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, keep your sodium up, because a lot of early fasting misery is low sodium rather than hunger, and the fix is different depending on whether you are eating or fasting. 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, keep the remaining hours on screen, because a countdown you can check is easier to finish than an open ended stretch of time.
Where the salt advice actually applies
This is the tip that confuses everyone, because telling you to salt your food is useless advice when the whole point is that you are not eating. It covers two different windows. When you are eating, salt your meals normally instead of going bland and low sodium, since a day of under salted food is what sets up the next morning's headache. During the fast itself, salt has no calories and will not break your fast, so a pinch in a glass of water is fine, and it is usually what fixes the lightheadedness, headache, and flat tired feeling that beginners assume is hunger.
Nothing exotic is required. Plain table salt in water, or a sugar free electrolyte mix, covers it. If you have high blood pressure or your doctor has told you to watch your sodium, skip this one and ask them first.
Turning the fast into a climb
- See where you areIn 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.