The words “intermittent fasting” sure scare a lot of people. The word “intermittent” doesn’t register for most, and their thoughts skip right ahead to images of starvation and despair. This is why I prefer to refer to it by the less technical term “Not eating all the damn time”.
The fact that it’s not a marketable product doesn’t help it’s public image – you can’t really package and sell the concept of eating less frequently, so you’re not going to see snazzy advertising about it. Nor does it help that it comes along with some fairly terrifying terms like “autophagy” (self-eating – more on this later).
The truth is that as a culture we’ve become so accustomed to having a constant supply of food, and of food consumption as being the norm, that our default state (not eating all the time) has become unusual enough to require a special term for it.
This is especially concerning because there is fairly compelling evidence that suggests that not only are we not built to be locked in a constant state of consumption and digestion, it is actively harmful to us, no matter how healthy the food we are consuming. Our guts need breaks too.
Although I dropped the habit of taking snacks at any and all times a long while ago, I decided to give intermittent fasting a shot last November; I had not been taking care of my nutrition as carefully as I was previously and I was starting to feel it, so I thought a change of protocol wouldn’t hurt.
What intermittent fasting is
The idea of intermittent fasting is to split your time between a fasting window (where you do not consume any calories) and a feeding window (where you do). 16/8 (16 hours of fasting and an 8 hour feeding window) is a fairly common split, as is the One Meal A Day (OMAD) protocol. Some protocols go for full days, in which case a number of days of eating with no restriction are followed by a single day of full fasting.
Since OMAD was not that far from what I was doing anyway, I started with that. If you want to try it, I suggest starting with time windows you’re comfortable with, and slowly increasing the length of the fasting window. The amount of calories consumed should be the same as if you were not fasting.
During the fasting window, no calories should be consumed. There is a significant difference between consuming a small quantity of calories, and consuming none. Water, black coffee (with no extras) and green tea are fine.
A number of people prefer to go all the way and cut out any form of consumption, including water. This apparently works better and I am aware that the body can extract water from fat so it should not be a problem; I am simply not comfortable with the idea of drinking no water for extended periods of time, and since I don’t have to, that’s ok.
How it works
Now, how is eating x amount of calories in 4 (or 1) hour different from eating the same amount over the course of a day? Calories in are calories in right?
The difference isn’t so much in the calories themselves, but in how our body reacts to them. When you eat, your body releases insulin to tell cells to store the glucose from your food; this gets converted into glycogen or stored as fat. It also inhibits the use of fat as a fuel source, so while your insulin levels are elevated, you cannot burn fat.
The process is of course more complicated and insulin does a whole lot of other things, but for the purposes of this post, let’s just say that eating puts you in energy storage mode until all the readily available energy stored in your cells is used up.
Now, if you eat constantly throughout the day, you’re always topping up the insulin and glycogen, which constantly tells your body to store fuel. Again this causes other side effects, like increasing insulin resistance, but for now let’s focus on the fuel side of things; store, store, store.
If you take a longer pause before eating, you’re giving your insulin levels time to go back down to the baseline and your readily available glycogen to go down. This lets you start to tap into your reserves for energy.
As an added bonus, this state encourages autophagy; while this sounds terrible, it’s a good thing! Your body constantly recycles old or damaged cells whether you’re fed or not; it’s just when it’s fed, it can be very picky about what it chooses to replace; after all there’s plenty of material to go around. If you’re running on reserves though, your body will start looking for anything it can safely reuse, including deformed cells, anything it doesn’t like the look of or isn’t working optimally. This is the natural process which the body uses to repair itself, just running more efficiently.
All this is a very basic explanation. There’s a whole lot more to say about hormonal activity, but this high level view should be enough to get you started if you want to look up more. I’ll just finish up with some points about intermittent fasting, and some personal observations.
It’s about restricting feeding time, not calories
You still need to eat the right amount of calories for your goals (growth, maintenance or weight loss). It’s not a starvation diet, but neither should you overeat just because you’re limiting your feeding time. I needed to count calories (for the first time in my life, I have to add) in the first few weeks because I was accidentally undereating in the first few days, which is not great. Once you get used to packing it in in a shorter span of time, it becomes easier.
It does not lead to muscle loss
Limiting your eating time will not lead to muscle loss; it’s not going to happen as long as you’re still eating enough in the day. Muscle loss happens after prolonged calorie restrictions, not after a few hours.
There’s a great quote by Dr. Jason Fung about this; he says “If the body burnt muscle first, it would be a bit like storing wood for the fireplace, and setting fire to the sofa as soon as it gets cold.”
It’s not a full time commitment
If you head down this route, you don’t need to do this every day, or keep rigid military schedules; there’s a bit of leeway, which is why 16/8 is pretty common. It offers a lot of flexibility. Just make sure a little flexibility doesn’t mean total abandonment!
Some observations
Since I started this self-experimentation in November and I’m still at it, I have to say that I was very pleased with the results so far. December is always a tricky month where food is concerned, but I was rather surprised that I lost 10kg of weight between November and February with no other change in routine.
Although I did not take fat percentage measurements before I started, I did not experience any decline in performance when it came to training – the weights I can move still progressed at the same rate as before, so I am guessing that a significant amount of that weight loss was water and fat; this is also corroborated by the loss of a couple of inches around the waistline.
I had expected to experience more discomfort; there were some cravings, but no severe discomfort from hunger. After the first two or three days, even the cravings had mostly subsided.
Subjectively, I feel better; energy levels are great, although sleep is practically inevitable after eating. I am certainly more alert, and generally lighter. While I have made a few tweaks to the process (for example, I switched my eating window to 4 hours because I found it hard to fit all the food in a single meal), I’m planning to continue along this route for the time being.
Do you have any questions or experiences with intermittent fasting in any variation? Drop me a comment below and tell me what you think!
Header image: “Black and White Photo of Clocks” by Andrey Grushnikov. (Free to use: Pexels License)