5 Fasting Mistakes You Have To Avoid | Ronan Oliveira

I'll get less excited. In a previous video, I talked to you about how to get started with intermittent fasting. Today I want to tell you about the five main mistakes that people usually do in the beginning of the practice, because I want your practice to be flawless. My name is Ronan. I am the head of the health and fitness department in Mindvalley, and I have helped more than 10,000 people to do their intermittent fasting practice. And I figured out four, five common mistakes that usually break the practice. Let's go one by one. So number one is taking too much of a big jump. Imagine that you have your current nutrition habits. So you have three meals in a day, and you have a snack here or there, another one before going to bed. They are spread throughout the day, and you do this for as long as you can remember. Then today you say, tomorrow, I am going to fast for 16 hours. I'm gonna do this every day. I'm gonna have only two meals a day. How do you think your body is going to respond? First, it's going to feel super hungry, and then it gets angry at the same time and it gets sluggish. And if you push through, it gives you a headache. Just make sure that you're listening. Food is a very powerful signal for your circadian rhythm. That means that the sensation of hunger and your digestion and many other things that happen inside your body are influenced by the time that you have food. So when you start doing intermittent fasting, start for 12 hours per day, and every one to two weeks, you increase it by one to two hours if you feel it's the right thing to do. Mistake number two is having calories when you're fasting. This means no creamer in your coffee, no sugar in your tea. Because the main mechanism that intermittent fasting is using to help you burn fat, if burning fat is important to you, is a reduction of calories, whether or not you know about it. There's a study that was done by the University of Illinois. They got 23 people. They asked these people to fast for 16 hours a day. After 12 weeks, these guys lost more or less 3% of their body weight in fat. And then the scientists said, all right, this was significant. Why did it happen? And they look at the food journal that the participants had, and they found out that these people ate more or less 350 calories less per day, intuitively, just because their meals were now closer together. So if you add calories in your fasting window, you are missing the point of the practice. But then comes the question, so can I add coconut oil or butter to my coffee? Because you know, that doesn't raise insulin in all that conversation. Well, it depends on the goal that you have behind intermittent fasting. If you do intermittent fasting for fat loss, then that fat loss depends on the reduction of calories. In this case, coconut oil is not going to be an option because even though it's just fat, it still has calories. But if you're doing fasting for other reasons, you want to decrease your insulin levels, you want to decrease inflammation, you want to improve longevity, and you don't really care about fat loss, then coconut oil is something that you can add to your coffee because it doesn't spike insulin. Mistake number three is going crazy with food. And here there's that famous compensation. You know, you fast for 16 hours and you're proud of yourself and you feel like, I deserve a reward. I'm gonna have pizza and beer and ice cream, which I never have. This is also when you start to miss the point. If you go. A few weeks ago, I did a video about how to burn fat, the easiest strategies to burn fat. And I talked about a kitchen analogy. It's more or less how you put food inside the fridge or inside the freezer at home. When you empty your fridge, this is then when you start emptying your freezer. Your freezer is more or less like your fat storage storage. So until the fridge is not empty, it's unlikely that you start pulling food from the freezer until your glycogenic storages are not empty. It's harder for your body to start pulling energy from your fat cells. So this is. Imagine that you go grocery shopping, you fill up the fridge, you fill up the freezer, and then you don't do grocery shop anymore. Now you empty the fridge. At some point, you start pulling fast food from the freezer, but then you do a massive, epic, huge grocery shopping so that you refill the freezer, you refill the fridge, and there's even leftover there's food that you need to leave on the floor because there is no space. This is more or less what happens when you compensate the amount of fasting with really high calorie foods. You deplete glycogen, you burn fat, but then you put more in some on top of this. So when you do intermittent fasting, try not to add high calorie foods to the types of food that you eat, not to overcompensate the amount of fasting that you do. And this leads to mistake number Four, which is the opposite is eating too little. You know, the opposite side of the spectrum is when you do fasting for 16 hours, and then when you are eating, you have a bowl of soup and lettuce. You know you're still hungry when you're eating. This is not intermittent fasting. This is a continuous starvation. And so what happens is that your body gets sluggish, and then you have headaches and your stomach hurts, and then you push through, and then you start losing hair, and women lose period. And a lot of other adverse effects happen. And this is because you're increasing the level of stress and in the body because you're eating too little. But then comes a day that you had a hard day at work, and you arrive at home, you open the fridge, and you see that someone ate your lettuce. This is when you lose your cool. You know, just to avoid burning the house down, you go outside and you say, you know, let me just go to the food truck. You get a burger, and the burger tastes amazing because you're so deprived. And then you eat the burger, and then you say, might as well just get some ice cream. And then goes the night, but it was Friday. And then he said, you know, let's just continue throughout the weekend. Now we lost it. When you starve your body for too long, you break all the hormonal balance of the body, and that creates a lot of stress in the body and deprives you of wise decisions. So when you fast, you fast, but when you eat, eat, you eat. How much should you eat? You don't need to eat until you are exploding, but you eat until you are satiated. You don't need to be hungry during your feeding window. And then finally, we have our fifth mistake, that is having empty calories. So I just told you that when you have intermittent fasting, you don't change more or less what you eat. Get ready. I'm gonna say the opposite. Now, there's a difference between calories and nutrients. If you imagine that you have a car and the car needs gasoline to work, this is more or less what calories are to your body. If the gasoline is over, the car stops working. If the body doesn't have energy, doesn't have calories, it also stops working. But then the car also has other things like air in the tire or oil in the engine. This is more or less like micronutrients, vitamins and minerals, your body, you know, if the car doesn't have air in the tire, it still works, but it shakes a bit. There's a bit of noise and it breaks down little by little, maybe a couple of years from now, then it collapses. The body works more or less in a similar way. You give it calories, it still works. If you don't give it minerals and vitamins, it shakes a bit, you know, it hurts a bit. Over the course of years, it breaks down a little bit. At some point, it collapses. And the foods that give you calories and nutrients are usually the natural foods. Think vegetables, fruits and lean protein have nuts and seeds and all these kinds of things. And usually highly industrialized processed foods are types of food that are empty calories. They give you only gasoline, but they don't give the air in the tire. So here I want to show you two examples of two different meals that have the same amount of calories. One of them is comprised by natural food. You see here fish, and you see sweet potato, and you see vegetables, and you see a banana as a dessert. And also you see a lot of these green bars. This represents the amount of vitamins and minerals that this meal is giving to your body. Now, the second meal here is the same amount of calories, the same amount of gasoline, but it's made of cookies, which is usually empty calories. And then you see that all those bars of vitamins and minerals are empty. So one meal is giving you the feeling of being satiated and also is improving your health. The other meal can lead you to health issues and increase your craving for food. So these are the five main mistakes that I want to make sure you are clear about them in the beginning and they are taking too much of a big jump in the beginning. Having calories when you're supposed to fast, or going crazy with food when you're eating, or having too little food when you're supposed to eat, and finally going with empty calories. Next week, we are going to talk about exercise and cardio in the following video. In a future video, we're gonna go back to intermittent fasting. And I wanted to talk about the secret tips to optimize your practice. So if you start intermittent fasting now, in a couple of weeks, you're going to receive the tips to take your practice to the next level. So subscribe to the channel. You're going to know when next video is up, and I see you in the next one.