone balance. So all of your testosterone estrogens, all of your hormones, you're going to need to kind of play around with those windows and how frequently you're going to do the one meal a days and maybe a two or three day fast a couple of times a month to see how your body responds.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
The good news is, is that fasting is tried and true and it immediately puts you in a calorie deficit, drops your insulin, and allows you to tap into those fat burning stores more quickly than it would on a low calorie or a low and slow eat less, move more type of approach.

[Tommy Welling]
What about if you grew up like in the seventies, eighties, nineties and you remember all of the low fat craze, too, right? You put a calorie restriction in with fat restriction, too. You just talked about balancing out your sex hormones, but those two things together wreak havoc versus the balance that we can induce back whenever we're having deliberate lines between our feasting, our fasting and our eating.

[Tommy Welling]
And we're bringing in those nutrient dense foods when we are eating. And I think just having clear lines in the sand between, you know, like if you're fasting, you're fasting, draw the line there, make the decision. So the insulin can actually come down, right and stop looking for all the the hacks and the things that I can put in.

[Tommy Welling]
How can I be fasting? But I'm not really fasting, you know, like most of those things are just slowing down the process frustrating and then like throwing a wrench in the whole operation really.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
Rather than doing a 24 hour fast and having a bunch of little 50 to 100 calorie, you know, mess ups here and there, the grazing the food is grazing, right?

[Tommy Welling]
Oh, yeah.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
Instead of doing that and struggling, how about back down your fasting timer to a time that you know you can consistently hit until you get it down? So if it's 16 hours before the hangry, the headache, the fatigue or whatever hits, then you do that for a while until your body balances. The cool thing about fasting, though, compared to the prolonged calorie restriction, right, because you alluded to this as well, we want to increase not just decrease the insulin load or the amount of insulin that's required to process the food.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
But we want to increase the sensitivity side, right? Yeah. So that comes back to insulin's relationship to your thyroid and how it's going to help convert inactive one of your thyroid hormones into an active thyroid hormone and eventually help balance the thyroid and not just deplete it to a place where now you're needing to think about medications. And once you get on the medication, it's not very times that I hear from the thousands of consoles in private practice over the years of men and women coming back and saying, Yeah, once I get on that thyroid medication, I was able to lose the weight right?

[Dr. Scott Watier]
It's like, Well, how long do I got to be on this while you lose the weight? Well, you just made it more difficult. So the thyroid in itself is powerful that when you're using this beast, this fast feeding type cyclical nature, you're going to help balance out those things, increase the effectiveness and the conversion of your thyroid hormones into an active thyroid from T four to T three.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
Yeah. Which then is going to stimulate cellular metabolism and increase your metabolism and increase your body's ability to burn and actually lose weight. So it's it's counterintuitive because you think it's like, oh, well, am I going to be damaging this mythical metabolism? No, you're actually as long as you are consuming good for the most part, not 100% perfection.

[Dr. Scott Watier]

[Tommy Welling]
What about when you first jump onto the fasting train? Like, think back like, okay, I've been slowly or maybe quickly gaining weight for the last few weeks or, you know, maybe this has been going on for years or decades and then all of a sudden, like, I'm putting in some deliberate fasting, but I haven't fixed my relationship with food or I haven't figured out how to make better food choices.

[Tommy Welling]
That can be a real kind of frustrating back and forth to that. I feel like if you don't use good clean boundaries for fasting, even if it's with quote unquote like short or fast, that can make for a real frustrating time because you try to do long, fast and break it with like highly indulgent, processed foods. It's going to make it harder, right?

[Tommy Welling]
Like to consistently show up and keep going with these cyclical nature of these fast. Right.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
And this is where we hear a lot of sometimes it's like I just can't close my window. Okay. Well, yeah, hydration. Hugely important. Protein content, hugely important. Fat content, hugely important. Stress sleep, hugely important. We don't want to put more stress on our adrenals and lead to the adrenal fatigue syndrome and higher levels of cortisol which mimics insulin resistance.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
So does stress and so to sleep, right? Yeah. We want to be moving in the opposite direction towards balance. Right. And all of those other benefits that we mentioned starting off. So yeah, if you're in your air quotes feasting window, right, you're feeding nutrition window, you don't have to overanalyze it and hyper analyze it into like specific know like I'm going to weigh this and I'm going to do this and that's just not sustainable or the results don't follow in most people's experiences with especially if you have weight loss resistance or insulin resistance or metabolic things like diabetes or blood sugar related issues.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
So really just to keep it simple is just make intentional choices to eat more protein, get good quality, nutrient dense foods, vegetables, things that grow from the ground rather than the process, refined stuff. And then be mindful of your sugar that you're drinking, that's in the sauces and that's in your carbohydrate intake and really just.

[Tommy Welling]
Making.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
Yeah. Those few changes and being intentional, continually cycling through those fasting windows of 16 to 18 hours all the way up to 30, 36, 48. Periodically you should be able to see or like I said earlier, feel the changes first and then you'll start to see them as well.

[Tommy Welling]
Yeah. And I think as you start to feel a little bit better, then it becomes, like you said earlier, it becomes more motivating to set your next fasting timer to rinse and repeat, right, to do it again. So that you can continue to see the needle moving over time.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
Like if you just had to rat a tat tat a few things to get fast cycling right into your day to day life, right? If you want to start practicing the cyclic nature because this is what we teach inside the groups in coaching and everything is just repetitive change like this weekly schedule, there's a fasting schedule. If you hit 80% of your targets, you're going to have some good feeding times and good fasting time.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
You know this specifically for fat loss, you're going to able to tap into the ketone production and becoming a fat burner versus a sugar burner. Certain things would be like move more towards the keto type lifestyle, so decrease your carbs, increase your protein and fat and avoid the snacks like we talked about, right? Yeah. Develop your fasting muscle just like your discipline, your willpower muscle or your power muscle.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
Right. That we talked about in the willpower versus discipline episode like kids fasting, the muscle, get used to it, make sure you're hitting the times you can and if you're binging through your window or feasting too much, then you've got to make some changes. And typically then I would go to hydration, maybe start walking. We just did an episode on the incredible effects of walking stress and sleep, giving your digestive track a break.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
So making some better food choices when you do break your fast and then making sure that you are getting satiating foods that you enjoy because that's going to make the process that much more fun. We don't want to die.

[Tommy Welling]
It die.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
Nobody wants to die. Yet 50% of the population is 60% of the population at any given time is trying to lose weight very unsuccessfully, if you look at the statistics long term wise. So some things to think about.

[Tommy Welling]
Yeah, we'd rather live life with style, right? Think about your lifestyle rather than your diet. So I think that these are like really, really cool, actionable things. You mentioned hydration a couple of times there. That's a big one because a lot of times if we're not living a fasting lifestyle, we're not used to it yet. We may not be used to getting proper hydration because we're just kind of winging it around.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
I love when we get the question, Hey, can I count my coffee or my tea? Yeah, has water. And I was like, Well, you can. Yes, right. But you shouldn't be.

[Tommy Welling]
Afraid of water.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
Or you get 75 to 90 ounces of water and make sure you're adding sea salt and Himalayan salt like, just do it. Oh, my dad or water. Well, now with that attitude you can run, but you are 70 to 75% water. It's kind of important. I'm not saying you have to drink two gallons a day, but can we at least hit like more than a bottle?

[Dr. Scott Watier]
Can we just start just simply increasing your hydration will help you lose weight.

[Tommy Welling]
Yeah, because here's the thing. Like our foods that we're bringing in, they have water, they have moisture, they have, you know, watermelon.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
Right? Yeah. Man. Third child. I don't know what it is, but the dad jokes or.

[Tommy Welling]
Just jokes just not.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
So terrible. I was like, What are you doing? I'm like, I haven't slept. Okay.

[Tommy Welling]
I can't turn it off.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
Yeah, I don't remember what my one was earlier in this episode, but I was like.

[Tommy Welling]
Oh, man.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
Apologies, everybody. Carry on, sir.

[Tommy Welling]
Carry out an apology in the show notes. Like just bringing in the proper the proper hydration is such an important piece of the puzzle. It's different versus when we're bringing in food all throughout the day. But it literally can be one of those things that can hold us back and can make it more uncomfortable and can keep us from enjoying the process to almost discourage us from these kind of fast cycles.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
If you're starting these fast cycling and using different, varied windows and you definitely need to focus on your hydration and your electrolytes, it's going to make the transition a lot smoother. It we call it an optimizer. It's a simple thing you can do. The other thing that we hear sometimes is in the eating window, like I've been doing fasting and now I went to have this meal and I'm really not that hungry.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
Yeah, right. That's showing that your body is changing. Okay, so give it some time. Don't force the food in your eating window, eat till you're satiated and let your body start balancing out those hunger cues and hunger hormones. Yeah, the other one thing I'll say is, you know, signs of potentially overeating during your window. So if we're under fasting and over consuming or over fasting and under consuming, it's not the right balance.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
So some signs of overeating could be bloating, some indigestion, some nausea after meals, or like a significant post-lunch nap attack, like significant fatigue after meals, mental fatigue or brain fog after meals. And then obviously if the scale is ticking upwards and you're over consuming and yeah, I will say this for women, don't expect the scale. As you know, to go up pre menses pre cycle.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
Right. So yeah, the week leading up to it, your cravings are going to be a little bit stronger. You're going to need some more healthy carbohydrates. But just know that if you stick with it and you compare the start of one cycle this month of the start of a cycle next month. Yeah, you should see some changes between those numbers and between those starting points in those ending points.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
So just big picture stuff in terms of the overeating side of it, but also like this cyclical kind of concept of how we want to start looking at this long term.

[Tommy Welling]
Yeah, that's a great point because I think this whole conversation around the different phases to the cycles that are going to be effective and like how to implement fasting and, and how this can lead to actual meaningful lifestyle changes versus just feeling like I'm on a diet, I'm on or off. It works a little bit sometimes. Maybe if I do everything right, but it's still a diet.

[Tommy Welling]
You know, when we go into it with a couple of key things in mind, like we've discussed on today's episode, what we're able to do is see how that it's not going to be perfect. There's no straight smooth line to success or to a finish line, quote unquote. But this is a lifestyle, so there is no finish line.

[Tommy Welling]
It's a matter of finding the ways to adapt it that work for you. And so knowing that it's not going to be a smooth line gives you some resilience in the process so that even when things aren't going just quite as planned, you know that you're on the right track, you know, you can tweak a few things and then you can keep going and find the ways to tweak those things and make it work for you.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
The last thing I want to mention, Tom, as we kind of continue to like unpack the big picture here, the fast cycling in the cyclical nature is possible signs of underwriting. So we talked about the overeating. But if you're under consuming, you might just have like hunger and cravings just a few hours after you eat or they're just kind of ongoing.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
Like you don't typically wake up hungry and all of a sudden you're hungry every morning or your weight drops dramatically, quickly, and like the cravings are just, like, crazy. Or maybe you get tired a few hours after, right? Fatigue and brain fog, a few hours after you eat. So not like right after, right. Like you're over consuming, but it's the opposite.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
It's a few hours after, right? That's a sign that you might be under consuming. And then when you eat, you immediately get like a big burst of energy. Like that's showing that there's an imbalance there as well. So some things you can do is just make sure, like we said, make sure you're making nutrient dense, healthy choices. Not all the time.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
Enjoy some foods, too, right? We're not. Oh, missionary restrictions free. Long term success. People like we can't preach long term restriction in our mission for sustainability for most. Right. Pay attention to your portion sizes. Listen to your body's cues. Try not to eat in front of the TV, right? Eat mindfully and make sure that it's like, you know, if you're eating with the family and you've chosen your one meal a day to be that meal, be intentional, sit down.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
Unlike what I do is buzz around the kitchen and eat standing up. Right, sit down and like make sure you're intentional with that meal. And then obviously we always love tracking. So start to journal some of these things that we talk about how you feel during the process and it should give you some really good insight in just a couple of weeks and kind of how your body's responding to fasting.

[Tommy Welling]
Yeah, that reflection portion, you can almost substitute that for like the old calorie and macro tracking everything. If you're used to doing that and you feel like you need to track something, track how you're actually responding to your fast and then to how you break your fast and how you feel afterwards. Because that's really going to give you some levels of insight for how to tweak and how to kind of optimize it going forward.

[Tommy Welling]
And I think that that's really good advice right there.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
As we wrap up today's episode, Tommy, is that one of the things that we've noticed is missing on this weight loss and fasting journey is support and you get your questions answered in real time. Yeah, when we started this podcast, it was like you were helping me. You had your coaches, you were reading doctor phone stuff. We started digesting some of the research.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
We started putting it in and getting results and helping other people because they kept asking us, Yeah, and it's been an incredible journey. But we also realize that there was a gap. So we created the Fasting for Life Community on Facebook. You guys come to the group, it's a free community group. All you get to do is click the link in the show notes come on in.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
And this week that this podcast episode drops, we're going to be talking about different fasting windows. Come get your questions answered, share your favorite fasting schedule or your favorite thing that you've realized. Or maybe you had an aha! Of like, wow, whoa. Okay. If I am having all these cravings, maybe I am under eating or maybe I am over fasting, but come into the group, come join us on this journey, get your questions answered in real time.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
And I'm really excited about this week's topic, even though it's a little bit more abstract in terms of figuring out what's going to work for you these are like the key players and the key things you should be thinking about when you're building your ideal weight loss and your ideal sustainable weight loss and health journey or plan, so to speak.

[Tommy Welling]
Yeah, absolutely. I feel like when you first get started, especially there's so many questions and frustration points and, you know, just kind of unknowns, you know, it can feel so different from what you've done in the past. And I feel like as the confidence increases, then, so does the sustainability with it. And I feel like that's really the key there.

[Tommy Welling]
So not giving up before you've gone far enough to kind of figure some of this stuff out is really crucial part of the process.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
Right? Right. Absolutely. Regardless if you're new on your fasting journey, if you're an OG, you've been with us since the beginning or you've been listening for a while. We want to support you in the best way that we can come to the group, get your questions answered, join the community, and continue this fasting lifestyle on this fasting journey with us, Tommy.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
I'm super pumped about this week's topic and this week's episode. I appreciate the conversation as always. If you want more information about who we are and what we do, check out the first couple of episodes. You can head to our website WW W dot the fasting for life dot com the fasting for life icon Tommy as always man thanks so much.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
And we'll talk soon.

[Tommy Welling]
Thank you.

[Tommy Welling]
So you've heard today's episode and you may be wondering, where do I start? Head on over to the fasting for life icon and sign up for our newsletter where you'll receive fasting tips and strategies to maximize results and fit fasting into your day to day life.

[Dr. Scott Watier]
While you're there. Download your free fast start guide to get started today. Don't forget to subscribe on iTunes, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Make sure to leave us a five star review and we'll be back next week with another episode of Fasting for Life and.