Ever hear of intermittent fasting? If so, many other f-words likely lingered on your lips (maybe even escaped them) at the mere thought. For me, fasting brought up all kinds of terrifying thoughts: starvation, thirst, malnutrition, prison. (Seriously, it made me think of prison.) It also brought up an f-load of questions. Exactly how intermittent was it? 24 hours? Two days? Three days? (i.e. 36 hours, or 2,160 minutes!) How long could a person actually go without eating and still function? Did one lie in bed all day, groaning, while one’s muscles wasted away? Did one’s metabolism come to a screeching halt so that ingesting more than one banana a day afterward would lead to metabolic disaster?
In answer, The Complete Guide to Fasting by Jason Fung, MD, and Jimmy Moore, rocked my food world. The title sounds boring, but Fung and Moore keep it going with stories and studies about the benefits and How-To’s of fasting. After listening to the audiobook, even my husband got into it (and he likes food—part of why we stay married)!
A few of the benefits: Lower levels of insulin, lower levels of glucose (down from diabetic and pre-diabetic levels to normal), lower cholesterol, and reduced systemic inflammation. Improved mental clarity. Weight loss. Anti-ageing. Detoxification—to name a few.
But before I get ahead of myself, here were all the personal reasons why fasting sounded like an excellent health choice for anyone else but me:
1. I have two teens. If I’m the one preparing every morsel they put into their mouths, and starving them doesn’t seem like an option, legally speaking, wouldn’t food prep while fasting be a lawful form of torture?
2. I get bad headaches when I’m hungry. Headaches suck.
3. Exercising. I’ve worked hard for many years to maintain a consistent exercise routine, and, ummm…a 90-minute hike in caloric deficit sounds, well, brutal.
4. The shakes. Before I reduced simple carbs in my diet (about 5 years ago), I used to get shaky. Low blood sugar shaky. It would pounce without warning, and it was not pretty. I’d feel hangry, irritated, unable to comprehend words until food went in. Going without food could mean inviting the shakes back into my life. No, thank you.
But Fung and Moore made compelling arguments. They talked about preventing Alzheimer’s Disease. They talked about burning body fat for fuel (like, who doesn’t want that?!). They talked about the psychology of hunger, and how, surprisingly, not only is hunger often a psychological experience rather than a physiological one, but “practical experience with hundreds of patients shows that while they’re on an intermittent fasting regimen, they most often see their hunger diminish, not increase,” (p.67). And lastly, there was the undeniable. As a health coach, how could I ever recommend intermittent fasting if I wasn’t willing to try it? Ugh. There was no out. There was plenty of water. There was unlimited green tea or black coffee. There was bone broth (all permissible on a fast). There was the guy in 1973 who went 382 days with only water and supplements under the supervision of researchers from Scotland University. Surely, if he could fast for over a year and survive (even thrive), then I could give it a try. But which protocol? The 16:8 (16 hours of fasting, 8 hours of food)? The 24-hour? The 5:2 Diet? Alternate day fasting? 3-days? 6-days? How was one to choose?
Click here to find out more about the different protocols and which one(s) I chose.