In this video, I'll uncover the real reason that so many people fail at intermittent fasting
in order to help set you up for success.
When it comes intermittent fasting, I've come to realize that there's a common theme out
there as to why so many people fail at it. When we look at intermittent fasting, it kills
me to see people fail because it has so many benefits, whether it's anticancer, improving
brain function, reversing a health condition, fat loss. Whatever it is, it has all these
different major benefits that a lot of people are looking for, but they start it and they
fail at it. So, what we're going to talk about in this video is the real reason people fail
at intermittent fasting. We're going to talk about the not-so-commonly known reasons that
people are failing and not getting the results they desire.
But before we get started, I'm Dr. Zyrowski and welcome to the channel. If you new to
the channel, it's a pleasure to have you here. Be sure to subscribe, hit that bell notification,
and join our notification community so I can help you excel your health and your life.
Let's go ahead and first talk about habits. So, this is important and you might think
to yourself, well, what do habits have to do with intermittent fasting? Well, habits
have everything to do with intermittent fasting because essentially, look at it this way - if
you're someone who has been doing something for 30, 40, 50 years and all of a sudden you
just try to stop, that habit is really going to come in and kind of wear away at you as
you're trying to change it. A lot of people go into intermittent fasting, they just think
to themselves, well, I'm just going to change up these, you know, eating hours. It's going
to be no thing and nothing's going to come in the way of it. Well, there's going to be
a lot of things, especially a lot of different mental things that come in and really block
you from achieving your goals.
Let's talk about some different habits. How about coffee with cream and sugar in the morning.
If you're someone who's gotten up for the past 50 years and you've had coffee with cream
and sugar in the morning, that's a pretty devastating habit to try to break. How about
breakfast? You wake up in the morning, have that big breakfast, right? Because breakfast
is the most important meal of the day so we've been told. So you have that big breakfast
- you sit down with your spouse, you sit down with your kid, you have that breakfast. And
once again, that's a hard habit to just break off. I mean, even for me like, sometimes I'll
sit down with the family, they're having breakfast, the kids are having breakfast and I just sit
there and it's like all the kids are going, well dad, aren't you going to have breakfast?
And I'm thinking about, I'd really love to have breakfast with you guys, but you know
what, I'm trying to stay true to this. So, I'm just going to sit here and socialize with
you. So, it's a hard thing to break. Maybe it's in the workplace. A lot of people are
getting together around 10:00 AM and they're sitting down to have coffee and donut. That's
a hard thing to break if you've done it for 30 years and you're trying to improve your
health now. So, know that these habits are a big deal, especially when you know you've
done them for so long. There's not too many people out there who are doing intermittent
fasting straight out of the gates, as in they're a teenager and they started intermittent fasting.
There's very few people doing that. It's usually people who are later on in life doing it when
they've already created a lot of other habits and they're not necessarily bad. Like having
a nice morning smoothie. It's not a bad habit, but it's just a habit that you have to break
if you want to find success with intermittent fasting.
Now let's talk about habits in general. So, the thing is about them, as a lot of people
think that you can just break a habit in 21 days, right? They've been told 21 is all it
takes. You break that habit and you move on in life. But the truth is there's actually
some studies out there and we're going to talk about one in particular in the European
journal of Social Psychology. In this journal, what they did is they basically took 96 people
and they looked at them over a 12-week period. They're looking at how long it would take
for them to actually go in and break habits. They all went and got habits, whether it was
drinking more water at lunchtime to exercising for 15 minutes a day. They all had to stick
to a habit and we had to see how long they would actually do that and how long it would
take for it to just become something that they didn't even think about anymore. They
just do. And so, it took on average two months basically for these people to go and develop
this habit. Now basically what they found too is that the behavior became automatic
at 66 days. So, they really went and monitor these people for a long period of time. Even
though the study was a shorter period, they'd monitor them for a long period just to see
what would happen. They wanted to offer that continued support. And so, the behavior became
automatic at 66 days. So that's something, like I said, they didn't even have to think
about it anymore. It just happened. And then between 18 and 254 days is what it took. So,
for the people who built habits very quickly, they did it in 18 days. For the people who
just took forever, it was 254 days. So once again, setting realistic expectations in this
whole intermittent fasting thing is so important. So, you may be someone who is at the further
end of the spectrum. It takes you a little bit harder to develop habits. You may develop
them fairly quick. Now, the other thing that they realized from the study is it wasn't
an all or nothing approach. And so, if you went and you fell off the intermittent fasting
bandwagon for a couple of days, it wasn't a big deal. You jumped back on and you're
able to still form that healthy habit. The thing is, a lot of people go and they mess
up and they go, well, you know what? I screwed it up. It's over. I'm not going to do it anymore.
So, we realize that it's not all or nothing realize that it's going to take upwards of
two months to go in and actually break these habits. And so, we have to realize all these
things we love, they're going to wear on us when we're trying to practice intermittent
fasting.
Let's talk about the next major thing that messes people up. And that's conventional
wisdom. That is your social influencing group that you're hanging around with. It's the
people, your peer group that are just wearing away on you by saying not only like more negative
things, but things that really don't hold any realistic weight in science. And so, let's
talk about some of them. Here's some of the conventional wisdoms out there. Breakfast
is the most important meal of the day. I've heard that a million times and you know, I
tell people I intermittent fast and I hear this stuff all the time. I'm like, look, do
you realize that this is something I've done for years and I've read all the science on
it? I understand it. It also is going to wreck your metabolism. That's something that a lot
of people are going to tell you. You start starving yourself, you’re wrecking your
metabolism. If you truly want to lose weight, you need to eat six small meals a day. And
then when we look at conventional wisdom, which is almost always wrong, there's a million
different permutations of it. People are going to tell you, you're too old or too young.
Women shouldn't fast. You're too skinny, you don't look right. Whatever it is, there's
going to be a million people who come out there and tell you that you shouldn't do intermittent
fasting because of all this conventional wisdom. And the truth is, is that they have no understanding
of it. So, you really shouldn't follow their advice. Now, the other thing about intermittent
fasting is that I just tell people like, look, if you want to do it, don't go around telling
everybody about it. Don't go around trying to psych yourself up by telling all your friends,
your coworkers, and then hearing their negative feedback and then trying to do it because
essentially it's going to cause you to fail. Cause if you combine this and you combine
the habit issue, then all of a sudden it gets harder and harder.
And then I’ll be able to give a couple of other reasons why. It can become a little
bit difficult as well. Now let's talk about unhealthy diet. This is a big reason that
people fail. Now, I talk about intermittent fasting all the time and say, look, you can't
use intermittent fasting as a crutch for an unhealthy diet.
A lot of people try to do that because you can eat fairly unhealthy and do intermittent
fasting and still have fat loss. You can still get some pretty decent results. But the truth
is, is that it causes intermittent fasting to become very hard. And as a result, a lot
of people just quit. So, one of the things you'll deal with is cravings. If you're eating
an unhealthy diet, you're going to have a lot more cravings. You're in that fasting
window. You're finding that you're just craving food the whole time. You're craving some sugar,
and so it's not a thing that you have to deal with if you're following a healthy diet. Blood
sugar swings is another very uncomfortable side effect of eating an unhealthy diet and
trying to do intermittent fasting. You're going to have hyperglycemic patterns where
you have a bunch of energy and feel that you're just your brain's working well, and then you're
going to have the opposite. You're going to have hypoglycemic patterns where your brain
just absolutely crashes. You have mental fatigue, you feel terrible, you're getting shakiness,
you're getting dizziness, and so you're going to have these highs and lows if you're following
an unhealthy diet. All the time, when people tell me that they're having a lot of these
issues with intermittent fasting, I tell them, okay, well like you know what's going on with
your diet. You need to make sure that you're straightening it up and typically when they
start explaining how they're eating, well that's the problem. So, in general, what we
want to do is we want to follow a low carb diet. We don't want to be eating high carb
because it once again creates that blood sugar instability. High fat is really good, moderate
protein. We want also want to make sure that we're cutting out the sugar and cutting out
the processed foods. When we go and we make these dietary changes, intermittent fasting
becomes so much easier. I'll even have people who have done it for a while and they just
fall off the bandwagon as far as eating a healthy diet and all this, and they go, I
don't know what's up with me, doc. There's intermittent fasting is just feeling terrible
as of lately. It's like, well, how is your diet? And so, it's a very important piece.
That's why in my intermittent fasting program, I literally take a ton of effort into actually
teaching on diet because it's so important.
Now let's talk about expectations. This is another thing that's so important. Now, when
we look at expectations, a lot of people, they want results and they want it now, and
unfortunately we live in a society when it comes to just general healthcare, that that's
what people expect. You want to lower your blood pressure. Well, don't focus on exercise
and eating healthy. Just take a pill. If you want to lower your cholesterol, don't focus
on your diet, take the pill. If you want to lose weight, well, there's a pill for that
too, right? So a lot of people go into intermittent fasting and they want to lose weight. They
want to have more energy, they want to build lean muscle, they want to reverse a health
condition, but in most cases, they want it now. They're going to give themselves a week.
They're going to give themselves two weeks to get results. First of all, we have to realize
is that when we look at intermittent fasting, it's a natural health technique. Now when
we look at your overall health, true health only comes naturally. So, we have to make
sure that we realize it's going to take time and also that this is something that we're
doing in order to naturally improve our health. And so, we have to realize that we don't want
to just give ourselves a short period of time and we don't want to just focus on these types
of goals, but want to focus on more long-term goals, right? How much weight do you want
to lose over a one-year period? Maybe you want to actually get the anticancer benefits
that the intermittent fasting has to offer because you know that you have genetic snips
within your family line that basically is saying that you're going to get cancer one
day. So, we want to make sure that if you are someone who has cancer in your family,
if you have disease in your family, that you're going in utilizing intermittent fasting for
not only things like weight loss and reversing a condition that you're facing at the time,
but as more of a bigger goal to just improve your health and for longevity purposes.
Now, if you're not familiar with intermittent fasting and all the details of it, I'll put
a link right up here to a complete guide that I did on it. It's going to tell you everything
you need to know A to Z on intermittent fasting because, like I said, there's so many different
variables. There's different hours you can do it within. I teach on everything there.
So, make sure you're sharing this video with your friends because a lot of people are falling
into these not so commonly known mistakes, and it's very frustrating. I mean, if you
just walked in the intermittent fasting thing, well, it's just about not eating during this
time and you weren't mentally prepared for all these other things that come up, well
then essentially you are going to have a greater chance at failing at it.
So, give this video a thumbs up, share it with your friends. If you have any questions,
put it in the comments section right here below. And also, be sure to subscribe to my
channel. If you want to learn more about exercise, nutrition, weight loss, things like water
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you're locked in, you never miss a piece of content. Lastly, check out my other videos
over here that are going to help you improve your health. And I'll see you in the next
video.