Hello and welcome to this week’s newsletter.

My name is John Cassidy-Rice. I am the founder of the Professional NLP Practitioner and we’ve been talking about getting ridiculously early in the morning. Yes, 5 am. So, what we discovered is that it’s about passion, living life to the full, and I mean full tilt boogie, getting out of the dawn chorus? to celebrate the new day. So, it doesn’t come around by accident. I changed my diet. As we talked about the benefits, I’ve gotten up early in the morning. And I’ve been asked several times now, I meant to do it last week so I’ll do it this week, is what was the diet change that I made?

So, as I indicated a few newsletters ago, three or four years ago I found myself being a lot larger than I wanted to be. Now, I wasn’t concerned from a looks point of view, but my energy levels were going down and down and down. And what I really wanted to do was to make sure that I had enough energy to be around for my children. My youngest is eight years old and I’ve also got a grandson now. And I want to be around to be able to play with him and he’s now 15 months old. Time flies so fast.

And also training, if you’ve ever done any training to speak in public or record and those types of things take a lot of energy. So, I wanted to maintain that energy. So, the first thing I did was cut out sugar. I lost a lot of weight from doing that so that was a great move. And then I cleaned up my diet overall so really lots of veggies and lots of fruits, those types of things. And here’s my big breakthrough, I started playing with something called intermittent fasting. So, I tried a couple years ago, didn’t really get along with it. Hey, I love eating. What can I tell you?

Intermittent fasting

Intermittent fasting, if you haven’t come across it, is that you extend the fast that we all have every day. So, when you sleep, you’re fasting. You’re not normally eating, unless you’re a sleepwalker who likes to eat while they’re sleeping, that’s very rare. Rather than having breakfast in the morning, you’d have maybe breakfast at say 12 or 1:00 and that could be what’s called a sixteen hour fast. And I kind of didn’t really get along with that initially so I then moved out to doing what’s called a 24 hour fast. Now strictly it’s not that you fast for 24 hours and then you eat the next day. The idea is it’s one meal a day.

So, I went to only having one meal a day with the goal to eat for one hour a day but not eat the whole time. By the time you’ve prepared it, it’s an hour and a half. So just casually, it’s not reducing the calorie count, but just eating one meal a day so it was quite a large meal. And it was easier than I thought it was going to be. It really did make a difference. I found myself having more energy during the day, more focus, being able to concentrate. It was great.

And then, what I started to notice was this, hunger is a habit. So, when I used to have my breakfast in the morning, I would get hungry about then I would have a glass of water now and the hunger would disappear. And then at lunch time I would normally have something to eat during the middle of the day so I’d get hungry at that point but then it would go if I’d drink a couple glasses of water and just waited a little bit. So, I concluded, a lot of times the hunger signals are just habits. The stomach’s grumbling, we eat here. Why aren’t we eating? But just because we normally eat then doesn’t mean we’re actually hungry. So, that one meal a day, freed up a lot of time during my day but gave me that side effect of having to be able to get up early in the morning. Yeah, this is a great side effect.

5am Morning

Now, I’m not advocating this. I’m not saying that you’re going to have to go and do this if you want to get up at 5 am in the morning, there are other ways that we could get the energy to do that. I’m just saying this is what happened for me. So if you have any experience of intermittent fasting, or you’ve been on one meal a day for a while, I would love to hear your experiences. So, post your questions, your comments, and your experiences below. You’ll also find a transcript below as well. Have an outrageous week, full of energy and vitality and let’s join the dawn chorus and sing our song. Until next time, John.

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