Fast & Bear It guides
How to Make Intermittent Fasting Easier
Willpower is the wrong tool
Most people fail fasts around the same spots: late morning on a workday, or late evening on the couch. Both failures come from treating fasting as a staring contest with your own hunger. The fix is structural. Move the hard hours to where life distracts you, and make the remaining time visible so your brain can see progress instead of absence.
Hunger arrives in waves that crest and pass within about half an hour. If you can name the wave and outlast one crest, the next hour is usually easy.
Seven tactics, in order of impact
One, anchor your window to sleep so at least half the fast happens unconscious. Two, front load water: a large glass at every hunger wave. Three, keep black coffee or plain tea in the rotation, they blunt appetite honestly. Four, salt your meals normally, because a lot of early fasting misery is just sodium. Five, fill the last hour before your window opens with something engaging. Six, do not break the fast with junk, since a bad first meal makes the next fast harder. Seven, make the fast visible, which is where a tracker stops being a stopwatch and starts being a motivator.
Turning the fast into a climb
- Give the hours a shapeIn Fast & Bear It, your fast is a mountain and Growls the bear climbs it in real time. The abstract misery of hour 13 becomes a spot on a trail, two flags from the summit.
- Collect on the way upFlags light up as you pass checkpoints. Tapping them earns coins, which is a small dumb pleasure that reliably beats opening a food app.
- Care for somethingThe app nudges you to give Growls water, and you drink too. Accountability by proxy works better than it should.
- Cash in at the summitFinish, plant the flag, get the share card, buy the bear a sweater. Tomorrow the mountain is there again, and by then you are a little bit better at climbing it.
The quiet secret
Every experienced faster eventually learns the same thing: the fast is easiest when you are not thinking about food, and hardest when the only thing in the room is the clock. Change what is in the room. A bear on a mountain is a silly answer, and it works.
Make hunger a mascot
The fasting timer with a bear and zero subscriptions.