The Daniel Fast Food List

The list

Where the lists disagree

Two things, and only two, and they’re the reason people spend an evening reading food lists instead of cooking.

Coffee. Nearly every published guide puts it out. If you drink it daily, taper over the two weeks beforehand rather than stopping on day one — a caffeine headache in the first week is the most common reason people give up early.

Oil. Some lists allow a little olive oil for cooking. Others treat it as refined and leave it out. Both are defensible.

Before day one — “Replace Before You Eliminate”

This is the part almost no Daniel Fast guide tells you, and it’s the part that decides everything.

Most people treat the twenty-one days as pure subtraction. Everything they know how to cook is gone on the morning of day one, and nothing has arrived to take its place. By Thursday they’re standing over the sink eating raw carrots. Nothing is wrong with them — nobody sustains a way of eating they experience as an absence.

• Set up the salad box. One afternoon, prep all your vegetables at once into separate containers — greens, colored vegetables, tomatoes on their own, onions on their own. A salad bar in your own refrigerator, and dinner takes under five minutes. The whole method is here.
• Learn three meals, not twenty-one. Make each one once in the week before you start, so day one isn’t also the day you’re learning to cook.
• Taper the coffee. Two weeks of half-strength beats one very bad Tuesday.
• Cook once, eat twice. Something already made in the refrigerator is most of the secret. Willpower at six in the evening is not a real thing.
• Put fruit where the sweet thing used to be. Dates, frozen grapes, a baked apple.
• Shop before day one, with a list, having eaten.

The three meals worth knowing

Not recipes. Shapes. Each one holds for days.

• A pot of lentil soupOnion, carrot, celery, garlic, lentils, tomatoes, water, whatever herbs you have. Better on the second day than the first.
• A grain bowlBrown rice or quinoa, roasted vegetables, beans, and something poured over it — tahini thinned with lemon, or blended tomato and herbs. Different every time and the same every time.
• Oatmeal with fruitSteel-cut oats cooked in water, with fruit cooked into them until they’re sweet on their own. Nuts on top. Breakfast for a week, made on Sunday.

Day twenty-two

The fast is built to end. That’s what makes it a fast. But there’s a difference between the fast ending and the food ending, and most people don’t notice they’ve decided the second thing until it’s already happened.

If something shifted in week two — people most often mention sleep, digestion, and the afternoon holding together — the fasting didn’t do that on its own. The food had a good deal to do with it.

Daniel wasn’t trying to lower his cholesterol. He set something aside so he would notice he was waiting — and every time he sat down and the rich food wasn’t there, he remembered why. Whatever else you do with the three weeks, we’d keep that part.

Blessings,
Paul & Ann

Download the printable version (PDF)