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Fast. Feast. Repeat.
What It’s About
The complete guide to intermittent fasting from one of the world's most-followed teachers on the topic. Gin Stephens explains the science of clean fasting, the why behind autophagy, and exactly how to design an eating window that fits your life. Practical, evidence-based, and refreshingly free of fad-diet fluff.
Three Key Ideas
Insulin Drives Fat Storage
As long as insulin is elevated from frequent eating, the body cannot access stored fat, making traditional calorie-restricted diets hormonally self-defeating.
Clean Fasting Is Non-Negotiable
Water, plain black coffee, and plain tea are the only permitted items during the fasting window, as even flavored drinks trigger insulin responses that break the fast.
Hunger Adapts Over Time
After four to eight weeks of consistent fasting, ghrelin levels fall and appetite corrects itself, making the fasting window progressively easier to sustain.
Read a Sample
Fast. Feast. Repeat.
*Gin Stephens*
In the fall of 2015, a fourth-grade teacher in Augusta, Georgia, stepped on her bathroom scale and saw a number she'd been trying to escape for years. She weighed over two hundred pounds. She'd tried every diet: the low-fat programs, the calorie-counting apps, the meal-replacement shakes, the points systems, the vegetable soups, the prepackaged frozen meals. Each one worked for a while, and each one stopped working. The weight came back, and sometimes it brought company. Somewhere deep down, she had accepted that this was just how her body was, broken, resistant and fundamentally impossible to fix. The one thing she hadn't tried, and had never even considered, was not eating.
Gin Stephens didn't start intermittent fasting because she'd found the science. She started because she was desperate and out of options. A friend mentioned that some people were skipping breakfast and losing weight, and that was the entire sales pitch. There was no clinical protocol, no doctor's appointment, no biohacking conference. She simply stopped eating in the morning and waited to see what would happen.
What happened was that she lost eighty pounds and kept every one of them off.
Who It’s For
- Anyone who has tried multiple diets and regained the weight each time.
- Anyone who wants to stop counting calories, macros, or points and still lose fat.
- Anyone curious about the science of autophagy, insulin resistance, and metabolic health.
- Anyone looking for a flexible eating approach that works around a normal social life.
About the Author: Gin Stephens
Gin Stephens is a former classroom teacher who spent nearly three decades in elementary education before turning to intermittent fasting after years of struggling with her weight. She lost eighty pounds using the protocol she describes in this book and went on to found the Delay, Don't Deny online community, which has grown to over a million members.
She later earned a doctorate in education and left teaching to focus full-time on her IF community and her podcast, Intermittent Fasting Stories. Her first book, Delay, Don't Deny, was self-published in 2016 before a major publisher released the expanded version as Fast. Feast. Repeat. in 2020, which became a New York Times and USA Today bestseller.
