Though that's also a self-limiting belief. It might seem lame the first week of going out to lunch with coworkers and sticking to water, but in my experience you get over it quickly. The fun part is the conversation, not entirely that everyone is spooning food into their acid sacs at the exact same moment.

You can also adjust your fasting windows to include one meal with family (as the person your responded to suggested, but you didn't actually reply to). Or only fast every other day. If you're fasting for a reason like to lose weight, then you'll have to decide if the goal is worth it to you.

It just depends entirely on your mentality. Some folks are much better at moderating than abstaining, others are the opposite. If you tell me to drink 10% less, I virtually cannot do it. If you tell me to never touch a drop of alcohol again in my life, I just say "bummer!" and get on with it.

Plenty of recovered alcoholics can be around family that drinks (responsibly). Smokers who quit don't have to run away whenever someone lights up in front of them. I quit both (with longstanding addiction issues), and within a few weeks I was able to join family dinners where everyone else drinks and my brother smokes. NBD.

If people can endure that, then people can still be social at mealtimes and just get used to drinking some water or tea or whatever while they fast. Or coffee, mmmmm. They might feel a bit put out at first during lunch, but then again might enjoy the looks they get during dinner when they get to chow down with abandon. The big thing would be waiting until you're comfortable with the fasting so you're not making everyone around you uncomfortable with your body language (or worse, complaining or otherwise drawing attention to it).

Fasting is not easy. If you didn't restrict calories before and now want to lose weight quickly, you have to make some sacrifices.

If your social and/or work life heavily depends on eating together it might be part of the "problem" of why you need to lose weight in the first place.

> If your social and/or work life heavily depends on eating together it might be part of the "problem" of why you need to lose weight in the first place.

This! My last boss used to be a "bon-vivant" guy, meaning he would particularly enjoy a nice meal with the occasional wine to go with it (please note this is pretty common in France) [0].

Two years after joining his team, I had gained quite some weight. I figured I had to eat less somehow, but I never had the impression that I was overeating. I also didn't want to skip to those meals with him. So I tried a few things:

* Pace myself with the wine. We would usually split a bottle among us. I actually enjoy wine, but don't particularly enjoy being tipsy, especially when I have to work. So win-win-win (see below)

* If there was some fruit available have that instead of cake, or skip desert altogether. Drinking the wine slowly leaves me with "something to do" while the others have desert, so they don't feel any pressure to hurry up.

* Go for more "filling" meals, meaning I looked for dishes with a bunch of vegetables. This would keep me full longer and I'd be less hungry in the evening, so also eating less. Another bonus is that I'd feel /really/ full and actually not want desert.

What I've found is that even though in the beginning the others would comment on my not having desert, they actually stopped having it themselves after a little while. The wine never actually went away, but we would occasionally only have a glass instead of a whole bottle.

The point is that I think people may feel there's a certain expectation to have a lunch a certain way. And it may be true in the sense that "it's common, so people expect it". But if you don't fully conform to it there doesn't seem to be any issue, pretty much no one seems to care [1] (except maybe if you think that you have to adhere to the expectation).

All this being said, I do appreciate that for people who enjoy nice meals it can be difficult to choose those "restrictions", especially when they're right in front of you.

[0] There never was any pressure to go along, especially since he was the kind to actively avoid talking shop at lunch. But, as the team would go out with him, I would have missed out on getting to know them. I should note that I'm not particularly outgoing and rather focused on my job, so random chats during the day wasn't exactly something I'd spontaneously do.

Most Muslims seem to manage it annually.

Because everyone they know is doing it as well, that is exactly OPs point. Muslims living in non-Muslim countries have a much harder time with Ramadan, I know this from personal experience.

Not really. They gorge themselves at night, so unlimited calories basically.

That’s true, and it sort of misses the point of Ramadan.

Exactly, but let's be realistic here: all that other eating between and all those meals that are not social meals - they can go.

> 14 subjects with metabolic syndrome who fasted (no eating or drinking) from dawn to sunset for more than 14 h daily for four consecutive weeks

it says no drinking as well, so not sure about the water, but I was surprised to read it, maybe they just meant drinks other than water.

Most IF practitioners say drinks to mean any caloric drinks. Plain coffee is ok to some and not others. Most think diet drinks are not ok because they can cause similar responses on the body as ingesting calories.

I IF from post-dinner to lunch every day, and only drink water and plain coffee.

I dislike eating. That’s a known thing about me. No one would bat an eye if I did exactly that - water should other eat.