IF is a daily eating program. Basically, keep your food consumption to within a time window. You can choose how long that window is. Some eat within 9 hours, don’t eat for the next 15, some just eat one meal a day. So for example, if your first meal is at noon, don’t eat anything after 9pm. If you eat breakfast at 9am, don’t eat anything after 6pm. Sleeping counts as fasting.
I’ve heard mixed opinions on coffee and tea. Some say they are okay without any sugar or milk in them. That makes sense as it’s mostly about keeping blood glucose down.
Controlling the peckish feeling is the hardest part. I find waking up and waiting to eat until dinner time is the easiest for me, because then I get tired and instead of eating, I just go to sleep. So a first meal around 4 or 5 tends to work for me. I wait to begin preparing dinner until I’m starving and the meal becomes the reward for having held off so long.
It’s easiest to begin with a wide window. Stop eating 3 meals a day, go to 2 within 9 hours. Then 8, 7, 6, and so on. Then you’ll just feel more comfortable eating one meal a day.
One more tip: Eat more than you think you should. Get STUFFED in your first meal. It’s counter-intuitive, but if you eat 1.5 times as much as you would in a normal meal when not intermittent fasting, but you only eat one, then you’ve cut your daily food consumption by 25%, and you don’t get hungry later.
Essentially, eat more in one meal than normal, so you aren’t as hungry later and you skip the second meal all together.
One meal a day really is the goal. That’s where I’m at and have been for quite some time. Now, hunger is just a feeling in my mind, but it doesn’t prompt me to eat.
Okay, one more. Drink water. When you get peckish, grab a glass of water. It’s a win-win. You drink more water and stave off a bit of hunger.
Good luck!!
Explaining intermittent fasting is difficult because it varies wildly. To a lot of people IF may be as mild as 16:8 (fasting for 16 hours, 8-hour eating window), 18:6, or 20:4. Some do r/OMADdiet where they only eat one meal per day. Others engage in ADF (alternate day fasting), where they eat a much smaller amount on the fasting day, or none at all, but eat normally the day after.
The “intermittent fasting” that you linked is 72-hour (3 day) water fasts, which is a bit extreme for a total beginner. But power to you if you want to jump into the deep end!
re: your question on drinks—unsweetened tea and coffee usually get the thumbs-up, usually black. Soda (unless it’s like Bubly or Lacroix) is more on the “avoid” list since artificial sweeteners in the diet ones can spike your glucose.