Longer fasts have taught me one thing I didn't expect: I couldn't tell the difference between being hungry and being stressed. Not until I had no choice but to sit with it long enough to find out which was which. I didn't used to question hunger if I’m being honest. My approach was something along the lines of: I feel hungry → I eat. Waiting felt… unnecessary. If food was there, if the feeling was there, done. The realization came during my very first 3-day fast back in 2022. At the time it felt like I was embarking on some really bizarre niche experiment. Who doesn’t eat for 3 full days?! My culture (Lebanese) is so food-focused I didn’t dare mention the experiment to any of my friends for fear of being subjected to an intervention (flatbread included). Back to that first fast: by day three a significant portion of what I had been registering as hunger in the days before had just gone quiet. Not suppressed, just registered. Noted. Moving on. When that happened I didn't know what to make of it. If I was genuinely hungry on day one, how was I less hungry on day three? And then gradually it started to make sense, because what dropped away wasn't actual physical hunger. It was everything else I had been calling hunger that wasn't. The expectation of eating at a certain time. The habit and association between a particular hour and food appearing. The reach for a snack when I was stressed, tired, or when some task felt harder than I wanted it to feel. All of that had been arriving in the same package as real hunger, with the same feeling (kind of) and the same urgency. And I had been treating all of it as the same signal requiring the same response. Fasting forced me to sit with the sensation long enough to actually tell them apart because then there was no other option. The discomfort was there but the food wasn't, and eventually the discomfort started to reveal itself for what it truly was. The bastard. On most normal eating days now I can notice the difference. Reaching for something because I'm genuinely hungry feels different from reaching for something because I'm bored, or avoiding something I don't want to think about.

Fellas, new video is up. Four things I've learned running multiple three-day fasts over four months: ownership, hunger, preparation, and re-entry. It's live in the Classroom, and the guide's there if you need to download it separately. If you've ever white-knuckled your way through a fast and wondered why it felt so hard, this one's worth watching. If you want to work through this directly with me, I've got a couple of spots open for 1-on-1 coaching. Drop me a DM. Onwards. /George

Not skipping them entirely, just finding myself choosing a lighter version on certain days. One that doesn't leave me wrecked for the next four hours. I only fully noticed it last week. I was planning my day: clients in the morning, business work in the afternoon with training sandwiched somewhere in between. And I caught myself looking at the program, seeing what was scheduled, and thinking: not that one today. Lemme replace it with something I can recover from faster. But I didn't frame it that way in that moment. I framed it as me being smart about energy management. Listening to my body. Training sustainably. All of which sounds reasonable. All of which is also partly a story I was telling myself to avoid discomfort. Here's the actual situation. I coach clients every morning. It’s physical work. I'm switched on, I'm present, I'm moving barbells, weights, and sometimes the clients themselves around if the session's hard enough. By the time I get back and sit down to work on my business, my battery’s already at 53% (mentally and physically). And what I've learned recently is that if I go and do a genuinely hard training session in that window, the afternoon just doesn't happen the way I need it to. What usually happens then is I sit down to work and the quality of my focus is garbage. And I’ve been in this long enough to tell the difference between a body that's been pushed to its limit and a body that's been worked hard but has something left. So I started making adjustments. Sensible ones like being flexible with the program or “managing output” across the day. And somewhere in those adjustments, I started avoiding the sessions I actually need. The hard ones. The movement that made my knee squeaky two weeks ago. The sled push whose whole purpose is to kick my ass at the end of the workout. The kind of things that hurt now but pay dividends later. This is a thing that happens to those who have more than one demanding thing going on. And I'd argue that's most of us in our 30s and 40s. You're not a full-time athlete training for a competition where performance is the only variable. You have a job, or a business, or both. A relationship. Maybe kids (in my case expecting in about six weeks!).

Video 2 of the Lift & Fast free course is live in the Classroom under 'FREE COURSE Lift & Fast'. This one covers what intermittent fasting actually is, how it works, the different fasting protocols, and the most common concerns. Below the video you will find the Fasting Window Finder, which is a short questionnaire that gives you your recommended eating window based on your life & schedule. Go through it and drop your window in the comments. Curious to see what everyone lands on. Haven't had the time to make Video 1 (what the course covers) so it'll drop in the next couple of days. P.S. Have you done any sort of fasting beore

Fellas - tomorrow I'm starting a planned 3-day fast (4 if I'm grooving). This will be for the second week in a row as part of a consecutive 5-week series of 3-day fasts. My goal is to cut weight from body fat from 91kg to 86 kg (roughly 11lbs or 0.8 stone for my American and UK friends) while still training 4x week and retaining as much muscle mass as possible. I'll be posting progress photos and my weight along the way to keep myself accountable and so you guys can see the results. If you have any questions in the meantime, leave a comment below. Cheers, /George