Why Is This Course 6 Weeks Long?

There are two reasons we built this course around six weeks. The first is to stay with you long enough that this way of eating becomes a genuine habit. The second is to give most people enough time to fully complete the first phase of adaptation.

The habit piece lands right around now. It’s fairly common consensus, and one of the few things we’re not turning on its head, that it takes about 28 days for something to become a habit. By the end of this week, you’ll have spent nearly a month consciously restricting carbs and tracking everything you eat, which means you now have real awareness of your intake and the ability to adjust it toward whatever result you’re after.

If you’ve kept exercising through adaptation, you should be feeling noticeably better day by day. I felt that improvement firsthand, my running got easier as my energy climbed and my weight came down. Even if you haven’t been active, you should still notice more energy and quicker movement day to day. Mental clarity becomes more pronounced too, and it stays consistent through the day instead of rising and falling with your insulin and blood glucose swings.

This is also a good moment to look back through your tracking and start spotting patterns, correlations between weight loss stalls or shifts in how you feel. You may not see clear trends yet, but they will show up over time. By the end of week six, most people are well adapted and clearly on the path to lasting health.

Do You Really Need to Eat 3 Meals a Day?

As this way of eating becomes second nature, it’s worth rethinking another assumption: you don’t actually need three meals a day. Most of us grew up being told to eat three meals, sometimes with snacks in between. That advice existed because a high-carb diet causes sharp blood sugar highs and lows, and eating constantly was the only way to avoid crashing.

Once you’re no longer eating that way, the crashes stop, and the need to eat constantly disappears with them.

What Is Intermittent Fasting?

Humans were never designed for constant access to food. In a natural environment, long stretches without eating, sometimes days, were normal, and our bodies are built to handle that well. Fasting simply means going without food, and everyone does it every night while sleeping. “Breakfast” gets its name from breaking that overnight fast. Intermittent fasting is just an extension of that idea: gradually widening the window when you don’t eat and narrowing the window when you do.

This isn’t about eating less. It’s about eating the same amount of food in a shorter window. A common starting ratio is 16:8, fasting 16 hours and eating within an 8-hour window. If your last bite is at 8pm, you wouldn’t eat again until noon the next day, then finish all your calories before 8pm again. Most people find two meals a day is plenty once they adjust, and some extend further to 18:6 or even 20:4. I’ve personally landed on one meal a day around 5pm most of the time. Occasionally I get a bit hungry around 2pm and have a small snack, usually biltong and macadamia nuts, though it often feels more like I need a break from work than genuine hunger. Outside of that, I never feel hungry.

What Are the Benefits of Intermittent Fasting?

• Reduces inflammation and oxidative stress

• Improves blood sugar and insulin sensitivity, which supports reversal of type 2 diabetes, better weight control, and sharper mental clarity

• Boosts Human Growth Hormone (HGH), improving healing and recovery, skin tone, and significantly reducing arthritis symptoms while supporting overall anti-aging

• Raises blood leucine levels, a branch chain amino acid (BCAA) with anabolic effects that support lean muscle mass, better muscle tone, and faster recovery from injury or intense effort

The video below covers these concepts in more depth. Get familiar with them this week, and feel free to experiment a little, we’ll dig into intermittent fasting more seriously next week.