Today is the beginning of my fifth consecutive week practicing intermittent fasting and a gluten-free vegan diet, as I wrote about previously in this post. It is not easy, but it is certainly a whole lot easier than I thought it would be. It has also become easier week after week and my growing conviction in the practice has enabled me to stick with it without much temptation to quit or make significant alterations to the original plan. One small alteration that I have made is removing Sunday dinner from the "on" period that I defined as Sunday dinner through Friday lunch when I started. I found that it is much easier for me to make the first meal of the "on" period a smoothie on Monday after the first of five consecutive 16-hour dinner-to-noon fasts for the week which passively initiates my "on" period. This change gives me the freedom to eat whatever I want for dinner on Sunday and that tends to be a more enjoyable way to close the weekend than with rice and beans.