It was the morning of March 3rd, 2020, a sunny beach day in Florida, when with eyes wide with fear I looked at my husband and said “Sam, half a million Americans will die from this virus, we need to pack up the dogs and drive home to Pennsylvania and hunker down.

As a health professional and researcher, I had studied the 1918 Spanish flu and knew that this “novel” virus attacked more than just the lungs, as the 1918 virus had done. I knew this was going to be horrendous.



The Start of a Difficult Year

We drove home that day, straight through, stopping only to relieve ourselves and the dogs, terrified of getting infected at the rest stops. The lockdown began and the Covid toll started to weigh heavily on my mental health. My three grown children were living in New York City. At this time, the city was experiencing unprecedented and catastrophic suffering and death. I begged my kids to leave Manhattan and seek refuge here at our home in Pennsylvania, torn between whether to risk exposure to me and my husband (who has an underlying medical condition that predisposes him to severe Covid illness) or provide safety to my kids.

Too Many Painful Goodbyes

At the same time, I was worried about my extraordinarily healthy 97-year-old mother, who lives alone in her apartment in Pennsylvania, but has aides who I knew could potentially infect her. My father-in-law was dying from Lewy body dementia at his home nearby, so I worried about him and my husband’s mental health, as he had just lost his mother 9 months before. My father-in-law died in May, an unspeakably horrific event—there was no funeral, just the immediate family, masked up, standing in the cemetery on a cold, rainy day—watching his casket being lowered into the ground by masked gravediggers.

Finding a Creative Outlet

In the midst of this overwhelming stress, fear, anxiety, and depression I got an email from my literary agent asking me if I would be interested in writing a dummies book on intermittent fasting. As an accomplished author of three traditional health and wellness books (Random House), I was unsure whether I wanted to partner with Wiley and the Dummies franchise. Both the advance and the royalty rate were certainly going to be lower than for my other books. However, I was passionate about the topic and knew that perhaps taking on this project would be just the medicine I needed to help me cope with the most difficult year of my life. A creative outlet that could help distract me from the unbearable reality of life.

Dummies Template for Writing

I signed the contract and was thrown into the whirlwind of Dummies writing, a world with rules and regulations miles apart from the guidelines I had previously adhered to during my traditional book writing experiences. I was going to have to speed write and enter all my words into the Dummies Microsoft Word Template. (A Dummies book has a very strict style that one must match when writing content.)

An Overwhelming Sense of Stress

I was immediately assigned an editor, instructed to immerse myself in the complicated format and told to start writing and to send my table of contents and sample chapter to my editor asap. I did the assignment, and my editor returned my work with pages and pages of markups and criticism. I reacted with an overwhelming sense of fear, anxiety, confusion—in short—a mental meltdown. (With the current pandemic, so many previously mundane aspects of our daily lives now trigger exaggerated stress responses.) I emailed my contact at Wiley and screamed (in all caps) that I never had to format my previous books before, I never had the extensive rewrites before, and I needed to step away from the project. I simply couldn’t bear the stress.

Saved by the Book

Both the project manager and my editor calmed me down, told me not to worry about the formatting and to just write. I felt better and proceeded to immerse myself into researching and writing the book. I discovered in my long days of writing and researching an escape, a healthy way to alleviate the stress and depression, a way to cope. I found the dark pandemic days more bearable, life more livable when I became laser-focused on what I am passionate about. Of the four books I have written, this one is my favorite, because writing this one saved my sanity. I hope you enjoy reading the book as much as I enjoyed writing it. Intermittent Fasting for Dummies is now available on Amazon.

WHAT IS INTERMITTENT FASTING?

Definition: Intermittent fasting is currently one of the most popular health and fitness trends in the world. It is not a diet, per se, but an eating schedule—plans tell you when to eat rather than what to eat. Intermittent fasting involves abstaining from eating for a set amount of time, before eating regularly again. Most plans have you fast for a certain number of set hours per day and then eat during another set number of hours. Others have you fast for a full 24 hours, on certain days of the week. Intermittent fasts are short-term fasts that never have you fast for longer than a 36 hour period, you go for long periods of time without eating (sometimes 24 hours, sometimes 16 hours, even 36 hours—depending on your plan of choice).

Why try it? New research studies have shown that this way of eating may offer numerous health benefits such as weight loss, fat loss (especially belly fat), metabolism boosting, disease prevention, and increased longevity. Furthermore, advocates claim that an intermittent fasting program is much easier to maintain than traditional, highly restrictive, calorie-controlled diets.

What are the different methods? There are various methods of intermittent fasting, and people will prefer different styles. Read on to find out about five of the most popular ways to practice intermittent fasting:

The 16:8 method: The 16:8 method is the simplest version of intermittent fasting. The rules for this diet are simple. A person needs to decide on and adhere to a 16-hour fasting window and an 8-hour eating window, every day.

The Warrior diet: This is a more hardcore version of the 16:8 method of intermittent fasting. In the Warrior diet, one fasts for 20-hours and confines eating to a 4-hour window, usually in the evening. Some versions of the Warrior Diet allow small amounts of fruit or vegetables to be consumed during the fasting period.

The 5:2 diet: This plan has you eating standard amounts of healthful food for 5 days and reduce calorie intake on the other 2 non-consecutive days of the week. During the 2 fasting days, men generally consume 600 calories and women 500 calories.

Alternate Day Fasting: Alternate day fasting is quite an extreme form of intermittent fasting, where people fast for a full 24 hours every other day.

Eat-Stop-Eat plan: Implementing the Eat-Stop-Eat intermittent fasting plan is relatively straightforward. You simply choose one or two non-consecutive days per week during which you abstain from eating for a full 24-hour period.

As you can see, there are many ways to do intermittent fasting. You need to know that there is no single plan that will work for everyone. Your best bet is to try out the various styles to see what suits your personal lifestyle and preferences.

Who should not try intermittent fasting? Intermittent fasting is not be suitable for everyone. People with health conditions, including diabetes, must speak to a medical doctor before attempting any form of intermittent fasting. Individuals with eating disorders, pregnant or lactating women and children should NOT practice intermittent fasting.

Remember, intermittent fasting can be a very healthful lifestyle. However, for the best results, it is essential to eat a nutritious, plant-based diet during all your eating windows. The biggest mistake most people make when practicing intermittent fasting is to have an unhealthy junk food-fest during their eating windows—do that and you negate all the health benefits!