"Are You Fasting?"

“Are you fasting?”

The question caught me off guard, despite the fact that I knew to expect it.  I was checking in at the lab to have some “fasted” blood work done.  It was 8:00 in the morning and I hadn’t eaten since my early dinner the night before.  So, yes, for the lab’s purposes, I was fasting. But the nurse’s question still took me aback.

Having struggled with disordered eating in the past, I have a knee-jerk response to any question about fasting.  I don’t fast.  Fasting is what anorexics do, and I’m not one of them. I like food too much.  Fasting is how beautiful girls become hollow shells of themselves, obsessed with the scale and hating themselves.

Fasting is not necessarily a guaranteed road to anorexia.  (However, I don’t think you can become anorexic without fasting, which is something to chew on if you are prone to disordered eating and consider it.)   After I read  Starving Your Way to Vigor in the March 2012 issue of Harper’s Magazine, I briefly  considered taking up fasting as a way to tackle my body fat.  It almost sounded easy.  But for me, I think a long-term, serious fast (assuming I could actually abstain from food that long) would lead me into a certifiable eating disorder and probably a clinical stay.  Extended fasts are not right for me.

Intermittent Fasts, though, are a different matter and they’ve been getting a lot of attention lately.  Proponents of Intermittent Fasting (or “IF”) claim that there are numerous benefits to periodized, regular fasts.  Rather than fasting for a week or a month at a stretch, intermittent fasts last only between 16-36 hours, depending upon which approach you employ.  Proponents of IF claim that in addition to weight loss (due to the reduced intake of calories), intermittent fasting provides many of the benefits associated with extreme calorie restriction including improved longevity, increased insulin sensitivity, better stress responses and improved mental clarity.   They reject the “myth of starvation mode – the idea that not eating will slow your metabolism” as a misunderstood effect of the thermic effect of food upon metabolism ( i.e., the only reason your metabolism seems to slow down is because you stop eating and your body doesn’t need to expend energy digesting it. )   And they strongly emphasize the importance of learning what REAL hunger is, as opposed to eating when we THINK we’re hungry.  There’s a difference.

What is emphasized in all of these IF approaches is strength training.  It appears that intermittent fasting, combined with weight lifting, allows one to fast without losing muscle mass.  Lifting weights, heavy weights, three times a week is recommended.

For a great overview of different approaches to IF, check out the Precision Nutrition Experiments with Intermittent Fasting by Dr. John M. Berardi.  In it, Dr. Bermardi subjects himself to different IF approaches and tracks his own results and experiences.  One thing which appears clear about fasting – it is more than a diet, and you will experience side effects of not eating.  Based on his experiences (and those of Steve Hendricks’ in the Harper’s article above), most fasters seem to go through some uncomfortable side effects at the start, most of which seem to lessen or transform into positives over time.  

There are two IF approaches with which I am familiar: Eat Stop Eat by Brad Pilon and LeanGains by Mark Berkhan.  

Eat Stop Eat (ebook) is simple.  Fast one day a week.  Eat normally until dinner, and then don’t eat again for 24 hours.   During rest of the week, follow your normal eating routines and workout routines (being sure to include strength training).  Just pick a day and make it your fast day.   Brad Pilon also spends a lot of time in his e-book explaining IF and the reasons it makes sense. 

LeanGains (website) is a little more complicated.   Fast for 16 hours, then eat for 8 hours.  Then fast again.  You do this every day.  Mark also spells out a somewhat complicated plan for how to eat during the 8 hours, and suggests working out in a fasted state is beneficial if you take BCAAs during training.  I tried his plan once, but it didn’t take long for me to feel like I was just skipping breakfast every day (and breakfast is my favorite meal.)  Besides his plan being complicated, his website is slow, so that I get annoyed with LeanGains.com every time I visit it.

After I left the hospital laboratory with a Band-Aid on the inside of my elbow and my official reason for a fasting to be over, I considered it.  When I got to work, I opted for black coffee (no cream) and kept considering it.  When a co-worker offered to pick up lunch, I waved him off: “No, I’m good,” and kept considering it.  At the end of the day, I went to the gym for a short treadmill run, then to the grocery store to get dinner.  By then, I was just going with the flow.  And when I finally took a bite of a strawberry, a sweet, luscious strawberry at dinnertime, 23 hours since my last meal, I realized that doing Eat Stop Eat is really pretty easy.  Maybe I’ll do it again next week.