Why Fast?

Why fast?

I’ll be the first to admit that when I got to the end of Dr. Jason Fung’s The Obesity Code and saw that his big key to hacking one’s body to circumvent the weight loss/regain loop was fasting, I thought “oh, there is no way in hell!” Along with, “really? Starving ourselves? That’s your big solution?”

Here’s the thing, though: he’s right. There are a number of reasons why and I’ll try to keep them short and easy to understand!

First off, reducing calories alone doesn’t work in the long run. In the short run, over a few months, it definitely can! But the body really prefers to keep its status quo, so if you start eating only 1800 or 1500 or 1200 calories per day, it will simply adjust and start spending less energy, even doing the same things that were burning more calories in the past. The body’s natural instinct is to maintain the status quo, even if that status quo is completely unhealthy. I used to work at a bank, so financial terms work for me: in essence, many of us have built up a long-term investment of fat and are only ever spending the interest (the blood sugar). What we want is to start burning the actual capital. This is really hard to do when the body itself actively resists being changed, particularly when we put it into a caloric deficit. It will actively strive to not only gain back what was lost, but gain even more, just to be “safe” – no matter how much weight we should actually be losing! And the worst irony of it is that the more a person weighs, the more their body will resist this change.

Intermittent fasting is a great way to circumvent this cycle and keep the body from settling into the new “normal”, aka whatever calorie limit you’ve chosen for yourself. Eating any food will cause more insulin to be made, so the obvious solution is to just stop eating for awhile so that the body can burn through its blood sugar stores and start burning fat for fuel instead.

A lot of people think that fasting is a completely crazy idea and refuse to even think about trying it. The truth is that most people in the privileged, developed world have never gone so long without food that they’ve never even experienced what it’s like to be in a fasted state. I started intermittent fasting after Easter this year, so it’s been about six weeks now and I have to confess that I genuinely love it. The biggest deterrent for most people is hunger: people have a huge fear of feeling hungry. I’m going to talk about hunger in my next post, but let me just say this: the hunger is worst during the first 24 hours, and even then it comes and goes in waves. After 24 hours, you’re essentially in the clear. Dr. Fung talks about an experiment that was done where a man fasted for over a year – 382 days, specifically. Throughout that year, the man gained more and more energy and became increasingly healthy. He drank water, took a multivitamin, potassium, and yeast and nothing else. A lot of people have said “I could never fast”, yet they’ll admit that they’ve never tried. Believe me, you can. You’re probably just afraid of being hungry.

There are a bunch of different protocols (fasting schedules) to choose from. This is a really good, quick overview, but if you’re interested in getting started or just trying it out, you can just give it a google and you’ll come up with a lot of information very easily! The main protocol I follow is the 24-hour fast which I typically do about 3 times per week. You start your fast after supper on Monday, say, then fast through the night (yes, you get to count those hours, when we normally fast anyway!), fast through breakfast and lunch on Tuesday, then eat dinner at about the same time as you did on Monday. Other popular options are the 16:8 regimen, where you fast for 16 hours every 24-hour period and limit your eating to an 8-hour window. You can make this more extreme with a 20:4 ratio. Some people follow the 5:2 plan, where you eat normally (whatever you’ve established as “normal” for yourself!) 5 days every week and limit your caloric intake to 500 on the other two days. The 16:8 and 5:2 plans are the lightest/easiest options, but also less effective. Ideally, you need to fast for a minimum of 16 hours before fat burning starts. And you can definitely go longer, too! A 36-hour fast would mean skipping all three meals in a day, three times per week. 42-hour fasts mean going from after supper on Monday until mid-afternoon on Wednesday. This is the longest one I’ve tried so far, and honestly it wasn’t bad at all.

Here’s what you need to know:

•      What you can eat/drink: well, for eating, the answer is nothing. If you’re fasting, that means you’re not eating. As for drinking, the recommended options are: water (still or sparkling, as long as nothing else has been added), tea (any kind, though green tea contains mild appetite suppressants, contains tons of antioxidants, and can help promote metabolism and weight loss), coffee (a small amount of milk or cream is considered okay, but no sweeteners of any kind) and bone broth. I have made bone broth exactly once. It was time-consuming and didn’t taste great, but I’m willing to try it again. I also sometimes drink powdered chicken bouillon – just make sure that no sugar has been added!
•          What are the cons? There aren’t many. I do get mild headaches while fasting sometimes, but I also stop noticing them pretty quickly. The best way to avoid these is to keep yourself well-hydrated! Occasionally, around the 30-hour mark, I get a little dizzy. This also goes away. Hunger is the main con, but the thing to remember here is that hunger comes and goes in waves. It’s not a constant. All you have to do is ride out the wave. And have another cup of tea!
•          What are the pros? There are tons. You’ll lose weight, for one. Fasting, unlike other weight loss plans, is completely free. You don’t have to buy anything, do anything, spend time on anything. It’s a not-doing of something, rather than a plan which you have to work into your busy life. It’s also totally flexible. You got invited to a fancy lunch with your company on a day when you’d planned to fast? Fine, fast on a different day! You’re going away for the weekend and want to relax and eat out with your friends/family? Go for it and resume your fasting plan afterwards. You don’t have anything on and want to try a longer fast? Again, go for it. A lot of people find the 24-hour plan one of the easier ones to work into their schedules because skipping breakfast saves you time in the morning, then you don’t need to necessarily take an eating break for lunch, and you can still eat dinner with your family or whatever you usually do in the evening. Eating is inherently social and many people would find skipping dinner with their families difficult to do. The point is that you can mix and match your fasting protocols to suit your life and schedule, which makes it one of the easiest things to incorporate into your life!

There’s so much more that can be said about fasting but I didn’t want this to get too long! If you have questions, put them in the comments and I’ll do my best to answer them!