where to start...?

...Because it's blindingly simple to begin turning one's life around in just a few days.

Just take a weekend and don't eat.

More and more data comes in all the time that if you try to lose weight by halving your food intake your metabolism goes down too, but if you fast that doesn't happen.  After just a few days of food-abstaining, fasting insulin sinks like a rock ... and then one's system begins to normalize.  Fat is drawn from adipocytes to keep one fueled, hormones adjust to spare lean tissue (without "exercise"), inflammation (from many causes) also diminishes -- it's nothing but a "win" situation.

There are those who say "women shouldn't fast" -- I call bullshit.  I suspect that SOME women feel badly when they fast IN CERTAIN WAYS but that other ways it's probably completely feasible.  I fully believe that many women also hear the sweeping pronouncement and take it as an excuse to not even try.

I get so tired of all the "this is better!" "no, THAT is better!" "no, you must do interval training!" "but you HAVE to eat X!"....  Noise.  Ego-stroking.  Pfui.

Take a good vitamin/mineral supplement, drink a lot of water (and maybe some coffee/tea), and every once in awhile (perhaps weekly) eat nothing for a day and two nights.  Or a couple of days.  Or maybe just eat in a six-hour window every single day.  Or alternate days, eating and not eating, without trying to limit quantity on food-days.

How much fasting you do will depend, of course, on whether you have a lot of weight you want lost, or if you just don't want to have to weigh and measure and time and look up info constantly in your daily life.  Our eating behavior in the twentieth century got really REALLY unnatural in those respects!  Very few people thought about how much they were eating before calorie-counting came to be the vogue.  Most people ate whole foods to the point that they weren't hungry anymore ... then they stopped.  But then people started counting calories, then counted fat-grams, then counted carb-grams.  What's next?

Some of us have found "the answer" for ourselves, and don't have any desire to change our patterns, but there are also those around us who still search.  There are a whole 'nother set of people, who don't want to do what they know to be effective and they ALSO keep searching, hoping to find a magic technique that will keep them from having to do something they hate.  For them, fasting could be the answer.

On those rare occasions when I indulge in such a way that I feel bad, fasting IS the high-road to getting back to normal.  It's the magic bullet that slays the monsters of inflammation, bloat, histamine-intolerance, unbalanced-hormones, and all their hydra-like siblings.  Fasting makes the extra water go away.  Fasting makes my body flexible, strong, and usable again. 

Fasting is where I begin.  And it's amazingly easy and painless, unlike the techniques most people use to stay fit.