Ep. 49 - Why diets fail, Willpower vs. Mindset and how to shift your thinking | Intermittent Fasting for Maintenance | Long-term Intermittent Fasting | Free OMAD Intermittent Fasting Plan

body composition diet goals maintenance willpower Dec 01, 2020

Maintenance | Willpower | Perspective

ANNOUNCEMENT! THANKS TO LISTENER FEEDBACK, WE'RE DOING ONE MORE CHALLENGE THIS YEAR 12/3 - 12/12! REGISTER HERE!

In this episode, Dr. Scott and Tommy dive deep into the struggle many people face when it comes to transitioning from a "diet" and into maintaining their healthy goal weight. The disconnect between how one reached their goal and the optimal techniques to maintain it can cause confusion, frustration, and oftentimes complete regression back to an unhealthy body composition. Willpower is a key component in this equation, and the mindset shift away from dieting and toward lifestyle design allows for freedom and proactive decisions that have staying power.

https://positivepsychology.com/psychology-of-willpower/

Have a question you'd like us to answer? Click here to send it to us or leave us a voicemail we can play on the show!

Fasting For Life Ep. 49 transcript powered by Sonix—easily convert your audio to text with Sonix.

Fasting For Life Ep. 49 was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the latest audio-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors. Sonix is the best audio automated transcription service in 2020. Our automated transcription algorithms works with many of the popular audio file formats.

Hello, I'm Dr. Scott Watier, and I'm Tommy Welling, and you're listening to the Fasting for Life podcast, and this podcast is about using fasting as a tool to regain your health, achieve ultimate wellness and live the life you truly deserve.

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

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 be Fasting for Life podcast. My name is Dr. Scott Watier. I am here, as always, with my good friend and colleague, Tommy Welling. Good afternoon to you, sir. Hey, Scott. How are you? Fantastic. We are going to talk ten day fasting ramp up challenge. We are going to talk about what it is that we actually do with fasting for life and hopefully bring some massive value today. I am fired up that December 3rd is right around the corner. Thanksgiving was fantastic. Feel good coming out of it. How about you?

Yeah, I feel great. It was a great Thanksgiving, used a lot of fasting actually around it and right back into it fast now, but enjoyed Thanksgiving for sure and pumped about the challenge coming up to.

Yeah, I love looking back last year before we started the podcast and thinking, OK, holidays are coming and I've been working hard for six months, you know, lost all the weight and I'm like, all right, what am I going to do? Oh, you know, what will this holiday season is a little bit more enjoyable when I'm not worried about making sure that my, you know, buttoned down black shirt that's very forgiving is clean or that, you know, I have a comfortable pair of jeans to wear to the holiday party or I need to get the suit coat out and make sure it still fits like. Right. It was a different, different holiday. And then this year was was much like last year where it was a lot more relaxed and felt good going into it. How to plan that a longer, fast going in enjoyed, didn't overdo, but enjoyed the holiday. And now we're we're gearing up to take a group of people through the ten day ramp up. And I am I'm really liking the fact that we added this to the to the calendar this year and didn't wait until, you know, the the holiday hangover wore off and, you know, end of January, beginning of February timeframe.

Yeah. Because that was the suggestion that a lot of people had a lot of people said, well, no, I'm going to think about that stuff again in January or February. And we were like, well, that's you know, you're you're so far down the rabbit hole, you have so much to undo at that point. You know, like the my least favorite part about the holidays in years past was actually making the Thanksgiving and the Christmas plans and then thinking about the family that I was going to be seeing, that I hadn't seen for a while. And actually dieting going into that, knowing that I was heavier than I than I had been earlier in the year. So I need to diet before I see people that I haven't seen in a while. But then fearing what I might eat and how much I might gain during the actual holidays and then what, January and February, we're going to look like it was like I already knew what the roller coaster track looked like in my mind. And and it was that is a really stressful time for me.

And the same, similarly, I agree, would happen with vacations, you know, we go on vacations and I'd prep and work so hard and then, you know, falling off track, not falling off track, but just literally enjoying myself on vacation, I would come back and I'd be so far off my my my long term low and slow goal that I would get discouraged. And I just didn't like the way that felt. So it's empowering to know everybody listening that, you know, yes, guys do care. We we do care. Like, this is stuff that bothers us, too, especially I know for me, being a dad, not being a good example for the kids and having the energy. And, you know, you tell your story about not needing naps anymore and just being able to get down on the floor with them and play with them. And, you know, we're talking, you know, mid to late 30s here. So we're not talking 60 year olds now. You know, that's how life should be, right? Right.

That's exactly how it should be. And, you know, when we went to the park, we did we did a big family friend gathering at the park the other day, and we were climbing around on monkey bars and just, you know, running around with dogs and kids. And just a few years back, that that wouldn't have it wouldn't have gone anything like that. It would have been sitting on the sidelines just kind of watching everyone, you know, play and have a good time. And it's just a completely different experience now.

And we're not talking a hundred pounds. We're talking forty to fifty pounds. That makes a huge difference. So good transition into what we're doing. So we call it the ten day fasting ramp up or the ten day challenge. And the word challenge can can almost be a little misleading as almost like an aggressive tone to it. Like we're going to challenge you. Like, come on, it's going to be hard. Like, I'm telling you, it is not that. So you and I had this realization just talking for the last few days where what it really is is like a live accountability group training. Yeah. And I don't even think the training is the right word because it's so much more than that. And I think that's why, you know, when we first started this process of delivering our story and our message and wanting to take on, you know, the massive undertaking of spreading the word of how to prevent diabetes and the insulin friendly lifestyle and getting the word out that you have a choice when it comes to your path, when it comes to weight and health and all these other different things. You know, what we realize is that really what we do is is much simpler than than what a lot of people think it is. And the live group training is ten days of us. It's ten days of the group. It's ten days of the ability to ask questions and get feedback and plan and learn how to pivot. And I want to before we kind of merge right into the topic that we're going to talk about for the episode today as well, which is, you know, the why diets fail and. The diet life balance and you know what you do when you get to maintenance, but there's so much more to unpack in this 10 days than what we can put on one registration page.

Right. And that's kind of the tricky part to work when we when we talk to a lot of listeners about what it is that they'd like to see in a in a challenge like this, what we keep hearing a few a few recurring things. One of them is community support. Like I want a place where other like minded individuals go and I can bounce ideas, you know, commiserate sometimes or bridge. You know, there's tough times for all of us, but but also just finding the support and the energy and the feedback there to kind of keep going and to pivot when necessary. And so that 10 days doesn't just end after the the challenge or the group training, it continues. That's lifetime access to the community. And some of the people in the community have been there for almost a year now, encouraging each other and and just growing and feeding off of each other's energy.

I was on a Facebook live this morning dropping a message into the group, gearing up for the challenge. And I saw a name pop up. She was one of our original challengers. Hmm. And I was like, hey, hey, hey. Yes, look at reengaging. Still has the support and is still there and doing great. So, yeah, you just you just hit it there, man. And in trying to summarize. And we've always said that we wanted this to be conversational, and that's why it's to send us emails and his messages and we do our best to get back as quickly as possible. And I'm sure there's been a few that we've missed over the last 11 months, 10 or 11 months. But the idea is that trying to instill what it is that we learned and we experienced that was so life changing and trajectory changing for us, the ten days is really more of like everything you need to learn on how to use fasting to do just that. And I know that sounds like a big like like Mike Mike dropped like here's all of this. Like in 10 days you're going to get all of it. The reality is it's it's simpler than you think. And it's it's tools. It's the psychology. It's the physiology. It's the ability to learn how to pivot. It's what intervals to use. And knowing that you have the confidence and support to be able to use those intervals within a fasting and like minded community where if you tell someone, you know, coming out of Thanksgiving that you're going too fast for 48 hours, somebody might be like, what would you eat on Thanksgiving? And they're like, oh, no, that's that's that's not why I'm doing it. Like, I didn't go crazy on Thanksgiving and I'm going to make myself suffer for 48 hours. Like this is part of my lifestyle. This is what helps me enjoy the holiday and then also know that I'm staying on track.

Yeah. And there's no regret involved. There's no there's no give back. There's no planning for the next few weeks to get ahead of the curve for Christmas. And then beyond that. And, you know, so and the power in the group training comes from when we when we have live daily sessions, we meet daily on that. And and it varies between training and Q&A. But the power of the conversation, like you said, keeping it conversational when you start understanding the science and the psychology and the physiology and then get to digest it and then come back and ask real world questions, OK, this has happened to me today. This is how my schedule looks this week. What about when X, Y, Z happens and we're bouncing these ideas and these these answers and suggestions and feedback? You you're you're learning from the whole rest of the group and all of their questions to like that's an exponential power that that's really kind of hard to to describe until you start to experience that.

And you said something that made me think, well, yeah, you're taking it. You're taking responsibility over it, your commanding and you're controlling it. We're the opposite this time of year, which you could do is just stick your head in the sand and be like now just going out, going dark for a little while. I'll think about this again, you know, in January or February.

And we're going to deliver some value here, too, in terms of discussing kind of how to unpack it and not just for the challenge. Like it's not just one big promo for the challenge. It was a realization and prepping for this challenge for this live ten days of live training. You know, that's what we do in what we're trying to do is simple. And there's a few underlying threads, again, when it comes to the tools, the psychology, the physiology and the intervals that makes it really tangible. So I want to make sure that. We don't just talk about the 10 day training the whole time because it was like it was cool, I mean, we could we have plenty of testimonials and excitement to just continue down that rabbit hole. I don't want to get buried in it, though. The like the diet life balance, you know, you know, the willpower. And then something that we get a lot is not everybody is looking for weight loss. It's really like, how do I use fasting to maintain. So which one do you want to start with? First time?

Um, you know, I feel like that maintenance piece.

Getting off of the diet roller coaster and then on to the maintenance, I feel like we get that a lot. Where?

Where people have a story about how they've they've gained and lost the same weight or they've they've received 20, 30 pounds Welling, right? Yeah. And then it was just it was like failure to engage in maintenance mode.

And so it ended up all coming back and a lot of times. And then some.

Yeah, and that's where a couple of things I've just been thinking about is. The diet life balance like and the fact that, like diets have a start and a finish to most people, like you're either on it or you're off it, you're on the wagon, off the wagon, you're either in the diet world or you're in the I'm just going to stick my head in the sand and live my life world or you're in the because being in the middle doesn't really work either. So that whole concept that diets have a start and start and finish, you know, a lot of the 30 day weight loss programs and 90 day, you know, fat to fit programs and all of the different things that are out there typically have a start and a finish. And what it comes down to is knowing how to find something that works for you, where the diet doesn't become your life. But as we say, you know, planning your life around fasting in the fasting lifestyle, insulin friendly lifestyle is where the power resides.

Yeah. And you know that it sounds like what I used to say about going to the gym, too, because as I've said before, I tried going to the gym heavily with my my eating habits and my calorie counting and trying to get the fat off.

And that was, you know, hey, how are your workouts going? Well, you know, it's OK. I haven't really been going to the gym lately.

I'm going to start back up or I missed I missed two this week, so, yeah, maybe I'll start back up next week or, you know, the first of the month or after my birthday or or whatever it is, you know, so you have these these on off hard stop cycles, but, you know, getting away from that and and on to something that's that's sustainable that you can maintain with and that you can use for a maintenance plan and health maintenance, that that's what we really want to drive home here. We spent a lot of time covering that in in the challenge. And that's why we wanted to go into some of that today to.

And.

One last thing I want to go into willpower to hear shortly, but one last thought on this, you know, on off thing, right? So. When we're looking at the end result, we have to have the end result in mind. So what does the end result look like for you? What does the end result look like for me? Well, it's going to be a little bit different. It's going to be around this concept of, you know, living life to the fullest, having energy, having focus, having a good sleep, having healthy relationships, having less stress, having ideal body fat percentage, having a certain level of strength right in the gym. If you're a lifter and having the endurance to be able to go to Disney with the family and not be the guy sitting on the bench eating a turkey leg. Right. Like, well, please enjoy the turkey leg, but you don't have to be the guy sitting down having the turkey. You get to choose to do that. And we usually when people get to maintenance is what happens is because they're not using fasting as a tool or they haven't used it long enough or they don't really know what to do with it. And then the old psychology and the things that come along going to define the world willpower here in a minute and then not understanding exactly what the physiology is and maybe thinking that like, oh, I'm slowing down my metabolism. I'm doing long term harm. Being able to know that when you lose that 20 pounds, you have the ability to stay there and maintain it like that's the whole point, like whatever that end result looks like, all of that stuff I just mentioned. Right. Like bits and pieces for different people, like we all have different motivating factors, like end result is to feel good, to look good, to have confidence, you know, like look good in the date night. Right. Like all of that stuff.

So how does it. Why, then, does it fail so often for so many people? Yeah, I feel like it's it's not really being discussed.

Whatever whatever method you're using to get to that maintenance point and for for a lot of us, it's it's a no on the scale. And once you get there, you may know you've hit that, but you don't necessarily have a plan to to actually maintain it. So if you were calorie counting, OK, what is your new calorie count need to be if you were using fasting intervals or you were doing Omayyad or something else?

Ok, well well now what if you don't want to continue to lose weight, then then what do you need to do now?

And the problem with that, I feel like, is a lot of people go back to their old habits at that point, right? They go back to doing the things that got them into the place they didn't want to be in in the first place. And I am one hundred percent speaking from experience, but I am the president, vice president and the board of this club. I know you're there with me were co presidents.

So like this is it. This was what we did. So it's it's looking at, you know, the almost like the schedule of how to use the intervals to your advantage. And it's really just coming from being able to do it consistently and kind of use the different variations and try some things and figure it out and and kind of tweak the process. So like, I was listening to someone that I follow on Instagram, he's a doc, a functional medicine doc in North Carolina, and he was talking about his fasting schedule.

Now I know him well and he was talking about how like Monday through Thursday, he does a 20 hour fast. So he eats in a four hour window from like two to six. And on Fridays he does six. Thursday to Friday, he does six to six, which is a twenty four hour window. There's a lot of benefit to the old man or the twenty four hour fasting cycle, which you and I love. And especially if people have done more of the six, eight, eight, six window, which is kind of the starting point for a lot of people when it comes to fasting. What I mean by window is, you know, when you're fasting.

You're not drinking anything other than coffee, tea and water, no sweetened beverages, no food, right? And then in the fasting, in the eating window, you can eat between like a two and a four or a 12 and an eight if you're doing more of an intermittent type. So he was due Monday through Thursday for our window.

Friday, Thursday to Friday would be a twenty four hour fast. So he would eat Friday night and then he does more of an intermittent like 12 to eight or eight to four. Right. Type window because it's family time. So it gives him more flexibility to be able to do the things on the weekends, which ties into one of the things that we hear so often, which is how do I keep motivation on the weekends? Well, the weekends are no damn different than any other day. They all end. And why? It's just that in our brain, we program them to be like, oh, I can chill, I can relax. I don't have to work. We'll know. It's figuring out how that fits. And I loved his approach and that's maintaining and working for him. For me, it's more of an nomad type thing with date nights and planning for holidays and celebrations and those types of stuff. So, you know, it's just that people I just don't know if there's enough. And this is why I love the live group trainings, because after ten days, you know how to make all of these pivots right.

And it's those pivots. It's there's little question marks that come up when you feel like you have the confidence to answer those questions for yourself. That's when you have the power to keep going for long term, to hit your goals and and then to maintain. But it's it's when you are, you know, kind of going at it alone without the confidence and the reassurance for those questions that pop up. That's when it becomes easy to say, well, I'm not sure if I'm making the right choice here and then kind of feel like you just fell off the wagon again. And then things kind of backslide. Right? Like, that's that's a pattern that we see sometimes. But but for for the functional medicine doc, that's his maintenance plan, correct? Correct. So, you know, that's the other thing that that we hear from a lot of people, too, is I've been doing intermittent fasting for three months, six months, a year or two. We get a lot of emails like that and it looks something like a like a six, eight type of schedule. But it's it's just not it's just not working for them. Well, if you think about it, this functional medicine doc does that seventy five percent of the time and that's his maintenance plan. So it's not really very surprising that the weight's not coming off when when that's your that's your tool. That's what you're using. So there's going to need to be more to it in order to actually get the weight off and then get to your maintenance point, which is one of the reasons why one of the questions we get which.

Oh, man, what are you guys indoors? Oh, man. Well, we oh, Matt is what worked for us. That's what worked for one of our biggest testimonials. Candice, who was lost eighty pounds up to this point, reversed her diabetes and she did. Omak shouldn't say only ohmy. But she did. Oh Matt. Every single day for a year. And that was that's all she did. Right now she's in a time period where she has more flexibility. But just what she loves, that her bloodwork looks great, her life looks great, and she feels and looks great. And she's like, you know what, I'm just going to stay here for a while. But, you know, with with the doc that I was talking about, yeah, he's doing more than an intermittent window and to maintain. So like people that are doing intermittent, if you're not getting the results, you can't keep doing that over and over and over and again and accept expecting that end result to change. Like, you probably need to push it a little bit. And that's where Matt comes into play or one meal a day, because it gives you that just a little bit of extra time in between meals, which allows your body to burn that little bit of extra fat. That adds up, you know, over the span of 30, 60, 90 days, you lose 50 pounds in 50 days or and that might seem obscene to some people. Right, because there's this thing out there of like, don't lose fat too fast. Right? Like, OK, well, let's get it off and then figure it out so you could do 60, 90 days of rapid fat loss. And then, of course, you're going to have to stop and reassess and, you know, let your body adapt. And there's all that those physiological things that take place like set points. And there's a psychological aspect which I want to talk about willpower. I keep mentioning it. We haven't gotten to yet, but it's coming. So I just love the idea that, OK, yeah, if you've done it and then and it's not working, then something's off and it's usually a timing or consumption problem.

Right. Or both. Yeah, true. Yeah. And again, that's what we spend a lot of time on that, especially at the beginning of the ten days because it's, it's so important and helps kind of that's why we call it the ramp up.

We're we're ramping up the process going from from a beginners state. But even if you've done plenty of fasting in the past, we still break it down so that. Anybody can start there and then you're still just building the pieces in the building blocks to to get to the top of the mountain.

And so for the fast start, guy, the mini master class, these challenges, the courses we are working on this piece like this is a piece that we've noticed is a big sticking point. It's a big request. It's a big well, I don't know what to do next in the podcast. Can we can deliver some of that on it, but we're going to do better.

So I want to talk about willpower and the fact that. I was writing an email earlier this week that went out to a bunch of the people in our newsletter and I was talking about the three options of what you can do this time of year, almost, you know, like in the framework of you've done all this work, you made progress, 20, 20 has been a heck of a roller coaster ride, like let's get off the roller coaster return to normalcy, let's get back on track.

Like, depending on where your starting point is, you've got some options. But a lot of it came down to this sort of like willpower and that willpower is this mythical creature. And so I did that. I was like, OK, what is willpower? Right. I'm like, what is it? Right. So the American and you have a psychology degree. So I'm thinking all the way back right to the days of the textbooks, the EPA or sorry. Didn't mean that you got to smile that wave. Yeah. Way back didn't mean it.

I am. I'm the oldest statesman in our in our friend group, so I shouldn't talk. So according to American, the APA that says the ability to delay gratification and resist short term temptations to meet long term goals. Great. Sounds awesome, right. The capacity to override and unwanted thought, feeling or impulse, a little bit of like emotional intelligence. I like it. The conscious effort for regulation of self by the self well self. If you're not doing great with something, it's pretty hard to regulate from a place of irregularity. Yeah. And a limited resource capable of being depleted. This is the one that I feel like is the problem when it comes to maintenance.

And then also these plateaus that happen when you're in a in a fast or a massive weight loss phase where you're trying to lose fat and keep it off, you're trying to lose 20, 30, 40, 50 pounds. That's the one that really sticks out to me.

Yeah. Because, you know, if we go back to the old diet model and eat less, move more. And the calorie restriction, if you think about it, if you're sitting down for three, four or five feeding sessions per day, a meal or a snack or whatever it may be, you're having to make decisions each time that you sit down, you know, to actually track those calories and to make the choices for what's on your plate and to keep in mind your total number of calories that you're trying to stay under for the day.

Well, that's multiple willpower decisions that at each each meal time, then multiply that over over a day and then over the weeks. And there's only so much of that to go around. And the less sleep you get, the less willpower you have. If you have any alcohol to drink, you have less willpower. Right. If you have stress going on, if kids are talking in your ear or or trouble at work or at home or anything else like that, that's all weighing on your willpower. It drains it so so reframing all of what we're doing and and coming at it at an angle that that involves less of the willpower and more personal empowering decisions is is really where we can we can kind of get off of that willpower train and not worry about the depleting resource so much.

Yeah. And it's it's I mean, when we talk about the physiology of it, it's hormone driven. You've got the leptin in the ghrelin and the the Sephardic phase and all the digestive stuff. And you've got you've got insulin, which is a hormone like it's it's this big network of hormones controlling it. So simply, like you just said, framing it, removing the triggers and having a different mindset about it, where it's not a bad thing to say yes or no or to think about anchoring to something greater, which is this whole idea of maintenance, like what is the end result look like and how am I going to get there? And that's what I loved about. There's a book called The Willpower Instinct. I have not read it, but I've seen a video explanation of it. And it's written by Kelly McGonigal. And she talks about three things where it's the I won't power the willpower and the I want power and kind of explains like the I won't power is when your body is screaming, yes, I want that.

And you say no. Like, that's willpower in the moment where you're like, yeah, oh, Pizza Hut into my belly. Like, I want the pizza. Like my body is hungry. I'm screaming for pizza. And I say, no, that's great, but that's finite.

Yeah. You can only do it so many times.

Right. And holidays, there's a lot more of those opportunities. Right. So, yeah, the second part was the I willpower. And this is I like this framework where it's saying yes to the things you will know that lead you closer to the end goal. And this is where willpower is typically a negative thing. But this is a. A positive reprogramming where you have the ability to say, yes, I am going to do this because it's going to get me to the end result, which is so much more powerful on the on the PFC or the prefrontal cortex of the brain in that neuroplasticity, in that rebuilding of the habits. So I loved that piece of it where you actually have a positive reinforcement here, even though we're talking about willpower, which is typically a bad thing that we run out of.

Yeah, so this is like where the doc was saying I will set a twenty four hour timer every Thursday after dinner because I'm going to be waiting till Friday dinner when that's my date night. That's important to me and I will be doing that every single time. But that, that's a that's a positive reinforcement right there. And that's one of the things that we focus on too.

I love it. And then the third one, which I thought was cool, which is what we really go over often, especially when our coaching clients and even with myself, where it's like, OK, I'm a little off track here. Why? OK, well, what is my why?

What is my end goal? What is my endgame? What is my legacy. What? And it's not just the all I want to lose weight. It's OK. There's an exercise we do where you go five layers deep just by asking simple questions.

And the I want power is really like remembering what we really want for the end goal. And I love how she talks about our brain has the ability to harness all three of those things within the one willpower matrix. We have the ability to say no at times and we can strengthen that muscle. We have the ability to say yes, which positively reinforces us.

And then we have the anchor, which is the why, which is the remembering what you really want for the end game, which is exactly the framework for what a maintenance type fasting schedule looks like, because people with the old man say, am I going to do this rest of my life? Well, are you where you want to be? OK, great. So let's do this and focus hard for six months and then we'll reassess.

Yeah.

Yeah, and, you know, there's there's there's there's more to that question, too, like, are you where you want to be? What what do you want things to look like on a day to day basis when you get to that maintenance point, too? So that's that's such a such an interesting question. And each one has has a different history to it whenever we get those. But, you know, I think I think just understanding the difference between the finite portions of the willpower versus what your own decisions are once you actually have the tools to get there and how they separate, it's it's hard to understand that until you until you just get started and start feeling that shift happening and then and then the ball gets rolling.

It was the exact motivation, not as articulated as well, because 11 months ago we didn't know that for the the fast start guide and the one meal a day like that's where it came from, like that was the empowering thing where it was like, oh, wait, like some of this is starting to make sense in the fall in the place. So we're refining the message, refining the delivery. If you guys don't know what we're talking about, fast our guide go to the website, the Fasting for Life Dotcom. Click the button you put in your email. It'll be sent to you. It's a one page PDF and then also comes with a little 20 minute six video explanation of how to use Mohmad, how to put it in your day to day life, how to start that weight loss phase and how to make it stick. And then the other thing we have going on right now is the challenge, which, you know, about December 3rd to December 12th. Registration closes in two days, sorry, it starts in two days. Registration closes tomorrow, Wednesday the second. And just we got a great group of people, lots of energy and excitement already. So go to the website, get registered. And Tommy, any last thoughts here on what they need to do? But I think we I think we think we covered it. And I'm really excited that things are starting to become clearer as we're starting to ramp up for twenty, twenty one.

Yeah, I really think they are. And I think things are falling into place for for everyone who's who's kind of been on this journey with us. And it's just going to be an awesome end of the year and then into a great twenty, twenty one. So I'm looking forward to it. So send us a message if you guys have any questions and hope to see on the inside.

All right. Thanks, Tom. Thanks. Bye.

So you've heard today's episode and you may be wondering where do I start? Head on over to the Fasting for Life Dotcom 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.

Why are you 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.

Automatically convert your audio files to text with Sonix. Sonix is the best online, automated transcription service.

Sonix uses cutting-edge artificial intelligence to convert your mp3 files to text.

Transcription is now more accurate and more affordable. Colleges and universities use Sonix to convert their lectures, classroom sessions, and research recordings to text. Create and share better audio content with Sonix. Researchers better analyze their interviews by transcribing their video and audio recordings with Sonix. Transcribing by hand is no longer necessary; put away those headphones. Automated transcription with the best customer support team to help you at every step of the way.

Sonix can make your life a whole lot easier. Enterprise-grade security for all of your automated transcription and translation needs. More computing power makes audio-to-text faster and more efficient. Sonix is the best automated transcription service online.

Sonix uses cutting-edge artificial intelligence to convert your mp3 files to text.

Sonix is the best online audio transcription software in 2020—it's fast, easy, and affordable.

If you are looking for a great way to convert your audio to text, try Sonix today.

Fasting For Life Ep. 49

[00:00:01] Hello, I'm Dr. Scott Watier, and I'm Tommy Welling, and you're listening to the Fasting for Life podcast, and this podcast is about using fasting as a tool to regain your health, achieve ultimate wellness and live the life you truly deserve.

[00:00:15] Each episode is a short conversation on a single topic with immediate, actionable steps. We cover everything from fat loss on health and wellness to the science of lifestyle design.

[00:00:25] 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.

[00:00:40] Hey, everyone, welcome to be Fasting for Life podcast. My name is Dr. Scott Watier. I am here, as always, with my good friend and colleague, Tommy Welling. Good afternoon to you, sir. Hey, Scott. How are you? Fantastic. We are going to talk ten day fasting ramp up challenge. We are going to talk about what it is that we actually do with fasting for life and hopefully bring some massive value today. I am fired up that December 3rd is right around the corner. Thanksgiving was fantastic. Feel good coming out of it. How about you?

[00:01:12] Yeah, I feel great. It was a great Thanksgiving, used a lot of fasting actually around it and right back into it fast now, but enjoyed Thanksgiving for sure and pumped about the challenge coming up to.

[00:01:25] Yeah, I love looking back last year before we started the podcast and thinking, OK, holidays are coming and I've been working hard for six months, you know, lost all the weight and I'm like, all right, what am I going to do? Oh, you know, what will this holiday season is a little bit more enjoyable when I'm not worried about making sure that my, you know, buttoned down black shirt that's very forgiving is clean or that, you know, I have a comfortable pair of jeans to wear to the holiday party or I need to get the suit coat out and make sure it still fits like. Right. It was a different, different holiday. And then this year was was much like last year where it was a lot more relaxed and felt good going into it. How to plan that a longer, fast going in enjoyed, didn't overdo, but enjoyed the holiday. And now we're we're gearing up to take a group of people through the ten day ramp up. And I am I'm really liking the fact that we added this to the to the calendar this year and didn't wait until, you know, the the holiday hangover wore off and, you know, end of January, beginning of February timeframe.

[00:02:39] Yeah. Because that was the suggestion that a lot of people had a lot of people said, well, no, I'm going to think about that stuff again in January or February. And we were like, well, that's you know, you're you're so far down the rabbit hole, you have so much to undo at that point. You know, like the my least favorite part about the holidays in years past was actually making the Thanksgiving and the Christmas plans and then thinking about the family that I was going to be seeing, that I hadn't seen for a while. And actually dieting going into that, knowing that I was heavier than I than I had been earlier in the year. So I need to diet before I see people that I haven't seen in a while. But then fearing what I might eat and how much I might gain during the actual holidays and then what, January and February, we're going to look like it was like I already knew what the roller coaster track looked like in my mind. And and it was that is a really stressful time for me.

[00:03:37] And the same, similarly, I agree, would happen with vacations, you know, we go on vacations and I'd prep and work so hard and then, you know, falling off track, not falling off track, but just literally enjoying myself on vacation, I would come back and I'd be so far off my my my long term low and slow goal that I would get discouraged. And I just didn't like the way that felt. So it's empowering to know everybody listening that, you know, yes, guys do care. We we do care. Like, this is stuff that bothers us, too, especially I know for me, being a dad, not being a good example for the kids and having the energy. And, you know, you tell your story about not needing naps anymore and just being able to get down on the floor with them and play with them. And, you know, we're talking, you know, mid to late 30s here. So we're not talking 60 year olds now. You know, that's how life should be, right? Right.

[00:04:30] That's exactly how it should be. And, you know, when we went to the park, we did we did a big family friend gathering at the park the other day, and we were climbing around on monkey bars and just, you know, running around with dogs and kids. And just a few years back, that that wouldn't have it wouldn't have gone anything like that. It would have been sitting on the sidelines just kind of watching everyone, you know, play and have a good time. And it's just a completely different experience now.

[00:04:53] And we're not talking a hundred pounds. We're talking forty to fifty pounds. That makes a huge difference. So good transition into what we're doing. So we call it the ten day fasting ramp up or the ten day challenge. And the word challenge can can almost be a little misleading as almost like an aggressive tone to it. Like we're going to challenge you. Like, come on, it's going to be hard. Like, I'm telling you, it is not that. So you and I had this realization just talking for the last few days where what it really is is like a live accountability group training. Yeah. And I don't even think the training is the right word because it's so much more than that. And I think that's why, you know, when we first started this process of delivering our story and our message and wanting to take on, you know, the massive undertaking of spreading the word of how to prevent diabetes and the insulin friendly lifestyle and getting the word out that you have a choice when it comes to your path, when it comes to weight and health and all these other different things. You know, what we realize is that really what we do is is much simpler than than what a lot of people think it is. And the live group training is ten days of us. It's ten days of the group. It's ten days of the ability to ask questions and get feedback and plan and learn how to pivot. And I want to before we kind of merge right into the topic that we're going to talk about for the episode today as well, which is, you know, the why diets fail and. The diet life balance and you know what you do when you get to maintenance, but there's so much more to unpack in this 10 days than what we can put on one registration page.

[00:06:33] Right. And that's kind of the tricky part to work when we when we talk to a lot of listeners about what it is that they'd like to see in a in a challenge like this, what we keep hearing a few a few recurring things. One of them is community support. Like I want a place where other like minded individuals go and I can bounce ideas, you know, commiserate sometimes or bridge. You know, there's tough times for all of us, but but also just finding the support and the energy and the feedback there to kind of keep going and to pivot when necessary. And so that 10 days doesn't just end after the the challenge or the group training, it continues. That's lifetime access to the community. And some of the people in the community have been there for almost a year now, encouraging each other and and just growing and feeding off of each other's energy.

[00:07:29] I was on a Facebook live this morning dropping a message into the group, gearing up for the challenge. And I saw a name pop up. She was one of our original challengers. Hmm. And I was like, hey, hey, hey. Yes, look at reengaging. Still has the support and is still there and doing great. So, yeah, you just you just hit it there, man. And in trying to summarize. And we've always said that we wanted this to be conversational, and that's why it's to send us emails and his messages and we do our best to get back as quickly as possible. And I'm sure there's been a few that we've missed over the last 11 months, 10 or 11 months. But the idea is that trying to instill what it is that we learned and we experienced that was so life changing and trajectory changing for us, the ten days is really more of like everything you need to learn on how to use fasting to do just that. And I know that sounds like a big like like Mike Mike dropped like here's all of this. Like in 10 days you're going to get all of it. The reality is it's it's simpler than you think. And it's it's tools. It's the psychology. It's the physiology. It's the ability to learn how to pivot. It's what intervals to use. And knowing that you have the confidence and support to be able to use those intervals within a fasting and like minded community where if you tell someone, you know, coming out of Thanksgiving that you're going too fast for 48 hours, somebody might be like, what would you eat on Thanksgiving? And they're like, oh, no, that's that's that's not why I'm doing it. Like, I didn't go crazy on Thanksgiving and I'm going to make myself suffer for 48 hours. Like this is part of my lifestyle. This is what helps me enjoy the holiday and then also know that I'm staying on track.

[00:09:18] Yeah. And there's no regret involved. There's no there's no give back. There's no planning for the next few weeks to get ahead of the curve for Christmas. And then beyond that. And, you know, so and the power in the group training comes from when we when we have live daily sessions, we meet daily on that. And and it varies between training and Q&A. But the power of the conversation, like you said, keeping it conversational when you start understanding the science and the psychology and the physiology and then get to digest it and then come back and ask real world questions, OK, this has happened to me today. This is how my schedule looks this week. What about when X, Y, Z happens and we're bouncing these ideas and these these answers and suggestions and feedback? You you're you're learning from the whole rest of the group and all of their questions to like that's an exponential power that that's really kind of hard to to describe until you start to experience that.

[00:10:23] And you said something that made me think, well, yeah, you're taking it. You're taking responsibility over it, your commanding and you're controlling it. We're the opposite this time of year, which you could do is just stick your head in the sand and be like now just going out, going dark for a little while. I'll think about this again, you know, in January or February.

[00:10:42] And we're going to deliver some value here, too, in terms of discussing kind of how to unpack it and not just for the challenge. Like it's not just one big promo for the challenge. It was a realization and prepping for this challenge for this live ten days of live training. You know, that's what we do in what we're trying to do is simple. And there's a few underlying threads, again, when it comes to the tools, the psychology, the physiology and the intervals that makes it really tangible. So I want to make sure that. We don't just talk about the 10 day training the whole time because it was like it was cool, I mean, we could we have plenty of testimonials and excitement to just continue down that rabbit hole. I don't want to get buried in it, though. The like the diet life balance, you know, you know, the willpower. And then something that we get a lot is not everybody is looking for weight loss. It's really like, how do I use fasting to maintain. So which one do you want to start with? First time?

[00:11:47] Um, you know, I feel like that maintenance piece.

[00:11:54] Getting off of the diet roller coaster and then on to the maintenance, I feel like we get that a lot. Where?

[00:12:01] Where people have a story about how they've they've gained and lost the same weight or they've they've received 20, 30 pounds Welling, right? Yeah. And then it was just it was like failure to engage in maintenance mode.

[00:12:15] And so it ended up all coming back and a lot of times. And then some.

[00:12:22] Yeah, and that's where a couple of things I've just been thinking about is. The diet life balance like and the fact that, like diets have a start and a finish to most people, like you're either on it or you're off it, you're on the wagon, off the wagon, you're either in the diet world or you're in the I'm just going to stick my head in the sand and live my life world or you're in the because being in the middle doesn't really work either. So that whole concept that diets have a start and start and finish, you know, a lot of the 30 day weight loss programs and 90 day, you know, fat to fit programs and all of the different things that are out there typically have a start and a finish. And what it comes down to is knowing how to find something that works for you, where the diet doesn't become your life. But as we say, you know, planning your life around fasting in the fasting lifestyle, insulin friendly lifestyle is where the power resides.

[00:13:24] Yeah. And you know that it sounds like what I used to say about going to the gym, too, because as I've said before, I tried going to the gym heavily with my my eating habits and my calorie counting and trying to get the fat off.

[00:13:39] And that was, you know, hey, how are your workouts going? Well, you know, it's OK. I haven't really been going to the gym lately.

[00:13:47] I'm going to start back up or I missed I missed two this week, so, yeah, maybe I'll start back up next week or, you know, the first of the month or after my birthday or or whatever it is, you know, so you have these these on off hard stop cycles, but, you know, getting away from that and and on to something that's that's sustainable that you can maintain with and that you can use for a maintenance plan and health maintenance, that that's what we really want to drive home here. We spent a lot of time covering that in in the challenge. And that's why we wanted to go into some of that today to.

[00:14:22] And.

[00:14:24] One last thing I want to go into willpower to hear shortly, but one last thought on this, you know, on off thing, right? So. When we're looking at the end result, we have to have the end result in mind. So what does the end result look like for you? What does the end result look like for me? Well, it's going to be a little bit different. It's going to be around this concept of, you know, living life to the fullest, having energy, having focus, having a good sleep, having healthy relationships, having less stress, having ideal body fat percentage, having a certain level of strength right in the gym. If you're a lifter and having the endurance to be able to go to Disney with the family and not be the guy sitting on the bench eating a turkey leg. Right. Like, well, please enjoy the turkey leg, but you don't have to be the guy sitting down having the turkey. You get to choose to do that. And we usually when people get to maintenance is what happens is because they're not using fasting as a tool or they haven't used it long enough or they don't really know what to do with it. And then the old psychology and the things that come along going to define the world willpower here in a minute and then not understanding exactly what the physiology is and maybe thinking that like, oh, I'm slowing down my metabolism. I'm doing long term harm. Being able to know that when you lose that 20 pounds, you have the ability to stay there and maintain it like that's the whole point, like whatever that end result looks like, all of that stuff I just mentioned. Right. Like bits and pieces for different people, like we all have different motivating factors, like end result is to feel good, to look good, to have confidence, you know, like look good in the date night. Right. Like all of that stuff.

[00:16:11] So how does it. Why, then, does it fail so often for so many people? Yeah, I feel like it's it's not really being discussed.

[00:16:25] Whatever whatever method you're using to get to that maintenance point and for for a lot of us, it's it's a no on the scale. And once you get there, you may know you've hit that, but you don't necessarily have a plan to to actually maintain it. So if you were calorie counting, OK, what is your new calorie count need to be if you were using fasting intervals or you were doing Omayyad or something else?

[00:16:49] Ok, well well now what if you don't want to continue to lose weight, then then what do you need to do now?

[00:16:57] And the problem with that, I feel like, is a lot of people go back to their old habits at that point, right? They go back to doing the things that got them into the place they didn't want to be in in the first place. And I am one hundred percent speaking from experience, but I am the president, vice president and the board of this club. I know you're there with me were co presidents.

[00:17:18] So like this is it. This was what we did. So it's it's looking at, you know, the almost like the schedule of how to use the intervals to your advantage. And it's really just coming from being able to do it consistently and kind of use the different variations and try some things and figure it out and and kind of tweak the process. So like, I was listening to someone that I follow on Instagram, he's a doc, a functional medicine doc in North Carolina, and he was talking about his fasting schedule.

[00:17:52] Now I know him well and he was talking about how like Monday through Thursday, he does a 20 hour fast. So he eats in a four hour window from like two to six. And on Fridays he does six. Thursday to Friday, he does six to six, which is a twenty four hour window. There's a lot of benefit to the old man or the twenty four hour fasting cycle, which you and I love. And especially if people have done more of the six, eight, eight, six window, which is kind of the starting point for a lot of people when it comes to fasting. What I mean by window is, you know, when you're fasting.

[00:18:31] You're not drinking anything other than coffee, tea and water, no sweetened beverages, no food, right? And then in the fasting, in the eating window, you can eat between like a two and a four or a 12 and an eight if you're doing more of an intermittent type. So he was due Monday through Thursday for our window.

[00:18:49] Friday, Thursday to Friday would be a twenty four hour fast. So he would eat Friday night and then he does more of an intermittent like 12 to eight or eight to four. Right. Type window because it's family time. So it gives him more flexibility to be able to do the things on the weekends, which ties into one of the things that we hear so often, which is how do I keep motivation on the weekends? Well, the weekends are no damn different than any other day. They all end. And why? It's just that in our brain, we program them to be like, oh, I can chill, I can relax. I don't have to work. We'll know. It's figuring out how that fits. And I loved his approach and that's maintaining and working for him. For me, it's more of an nomad type thing with date nights and planning for holidays and celebrations and those types of stuff. So, you know, it's just that people I just don't know if there's enough. And this is why I love the live group trainings, because after ten days, you know how to make all of these pivots right.

[00:19:49] And it's those pivots. It's there's little question marks that come up when you feel like you have the confidence to answer those questions for yourself. That's when you have the power to keep going for long term, to hit your goals and and then to maintain. But it's it's when you are, you know, kind of going at it alone without the confidence and the reassurance for those questions that pop up. That's when it becomes easy to say, well, I'm not sure if I'm making the right choice here and then kind of feel like you just fell off the wagon again. And then things kind of backslide. Right? Like, that's that's a pattern that we see sometimes. But but for for the functional medicine doc, that's his maintenance plan, correct? Correct. So, you know, that's the other thing that that we hear from a lot of people, too, is I've been doing intermittent fasting for three months, six months, a year or two. We get a lot of emails like that and it looks something like a like a six, eight type of schedule. But it's it's just not it's just not working for them. Well, if you think about it, this functional medicine doc does that seventy five percent of the time and that's his maintenance plan. So it's not really very surprising that the weight's not coming off when when that's your that's your tool. That's what you're using. So there's going to need to be more to it in order to actually get the weight off and then get to your maintenance point, which is one of the reasons why one of the questions we get which.

[00:21:14] Oh, man, what are you guys indoors? Oh, man. Well, we oh, Matt is what worked for us. That's what worked for one of our biggest testimonials. Candice, who was lost eighty pounds up to this point, reversed her diabetes and she did. Omak shouldn't say only ohmy. But she did. Oh Matt. Every single day for a year. And that was that's all she did. Right now she's in a time period where she has more flexibility. But just what she loves, that her bloodwork looks great, her life looks great, and she feels and looks great. And she's like, you know what, I'm just going to stay here for a while. But, you know, with with the doc that I was talking about, yeah, he's doing more than an intermittent window and to maintain. So like people that are doing intermittent, if you're not getting the results, you can't keep doing that over and over and over and again and accept expecting that end result to change. Like, you probably need to push it a little bit. And that's where Matt comes into play or one meal a day, because it gives you that just a little bit of extra time in between meals, which allows your body to burn that little bit of extra fat. That adds up, you know, over the span of 30, 60, 90 days, you lose 50 pounds in 50 days or and that might seem obscene to some people. Right, because there's this thing out there of like, don't lose fat too fast. Right? Like, OK, well, let's get it off and then figure it out so you could do 60, 90 days of rapid fat loss. And then, of course, you're going to have to stop and reassess and, you know, let your body adapt. And there's all that those physiological things that take place like set points. And there's a psychological aspect which I want to talk about willpower. I keep mentioning it. We haven't gotten to yet, but it's coming. So I just love the idea that, OK, yeah, if you've done it and then and it's not working, then something's off and it's usually a timing or consumption problem.

[00:23:04] Right. Or both. Yeah, true. Yeah. And again, that's what we spend a lot of time on that, especially at the beginning of the ten days because it's, it's so important and helps kind of that's why we call it the ramp up.

[00:23:20] We're we're ramping up the process going from from a beginners state. But even if you've done plenty of fasting in the past, we still break it down so that. Anybody can start there and then you're still just building the pieces in the building blocks to to get to the top of the mountain.

[00:23:39] And so for the fast start, guy, the mini master class, these challenges, the courses we are working on this piece like this is a piece that we've noticed is a big sticking point. It's a big request. It's a big well, I don't know what to do next in the podcast. Can we can deliver some of that on it, but we're going to do better.

[00:23:58] So I want to talk about willpower and the fact that. I was writing an email earlier this week that went out to a bunch of the people in our newsletter and I was talking about the three options of what you can do this time of year, almost, you know, like in the framework of you've done all this work, you made progress, 20, 20 has been a heck of a roller coaster ride, like let's get off the roller coaster return to normalcy, let's get back on track.

[00:24:26] Like, depending on where your starting point is, you've got some options. But a lot of it came down to this sort of like willpower and that willpower is this mythical creature. And so I did that. I was like, OK, what is willpower? Right. I'm like, what is it? Right. So the American and you have a psychology degree. So I'm thinking all the way back right to the days of the textbooks, the EPA or sorry. Didn't mean that you got to smile that wave. Yeah. Way back didn't mean it.

[00:24:58] I am. I'm the oldest statesman in our in our friend group, so I shouldn't talk. So according to American, the APA that says the ability to delay gratification and resist short term temptations to meet long term goals. Great. Sounds awesome, right. The capacity to override and unwanted thought, feeling or impulse, a little bit of like emotional intelligence. I like it. The conscious effort for regulation of self by the self well self. If you're not doing great with something, it's pretty hard to regulate from a place of irregularity. Yeah. And a limited resource capable of being depleted. This is the one that I feel like is the problem when it comes to maintenance.

[00:25:42] And then also these plateaus that happen when you're in a in a fast or a massive weight loss phase where you're trying to lose fat and keep it off, you're trying to lose 20, 30, 40, 50 pounds. That's the one that really sticks out to me.

[00:25:56] Yeah. Because, you know, if we go back to the old diet model and eat less, move more. And the calorie restriction, if you think about it, if you're sitting down for three, four or five feeding sessions per day, a meal or a snack or whatever it may be, you're having to make decisions each time that you sit down, you know, to actually track those calories and to make the choices for what's on your plate and to keep in mind your total number of calories that you're trying to stay under for the day.

[00:26:29] Well, that's multiple willpower decisions that at each each meal time, then multiply that over over a day and then over the weeks. And there's only so much of that to go around. And the less sleep you get, the less willpower you have. If you have any alcohol to drink, you have less willpower. Right. If you have stress going on, if kids are talking in your ear or or trouble at work or at home or anything else like that, that's all weighing on your willpower. It drains it so so reframing all of what we're doing and and coming at it at an angle that that involves less of the willpower and more personal empowering decisions is is really where we can we can kind of get off of that willpower train and not worry about the depleting resource so much.

[00:27:19] Yeah. And it's it's I mean, when we talk about the physiology of it, it's hormone driven. You've got the leptin in the ghrelin and the the Sephardic phase and all the digestive stuff. And you've got you've got insulin, which is a hormone like it's it's this big network of hormones controlling it. So simply, like you just said, framing it, removing the triggers and having a different mindset about it, where it's not a bad thing to say yes or no or to think about anchoring to something greater, which is this whole idea of maintenance, like what is the end result look like and how am I going to get there? And that's what I loved about. There's a book called The Willpower Instinct. I have not read it, but I've seen a video explanation of it. And it's written by Kelly McGonigal. And she talks about three things where it's the I won't power the willpower and the I want power and kind of explains like the I won't power is when your body is screaming, yes, I want that.

[00:28:24] And you say no. Like, that's willpower in the moment where you're like, yeah, oh, Pizza Hut into my belly. Like, I want the pizza. Like my body is hungry. I'm screaming for pizza. And I say, no, that's great, but that's finite.

[00:28:40] Yeah. You can only do it so many times.

[00:28:42] Right. And holidays, there's a lot more of those opportunities. Right. So, yeah, the second part was the I willpower. And this is I like this framework where it's saying yes to the things you will know that lead you closer to the end goal. And this is where willpower is typically a negative thing. But this is a. A positive reprogramming where you have the ability to say, yes, I am going to do this because it's going to get me to the end result, which is so much more powerful on the on the PFC or the prefrontal cortex of the brain in that neuroplasticity, in that rebuilding of the habits. So I loved that piece of it where you actually have a positive reinforcement here, even though we're talking about willpower, which is typically a bad thing that we run out of.

[00:29:31] Yeah, so this is like where the doc was saying I will set a twenty four hour timer every Thursday after dinner because I'm going to be waiting till Friday dinner when that's my date night. That's important to me and I will be doing that every single time. But that, that's a that's a positive reinforcement right there. And that's one of the things that we focus on too.

[00:29:50] I love it. And then the third one, which I thought was cool, which is what we really go over often, especially when our coaching clients and even with myself, where it's like, OK, I'm a little off track here. Why? OK, well, what is my why?

[00:30:03] What is my end goal? What is my endgame? What is my legacy. What? And it's not just the all I want to lose weight. It's OK. There's an exercise we do where you go five layers deep just by asking simple questions.

[00:30:16] And the I want power is really like remembering what we really want for the end goal. And I love how she talks about our brain has the ability to harness all three of those things within the one willpower matrix. We have the ability to say no at times and we can strengthen that muscle. We have the ability to say yes, which positively reinforces us.

[00:30:43] And then we have the anchor, which is the why, which is the remembering what you really want for the end game, which is exactly the framework for what a maintenance type fasting schedule looks like, because people with the old man say, am I going to do this rest of my life? Well, are you where you want to be? OK, great. So let's do this and focus hard for six months and then we'll reassess.

[00:31:04] Yeah.

[00:31:06] Yeah, and, you know, there's there's there's there's more to that question, too, like, are you where you want to be? What what do you want things to look like on a day to day basis when you get to that maintenance point, too? So that's that's such a such an interesting question. And each one has has a different history to it whenever we get those. But, you know, I think I think just understanding the difference between the finite portions of the willpower versus what your own decisions are once you actually have the tools to get there and how they separate, it's it's hard to understand that until you until you just get started and start feeling that shift happening and then and then the ball gets rolling.

[00:31:53] It was the exact motivation, not as articulated as well, because 11 months ago we didn't know that for the the fast start guide and the one meal a day like that's where it came from, like that was the empowering thing where it was like, oh, wait, like some of this is starting to make sense in the fall in the place. So we're refining the message, refining the delivery. If you guys don't know what we're talking about, fast our guide go to the website, the Fasting for Life Dotcom. Click the button you put in your email. It'll be sent to you. It's a one page PDF and then also comes with a little 20 minute six video explanation of how to use Mohmad, how to put it in your day to day life, how to start that weight loss phase and how to make it stick. And then the other thing we have going on right now is the challenge, which, you know, about December 3rd to December 12th. Registration closes in two days, sorry, it starts in two days. Registration closes tomorrow, Wednesday the second. And just we got a great group of people, lots of energy and excitement already. So go to the website, get registered. And Tommy, any last thoughts here on what they need to do? But I think we I think we think we covered it. And I'm really excited that things are starting to become clearer as we're starting to ramp up for twenty, twenty one.

[00:33:14] Yeah, I really think they are. And I think things are falling into place for for everyone who's who's kind of been on this journey with us. And it's just going to be an awesome end of the year and then into a great twenty, twenty one. So I'm looking forward to it. So send us a message if you guys have any questions and hope to see on the inside.

[00:33:34] All right. Thanks, Tom. Thanks. Bye.

[00:33:38] So you've heard today's episode and you may be wondering where do I start? Head on over to the Fasting for Life Dotcom 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.

[00:33:51] Why are you 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.

Ep. 49 - Why diets fail, Willpower vs. Mindset and how to shift your thinking | Intermittent Fasting for Maintenance | Long-term Intermittent Fasting | Free OMAD Intermittent Fasting Plan

Fasting For Life Ep. 49 transcript powered by Sonix—easily convert your audio to text with Sonix.

Automatically convert your audio files to text with Sonix. Sonix is the best online, automated transcription service.

Sonix uses cutting-edge artificial intelligence to convert your mp3 files to text.

Get started today!