Fasting for 24 hours is not as difficult as you would think.
No really. Stay with me.
This comes in two steps.
The first is a common technique with intermittent fasters.
Plain and simple: You have to stop eating breakfast.
See, this is all about shortening the window within which you eat. (If you don’t know, fasting changes the way your cells burn food.)
So there you go. You are skipping breakfast like a champ.
Lunch is at noon. You take dinner between five and six.
All of your eating is being done within a six-hour window – and just like that, you are fasting for 18 hours of the day.
Once you have implemented this lifestyle change, fasting for 24 hours is easily doable.
All you have to do is skip dinner.
Skip breakfast as usual one day. Eat a normal lunch. Skip dinner that night. Sleep. Skip breakfast again the next day (as you always do). And then when you hit lunchtime, your 24 hours is complete.
Fasting is healthy, sure. But don’t obsess about it. I mean, I tend to be strict all week and eat whatever I want on the weekends.
Understand: Fast. Be healthy. But occasionally have a cheat day and eat breakfast and lunch too.
Everyone knows that fasting is a different experience from missing your dinner by accident or through poverty. Fasting asserts the will against the appetite—the reward being self-mastery and the danger pride: involuntary hunger subjects appetite and will together to the Divine will, furnishing an occasion for submission and exposing us to the danger of rebellion.
-C.S. Lewis, The Problem Of Pain (Amazon)