28 Day FAST Start Day by Day The Ultimate Guide to Starting

(or Restarting) Your Intermittent Fasting Lifestyle So It Sticks

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 WELCOME! START HERE

I’m so glad you picked up a copy of this book, or maybe a good friend or
family member who is an intermittent faster gave you a copy to introduce
you to intermittent fasting (which we call IF).
First, I want to explain what this book is and what it isn’t.
My goal with this book is to take you by the hand and walk with you as
you begin your journey down the IF path. As we go along together
throughout the next month, I want to equip you with the tools you need so
that IF sticks.
Here’s what this book is:
As it says right in the title, it’s your 28-Day FAST Start day-by-day
guide to starting (or restarting) your IF lifestyle so it sticks.
What this book isn’t: a complete guide to all-things IF. That’s a
different book: Fast. Feast. Repeat.: The Comprehensive Guide to Delay,
Don’t Deny Intermittent Fasting.
I want to be very clear:
The book you are holding is a companion to Fast. Feast. Repeat. If
you could only get one book, that’s the one you want. (Don’t tell my
publisher I said that.)
But you really need BOTH books. And this is not just me selling you
two books. I promise. You’re going to save so much money on food and
fancy coffee drinks this month that you could afford to buy thirty books with
the money you’ll save. Another benefit of IF! You’re welcome.;-)
So, why do you need two books, when Fast. Feast. Repeat. has
everything you need to begin and implement an intermittent fasting lifestyle
successfully, and to tweak it till it’s easy?
You could say that’s Fast. Feast. Repeat.’s greatest strength: it’s
comprehensive.
But you could also say it’s the book’s greatest weakness.
 What do I mean by that? It’s so complete that it can be overwhelming.
I hear comments like this one all the time: “I gave a copy of Fast. Feast.
Repeat. to my sister and she says it’s too long and she won’t read it.”
Or someone will read Fast. Feast. Repeat. cover to cover and then feel
like their brain is so overflowing with information that they don’t know
what to do next.
Information overload.
And that is why this day-by-day guide was born. Not everyone is ready
for ALL of the science found in Fast. Feast. Repeat. on day 1 of their
journey.
“Just tell me exactly what to do, Gin!”
That’s what you have here. For the next month, I’m going to guide you
through each day. This book is consumable and designed for you to write in
as you go. If it helps, think about it as your IF success journal. I was a
teacher for twenty-eight years, so my expertise is curriculum design: I’m
trained to present content and to make sure it sticks. And I’m using many of
the strategies I learned as an effective teacher here in this book.
Every day, you’ll begin the day by confirming your daily fasting plan
and setting your intention by creating achievable goals. There will be a
daily lesson from me designed to give you the knowledge and motivation
you need to keep going (even when it gets hard). All but a few of these
lessons are short and sweet on purpose so you don’t get bogged down by
too much information.
You’ll also hear from a past Intermittent Fasting Stories podcast guest
in a Daily Inspiration Spotlight. Along with reading an update, where they
share what’s been happening since their interview, you may want to find
their podcast episode (on your favorite podcast app or at
intermittentfastingstories.com) to hear their entire inspiring story. The Daily
Inspiration Spotlights will provide even more inspiration to your day.
At the end of each day, you’ll take a few minutes to reflect on how the
day went, including both the fast and the feast. You’ll identify what went
well and what might have been a struggle. You’ll also think about the next
day, always looking ahead and planning for success.
But don’t forget that while you work through this book for the next
month, you’re also going to need a copy of Fast. Feast. Repeat. as a
reference. After a few of the daily lessons, I’ll point you toward sections of
Fast. Feast. Repeat. where you can go for more in-depth information about
the daily topic. I’m calling them your “extra credit reading” assignments.
Yep—I’m still a teacher at heart. Since it’s extra credit, I know that you
might not have time to get to each of them, but they are there for you when
you want or need more information.
If you don’t yet have a copy of Fast. Feast. Repeat., go ahead and order
it now. You won’t be sorry—it’s going to be an integral part of your long-
term success. Also, all the scientific research and references are contained
in Fast. Feast. Repeat., as are the next steps that you’ll need after your
FAST Start is over.
But for now: it’s most important that you stick with me here in this day-
by-day guide and concentrate on one thing only: building up your fasting
muscle and establishing IF as a habit. When you take it day by day, you
won’t be overwhelmed, and you’ll set yourself up for long-term success.
Are you excited? Let’s do this!
 WHAT IS “INTERMITTENT
FASTING”?

If you are new to IF, you may wonder: What exactly is intermittent fasting?
Even if you eat three meals a day plus snacks like most people in our
modern society, you are somewhat of a faster, whether you realize it or not.
We all fast while we sleep, and we wake up every morning in a fasted state.
Most intermittent fasters simply extend that fasted state throughout the day
rather than eating a traditional breakfast in the morning. Just like everyone
else, we break-fast, but it may be when most people are having their lunch
or dinner. Breakfast literally means “break the fast.” We all do it, just at
different times of the day. For me, break-fast, which I usually eat in the late
afternoon or early evening, really is the most important meal of the day!
For intermittent fasters, there’s a period of the day when we
intentionally fast, sticking to clean-fast-approved beverages only (plain
water, black coffee, plain tea, and unflavored sparkling water)—and there’s
a period of the day when we eat, which is called our eating window. I’ll
help you choose your preferred eating window approach for the FAST Start
before you begin, so keep reading.
It’s important to understand that IF is a flexible lifestyle that doesn’t
have to be exactly the same from day to day, but the most common eating
windows vary between one and eight hours a day.
To illustrate how this looks, let’s say someone follows an intermittent
fasting lifestyle with a four-hour daily eating window. Since a day has
twenty-four hours, twenty hours of each day (including the time you are
asleep) would be spent fasting, and all your eating for the day would take
place during the consecutive four-hour eating window that you choose. We
would call that approach 20:4, representing twenty hours of fasting and a
four-hour eating window. Most people who use the daily eating window
approach end up with anything between 16:8 (sixteen hours of fasting and
an eight-hour eating window) and 23:1 (a twenty-three-hour fast and a one-
hour eating window). Because it’s a flexible lifestyle, your eating window
can vary from day to day, based on your schedule and even your varying
appetite.
Here’s how this might look as a day in my life. Every morning, I wake
up and start the day with black coffee. After my coffee, I switch over to
water and unflavored sparkling water until I am ready to eat. I usually open
my eating window at some point between 2:00 and 5:00 p.m. with a snack
of some type. A couple of hours later, I prepare dinner for my husband and
me, and we eat together. After dinner, I will often have a dessert of some
type, or just a little something sweet to close my window. Overall, my
eating window lasts for somewhere between two and six hours most days.
The daily eating window approach isn’t the only way to live an
intermittent fasting lifestyle, and there are other options that involve longer
fasts of up to thirty-six to forty-two hours. These are based on the concept
of alternate daily fasting (ADF), which is a well-researched practice. ADF
isn’t something you’re going to implement during your FAST Start, so I
won’t explain it here. It’s a tool that is described fully within Fast. Feast.
Repeat., and something you can consider for later in your IF journey.
You may be wondering:
Is intermittent fasting extreme or dangerous?
For people who have never heard of intermittent fasting or who don’t
understand the many health benefits that come along with the IF lifestyle
(which I will cover on day 4), this type of schedule may seem bizarre or
even possibly dangerous. What?!?!?! You go most of the day without
eating? Every day? You might even fast for thirty-six hours? Don’t you
have headaches? Don’t you collapse from lack of food? How do you have
energy to do day-to-day tasks?
Many intermittent fasters have gotten the speeches from well-meaning
friends and family members:
“Of course you’re losing weight, you’re starving yourself!”
“Everyone knows that breakfast is the most important meal of the day!
You need energy to start your day.”
 Neither of those statements is true, even though we have probably all
heard them. You aren’t starving yourself, and you won’t collapse without
breakfast. Let’s dig into each of them:
Are we starving ourselves? Absolutely not. My comprehensive book is
called Fast. Feast. Repeat. after all, not Fast. Eat a little tiny diet meal.
Repeat.
When I eat, I eat well, and that’s true for most IFers. I choose foods that
make me feel great, and I eat until I am satisfied. Back in my low-calorie
diet days, whenever I wanted to lose a few pounds, I would restrict my
calories throughout the day to about 1,200 (because that’s what “they” said
I should do), and that felt like I was starving myself. I’ll explain more about
how IF is different from a low-calorie diet on day 3.
What about breakfast? Do we need breakfast first thing in the morning
to fuel our bodies? The surprising answer to that question is no. If you have
ever been hangry, you know the feeling. You need to eat NOW. Many
people imagine that is what IF feels like. While it may feel like that over the
brief adjustment period, once we are adapted, hangry goes away. The key is
that we are well fueled during the fast … by our fat stores, which exist for
that very purpose. One of the most common things we hear from new IFers
is that they can’t believe how great they feel during the fast. Most of us are
a lot less hungry while fasting than back in our low-calorie or frequent-
small-meal days. The difference is astounding. Instead of getting worse
over time, like most low-calorie diets, IF gets better and better as we adjust.
More about this on days 9 and 16.
For now, what you need to remember is this: as we progress through the
28-Day FAST Start Day by Day, I’ll teach you everything you need to know
about intermittent fasting so that you understand the basics and have the
tools you need to set a firm IF foundation … and ensure that your IF
lifestyle sticks.
 WHY DO IFERS QUIT? AND
HOW TO KEEP IT FROM
HAPPENING TO YOU

Maybe you have never heard of IF before today, and you think it sounds too
good to be true. Good news! It isn’t too good to be true, as you will learn
for yourself over time. The intermittent fasting lifestyle has changed
thousands (if not millions) of lives, and yours is about to be one of them.
Or maybe you’ve dabbled with IF in the past but couldn’t make it stick.
The book you are holding is designed to equip you with all the tools you
need to make sure it sticks this time. There are a few common mistakes you
may have made in the past that I’m going to help you identify. And once
you identify what was holding you back, you’ll be prepared for success.
It’s even possible that you lived as an IFer for a significant period of
time, but for whatever reason, you have wandered off the path and are
looking for your way back to the lifestyle that you know is right for you.
The next month is designed to ease you back into IF. Think of it as your
fresh start.
You may be reading this and asking:
If IF is so great, why would anyone quit?
That’s a great question, and I am glad you asked. I’ve had amazing
success with IF, but for years I fit into the category of “couldn’t make it
stick.” You see, I was an IF dabbler. In my heart of hearts, I had the feeling
that intermittent fasting was the answer. Unfortunately, however, I didn’t
have the tools that I needed to make IF into a lifestyle.
 I treated IF as if it were another diet. I would start, last a few days, and
then get discouraged for whatever reason:

» Results were neither quick nor dramatic. I had unrealistic

expectations. (Blame the tabloids at the checkout counter of the
grocery store that tell you you’ll lose ____ pounds by _____. You
won’t, because that is not how the body works. But it makes you
think you should be able to do it. When you don’t, you blame
yourself, of course, when really it was the unrealistic expectations
that failed you.)
» It was hard. I didn’t understand the adjustment period, or what
needed to go on within my body during the adaptation process. So,
as soon as it felt hard, I quit.
» Food soothed me in times of stress. I was an elementary school
teacher, a mom of two school-aged boys, a wife, and I also had a
second (and third, and fourth) job teaching adults in two online
universities and our school district’s gifted teacher endorsement
program. When I wasn’t busy with family or work, I turned to food.
Food was always there, and it didn’t talk back.

Is it any wonder that I kept quitting?

I’m not going to let that happen to you. Not this time.
I’ve been around the intermittent fasting world since 2009, first as a
dabbler (2009–2014) and then as a newly determined IFer who felt like
this was her final shot (2014–2015). Starting in 2015, I transformed into an
excited IFer who had finally reached her goal weight (after years of failed
diets), and I started my first IF support group on Facebook. That allowed
me to mentor hundreds of thousands of IFers from around the world, and
inspired me to write my first book (Delay, Don’t Deny, in 2016) and
become a podcaster in 2017.
Since that happened, I have gone on to reach millions of listeners and
readers through my books and podcasts and to write the New York Times
bestseller Fast. Feast. Repeat., and I am grateful to have the opportunity to
continue to mentor intermittent fasters through my online support
community. We are no longer on Facebook these days, and you can find us
by going to ginstephens.com/community.
 In my IF evolution, I am now an experienced IFer. As of the writing of
this book, I have gone through nine holiday seasons as an intermittent
faster. Nine summers, vacations and all. This is the first time in my adult
life that I have stuck to something for this long.
And I know this:
I will never stop living the intermittent fasting lifestyle.
My experience, plus the experience of thousands of other successful
IFers, illustrates that IF is a lifestyle that works long term.
Just ask Dr. Mark Mattson, who I interviewed for episode 204 of my
podcast, Intermittent Fasting Stories. He is one of the world’s leading
experts on intermittent fasting, and he has been living the IF lifestyle since
the 1980s. Dr. Mattson is the former chief of the Laboratory of
Neurosciences at the National Institute on Aging, and he is best known for
cutting-edge neurological research during his time at Johns Hopkins
University. When someone with that level of scientific expertise tells me
that he chooses to live the intermittent fasting lifestyle because he is sold on
the profound health benefits, I listen.
And he’s not the only researcher who is sold on the health benefits of IF.
Dr. Gil Blander appeared on episode 96 of the Intermittent Fasting Stories
podcast. He received his Ph.D. from MIT with a focus on aging research,
and he is considered to be an expert in the area of longevity. As of my
interview with him in 2020, he had been living the IF lifestyle for eight
years, and he told me: “The best intervention we have available for us today
to live longer is IF. It is natural and simple. It’s not easy for the first couple
of weeks. But once it becomes a routine, then it’s easy.” (He’s right, by the
way. Even though it might not be easy on day 1, once you are fully adapted,
it becomes something you simply do.)
Besides talking to scientists and experts who choose to live the IF
lifestyle, I have interviewed hundreds of IFers from the real world who are
just like you and me. They are like your neighbor, your mom, your friend,
your son or daughter … real-life people who have made the intermittent
fasting lifestyle work for them long term.
It is the greatest joy of my life to talk to successful intermittent fasters
and hear how IF has transformed them and their lives in ways they never
expected.
Even so, sometimes I talk to people who have struggled to make IF
work for them. Not every story begins as a success story. Mine didn’t.
You’re probably not surprised (especially if you’ve ever listened to me
on podcasts) that I love to talk to people about IF. And that includes perfect
strangers. Just imagine how many grocery store checkout lane
conversations or random encounters I have had that ended up turning to IF.
Oops. What can I say? I’m passionate about the topic. You don’t lose eighty
pounds and keep it off and not want to shout it from the mountaintops.
In the early years of my IF journey, it was common for people to have
never heard of IF. Frankly, many of them thought it sounded crazy. “Thank
you, Crazy Grocery Store Lady. Please allow me to check out with my
groceries now.”
But somewhere around 2019, the tide began to shift. Now, when I bring
up IF with a stranger, it seems they all know someone who has had great
success with it.
These days, it’s very common that the person I’m talking to even tried it
themselves at some point. For those who have tried it, the conversation
usually goes something like this:
STRANGER: I tried it, and it didn’t work for me.
ME: Tell me about that. What were you drinking during the fast?

BOOM!
That’s when they tell me about the energy drinks, or the coffee with
cream, or the flavored sparkling water, or the herbal tea, or the _________
—you can fill in the blank with any number of beverages that break a fast,
making it much harder to get through the day. More about why in the next
chapter, where I will give you the basics of what I call the clean fast. Trust
me when I tell you that the clean fast changes everything.
Sometimes, however, the person I’m talking to did fast clean. Maybe
they only drank plain water, and they stuck to black coffee.
When someone who was fasting clean tells me that IF “didn’t work for
them,” my next question is usually:
How long did you give it, and bhow did you determine it wasn’t working
for you?
 Every time, the answer is some sort of combination of only giving it a
couple of weeks at the most, and they were usually using the lack of
dramatic scale movement to determine that IF “wasn’t working.”
If you’ve tried IF in the past and quit, I bet you either weren’t fasting
clean, or you didn’t give it long enough.
But that doesn’t apply to someone who lived the IF lifestyle
successfully for a time, fasted clean, had great results, and then quit. Why
does that happen? Did that happen to you, by any chance? There can be
many reasons you stopped fasting:

» You followed bad advice—There’s a lot of conflicting information

out there, and if you go down every path, you can lose your way.
Instead, keep it simple: fast clean, and learn to listen to your own
body and to trust yourself.
» Life got in the way—Maybe a vacation happened and you never
went back to intermittent fasting, or a stressful period of time
caused you to stop fasting. Before you knew it, you were not
fasting at all.
» Diet brain took over—Maybe your friend started a new diet plan
and was losing weight more quickly than you were, so you decided
fasting wasn’t “working” and you jumped ship to this other plan.
» You began to question fasting in general—Maybe you saw a blog
post or news article that made you question either the safety or
efficacy of IF. (As an example, in late 2022, a bunch of articles
came out that claimed certain dangers associated with IF, but when
I looked into the study the articles were based on, I realized it
wasn’t a fasting study … by the way, this is actually a common
tactic in what passes for health journalism these days—sensational
headlines that don’t reflect what the study actually found or even
what it actually studied. Always go to the source rather than
trusting the headlines.)
» Naysayers got into your head—Sadly, this is very common.
Someone you know (or even someone you love) plants a seed or
disparages fasting, or makes you feel silly or even guilty about your
choices. So, you quit.
 If you quit, don’t let that stop you from trying again. Think about a
toddler who is learning to walk. That toddler doesn’t fall down once and
say, “Welp. Looks like walking isn’t for me.” No. That toddler gets up and
tries again, as many times as it takes.
Have you heard the Japanese proverb:
Fall down seven times, get up eight.
If this is your first time as an IFer, the tools in this book will give you a
great foundation to ensure you get up each time you fall down. If you’ve
tried IF in the past, maybe you already know where you went wrong, and
you’re ready to get it right this time.
Either way, I hope you’re excited, because this time, you are not going
to quit.
Write it down:
I am not going to quit.
And sign your name to it. Date it. Make that promise to yourself today.
 WHAT IS THE”CLEAN FAST”?
THE BASICS

The clean fast is the one nonnegotiable rule that I will never waver on, and
you shouldn’t, either: when you fast, fast clean. Otherwise, you are not
really fasting.
The clean fast is so important that I devoted two chapters of Fast. Feast.
Repeat. to the topic. In chapter 4, “The Magic Is in the Clean Fast! Learn
Why We Fast Clean,” I explain the rationale behind the clean fast, with all
the scientific explanations as to why it matters and why we care. In chapter
5, “Keep It Clean! Learn How We Fast Clean,” I share all the details of
what it means to fast clean, followed by ten pages of stories from forty-
three IFers who share how the clean fast was instrumental in their success.
You need to read both of those chapters, because understanding why is a
lot more powerful than simply hearing me tell you what to do. When you
understand why, you’ll never want to sacrifice the clean fast, and you’ll
prize that time of your day even more, recognizing how powerful it truly is.
So, your homework assignment is to read the clean fast chapters of
Fast. Feast. Repeat. at some point in the near future to fully comprehend
the why and the how.
For now, use this diagram to understand the clean fast.

WHAT IS A “CLEAN FAST”?

YES! MAYBE … NO!

Water (unflavored) We call this the “gray area”: Food

Black coffee (unflavored) Peppermint essential oil for Flavored water
Any plain tea brewed from actual breath freshening only, NOT Flavored coffee
dried leaves only (black tea, green