Fast. Feast. Repeat.: The Comprehensive Guide to Delay, Don’t Deny® Intermittent Fasting

Book Preface

“Thank you for telling me about Delay, Don’t Deny intermittent fasting! It is truly life changing!”
In my nearly twenty years as a primary care physician, I’ve heard similar en‐thusiasm on occasion, but since I’ve been advocating for intermittent fasting—specifically Gin Stephens’ Delay, Don’t Deny: Living an Intermittent Fasting Lifestyle—I hear this kind of excitement regularly. Recommending Gin’s first book has been the single most effective intervention that I, as a primary care physician, have ever made. In my patients’ experiences, it has been more ef‐fective than any medication, program, or diet. It has also become a lifestyle for me, one that has allowed me to lose weight, have more energy, and—in an amazing non-scale victory—erased all joint pain. IF is an exceptionally liv‐able, flexible lifestyle. I have done it while at home and also while I have trav‐eled and celebrated: truly FEASTING and Fasting. I have lived this lifestyle for almost two years now, and have no intention of ever going back to “three squares and snacks”!

Gin has done it again—building on the science that she presented in her first book, and continuing to instruct readers about how to make Intermittent Fasting a livable lifestyle! Fast. Feast. Repeat. is a highly informative, readable guide to both the science behind intermittent fasting and the methods and tricks that make an intermittent fasting lifestyle both practical and easy. She presents the complex scientific concepts—like the teacher she is—by breaking them down in a way that is very easy to understand. You may even feel like you’re having a discussion with Gin when you read this book: her writing style is so warm and personal and conversational.

Gin’s 28-day FAST start is the perfect way to ease into and adjust the fast/feast pattern—letting your body begin to heal and become good at tap‐ping into its fat stores. Her Clean Fast Challenge will convince you that clean fasting is the key to making IF a lifestyle and not a diet. In Fast. Feast. Repeat.

you’ll find new information, clear instruction on clean fasting, and more in-depth descriptions of styles of fasting—including alternate-day fasting, 18:6, 19:5, OMAD and others—than she’s ever delivered before.
In December 2019, the New England Journal of Medicine published a re‐view article about the many health benefits of intermittent fasting that not only solidified my conviction about its benefits, but was very specific in its declaration that IF is NOT just about calorie restriction: “the benefits of IF are dissociated from its effects on weight loss. These benefits include improve‐ments in glucose regulation, blood pressure, and heart rate; the efficacy of en‐durance training; and abdominal fat loss.” In everyday language, this means that while we often come to IF for weight loss, we remain intermittent fasters for the broad health benefits: lowering blood pressure, reducing risk of dia‐betes/improving diabetes and reducing abdominal fat, the accumulation of which has long been known to be detrimental for health. The article goes on to mention the benefits related to neurodegenerative disorders, cancer risk re‐duction, longevity, dyslipidemia, insulin resistance, and inflammation. This means that IF is the “magic pill.” It is what we’ve all been looking for. For the first time in my professional life, I’ve been able to regularly de-prescribe med‐ications for my patients. It is no longer unusual to lower or eliminate a pa‐tient’s blood pressure medication or diabetes medication or cholesterol med‐ication. If the pharmaceutical or diet industry could do any single one of these things consistently, it’d be a home run in terms of sales and profit. For‐tunately for us, Intermittent Fasting is free, and it can do all of these things, not just one!

If you are just curious or ready to dive in with your very first fast—or if you’ve been a longtime faster—you will find a great resource in Fast. Feast. Repeat. What are you waiting for? Join the health revolution!

—Julie Sandell, DO, Family Medicine Physician, Cedar Falls, Iowa