A Primer on Intermittent Fasting

Readers, once again, thanks for indulging me while I take a short break from writing, and please enjoy this post from CK's archives. See you next week with (finally) a new post!
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One of the more interesting dietary topics I’ve been learning about over the past several months is the concept of the fasting window, and how intermittent fasting can help you achieve weight loss, eliminate body fat, and improve your body’s overall health and fitness.

Remember, humans only started eating three square meals a day relatively recently. And it’s only over the past century that humans began eating three carb-heavy meals a day.

In contrast, consider a Paleo-era human, genetically identical to humans today, yet built to survive, even thrive, in an environment where food was periodically scarce. A Paleo-era human would periodically go many hours, sometimes days, without eating at all. Which brings us to some of the key central concepts behind intermittent fasting:

1) Our bodies were not designed for the consumption of regularly timed, full-size meals.

2) Our bodies are actually designed for occasional periods of fasting.

3) Our bodies benefit from these occasional periods of fasting.

Bonus! 4) Based on my experiences, intermittent fasting actually isn’t all that bad or even all that hard to do.

A disclaimer. I am not an expert in these areas. Not even close. My goal for today’s post is merely to talk about my own experiments with intermittent fasting. If you’re curious about attempting your own intermittent fasting experiments, or if you’d like to learn more about this domain, be sure to look over the various resources at the end of this post. There’s plenty of reading material there to get you started.

A 17-hour fasting window
So, with that as background: what, then, is a fasting window, and what does it do for you?

Simple: it’s just a period of time during which you don’t eat. And this fasting period causes your body to burn its own body fat through a process called autophagy, where the body in effect metabolizes itself in a way that helps our cardiovascular health, our fitness and our body composition.

Like I said, I’ve been experimenting with intermittent fasting, and I’ll share an example from my own experience of a recent 17-hour fasting window. And while it may seem like a really long time to go without food, it’s actually not as big a deal as you’d think.

First, I had an earlier than normal dinner, finishing eating at about 6:00pm, perhaps an hour earlier than typical for us here at CK. I also made sure the meal was predominantly protein-based. I did my regular post-dinner things: reading, relaxing and so on, but didn’t snack, consume alcohol or ingest anything other than water. Then, I went to bed around 10:00pm.

The next morning I got up at 6:30am, but instead of eating breakfast at my normal time (around 8:00 or 8:30am) I deferred breakfast until after my workout. At 9:30am I went to the gym and did my usual workout, which lately includes things like squats, deadlifts, some light running and other weightlifting exercises. When I got back it was just after 10:30am. I then waited about a half hour, and at 11:00am, I ate two eggs and a dollop of peanut butter, a meal containing about 30 grams of protein and plenty of satiety factor to carry me well into the afternoon.

So, with my simple breakfast at 11:00am, I had just completed a 17 hour fasting window--the time difference between 6pm the night before and 11am the next day.

During this time, my body first obtained fuel from my meal from the night before. At some point, however, it began extracting the fuel it needed from my body’s own stores of body fat. Which is the whole point of all of this in the first place.

What was most striking about this 17 hour fasting window, shocking even, was that I was never hungry at all, thanks to two things:

1) a high-satiety, low-carb meal the night before,
2) the fact that working out makes your hunger temporarily disappear.

I only really started to think, “hey, it might be kind of nice to eat something” at around 10:45, just a few minutes before I actually ate.

One more thought. Every time you sleep through the night, or at least avoid creeping downstairs and raiding your fridge in the middle of the night, you execute a fasting window of around eight hours. Which means the easiest way to apply intermittent fasting is to incorporate your sleeping period, but then add a couple hours of extra fasting on either side. Start by eating a slightly earlier dinner and deferring breakfast a little the next day. This can get you to a simple ten- or even twelve-hour fasting window quite easily with minimal changes to your routine. Try it.

Once again, we humans weren’t designed to eat every few hours--as much as we tend to get hungry with that kind of timing and think we need to eat. We certainly weren’t built to eat regular, full-size meals consisting of carb-heavy processed foods. And, in an unfortunate case of dietary circularity, it’s the carb-heavy foods themselves that put us on a hunger roller-coaster, making us think we need more food every few hours.

Finally, I’ve repeated this intermittent fasting experiment many times in the past few months, with fasting windows ranging from 12 hours to 19 hours, to see what the results would be. At what point I feel unwell? Would I ever experience severe hunger?

The answers, shockingly, were never and no. I experience some modest sensations of hunger once my fasting window gets beyond 16 hours, but nothing severe and nothing I couldn’t handle. Further, it was interesting to have a chance to observe those mild-to-moderate sensations of hunger. If anything, they were good tests of my Stoic principles, which made me all the more grateful and appreciative of the food I later ate.


Read Next: Minimum Viable Progress


Resources/For Further Reading:
1) The New Evolution Diet: What Our Paleolithic Ancestors Can Teach Us about Weight Loss, Fitness, and Aging by Arthur De Vany, a pioneering thinker of Paleo eating and fitness.

2) Man 2.0 Engineering the Alpha by John Romaniello and Adam Bornstein. Extraordinarily useful (though male audience targeted) book on fitness and diet with excellent discussions on fasting techniques.

3) Antifragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (the entire book is useful, but specific to fasting see pages 365-369).

4) Highly useful four-part series on various aspects of intermittent fasting at Inside Tracker: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4.

5) See also CK’s ragingly positive review of Arthur De Vany’s The New Evolution Diet

6) CK on how to apply “Antifragility” to our diets--and eat better for a lot less money.

Carbs and the Feeling of Hunger

Another factor that I believe plays a huge (yuge!) role in the psychological experience of hunger: The proportion of carbs in your most recent meal.

The problem with carbohydrates is they generally offer very little satiety per calorie. This is entirely separate from all the other problems carbohydrates present to our body: insulin production, hunger roller-coaster, a quick hit of blood glucose followed by cravings for more, and so on.

Years ago, I used to eat a much more carbohydrate-centered diet. Unsurprisingly, I was hungry--a lot--and that hunger was often accompanied by all sorts of physical and psychological symptoms: I would get nervous, my stomach would growl at an astounding volume, I'd get the jitters, sometimes I'd even get even fearful... sometimes I'd even start sweating. I believed I had to have something to eat, right away! And preferably something starchy or sugary, because I thought that was what my body needed to get my blood sugar "up."

Little did I know I was just getting right back onto the proverbial hunger roller-coaster.

After enough years of this went by, I'd become trained, Pavlov-like, to connect the feeling of fear with the feeling of hunger. Yep, fear. Because I knew what was coming, soon, after I experienced the feeling of hunger--that weak, dizzy, jittery, low-blood sugar feeling I would get if I didn't eat something every three or four hours.

Today, I eat a diet much more heavily centered on fats and proteins. Unlike carbs, proteins and fat offer far more satiety per calorie, take longer to metabolize, and they don't put the human body on an insulin/hunger roller-coaster. And on this less carb-centered diet, I regularly execute fasting windows of twelve, sixteen, even twenty hours with no fear and no problem, and only occasional, passing emotions of hunger. And even these passing feelings don't always happen to me all the time.

Of course, I didn't know any of this back years ago when I followed the government's completely upside down Food Pyramid and ate a heavily carb-centered diet. I was hopelessly naive about concepts like satiety or the hunger roller-coaster. So when I experienced "hunger" I actually thought it was the real thing... and feared it.


READ NEXT: "Learn to Live on Lentils..."


How can I support Casual Kitchen?
Easy. Do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site! You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.

Psychological Hunger... Compared to the Real Thing

And.... we're back! I'd like to thank readers for indulging CK's one-month hiatus while I spent a month in Poland attempting to learn my first Slavic language. Dziękuję bardzo!
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If you've ever heard someone say "I'm starving!" take three minutes to watch this monologue by comedian Louis C.K.

Let's start off by just spitting out the truth: Hardly anyone is ever really "hungry" in the genuine sense of experiencing starvation. Like Louis C.K. says, if you ate today, you really shouldn't say you're hungry.

But then again, we do feel hungry. It's a feeling, and it feels real. In fact, it feels so real that we almost always obey it by eating! Come to think of it, one way to think about obesity is to see it as an unlucky intersection of three things: wide food availability, our survival instinct, and the strong emotional experience of the "feeling" of hunger.

So, if you want to really learn about the feeling of hunger, if you want to learn how to sit with the feeling--even to get comfortable with it, instead of reacting to it or fearing it--I urge you to experiment, gradually, with intermittent fasting techniques.

We all know, in the logical part of our brains, that humans can easily go days without eating. Days. Now, we're finding mounting evidence that occasional fasting is actually healthy for the human body. And the entire discipline of intermittent fasting is built around this steadily growing body of evidence.

What I've found surprising in my experiences practicing intermittent fasting is how fasting helps you explore the emotional side of hunger. Over the past several months I've felt a lot more around the edges of the "feeling" of hunger. I've learned it simply isn't what I thought it was, and I've learned to differentiate it from true hunger. The two are most definitely not the same.

Even when I've really pushed myself and attempted fasting windows of twenty or twenty-one hours, the psychological feeling of hunger has become an interesting experience for me, and not something I react to with fear or panic, like I most certainly would have in the past. (Hang onto that thought--I'll talk more about it in next week's post.)

I've encouraged readers here to experiment with intermittent fasting, and I want to encourage it again. It doesn't just offer health benefits, and it doesn't just help you burn body fat. It teaches you not to fear the feeling of hunger. That alone makes it worth it.

Now, instead of saying, "I haven't eaten since 2:00. I'm STARVING," you might find yourself merely thinking, "I haven't eaten since 2:00." You won’t feel the need to tack on the (attention-getting?) phrase I'm STARVING at the end, because it doesn't merit being said.


READ NEXT: Book Review: The New Evolution Diet by Arthur De Vany


How can I support Casual Kitchen?
Easy. Do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site! You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.

A Primer on the Fasting Window and Intermittent Fasting

One of the more interesting dietary topics I’ve been learning about over the past several months is the concept of the fasting window, and how intermittent fasting can help you achieve weight loss, eliminate body fat, and improve your body’s overall health and fitness.

Remember, humans only started eating three square meals a day relatively recently. And it’s only over the past century that humans began eating three carb-heavy meals a day.

In contrast, consider a Paleo-era human, genetically identical to human today, yet built to survive, even thrive, in an environment where food was often scarce. A Paleo-era human would periodically go many hours, sometimes days, without eating at all. Which brings us to some of the key central concepts behind intermittent fasting:

1) Our bodies were not designed for the consumption of regularly timed, full-size meals.

2) Our bodies are actually designed for occasional periods of fasting.

3) Our bodies benefit from these occasional periods of fasting.

Bonus! 4) Based on my experiences, intermittent fasting actually isn’t all that bad or even all that hard to do.

A disclaimer. I am not an expert in these areas. Not even close. My goal for today’s post is merely to talk about my own experiments with intermittent fasting. If you’re curious about attempting your own intermittent fasting experiments, or if you’d like to learn more about this domain, be sure to look over the various resources at the end of this post. There’s plenty of reading material there to get you started.

A 17-hour fasting window
So, with that as background: what, then, is a fasting window, and what does it do for you?

Simple: it’s just a period of time during which you don’t eat. And this fasting period causes your body to burn its own body fat through a process called autophagy, where the body in effect metabolizes itself in a way that helps our cardiovascular health, our fitness and our body composition.

Like I said, I’ve been experimenting with intermittent fasting, and I’ll share an example from my own experience of a recent 17-hour fasting window. And while it may seem like a really long time to go without food, it’s actually not as big a deal as you’d think.

First, I had an earlier than normal dinner, finishing eating at about 6:00pm, perhaps an hour earlier than typical for us here at CK. I also made sure the meal was predominantly protein-based. I did my regular post-dinner things: reading, relaxing and so on, but didn’t snack, consume alcohol or ingest anything other than water. Then, I went to bed around 10:00pm.

The next morning I got up at 6:30am, but instead of eating breakfast at my normal time (around 8:00 or 8:30am) I deferred breakfast until after my workout. At 9:30am I went to the gym and did my usual workout, which lately includes things like squats, deadlifts, some light running and other weightlifting exercises. When I got back it was just after 10:30am. I then waited about a half hour, and at 11:00am, I ate two eggs and a dollop of peanut butter, a meal containing about 30 grams of protein and plenty of satiety factor to carry me well into the afternoon.

So, with my simple breakfast at 11:00am, I had just completed a 17 hour fasting window--the time difference between 6pm the night before and 11am the next day.

During this time, my body first obtained fuel from my meal from the night before. At some point, however, it began extracting the fuel it needed from my body’s own stores of body fat. Which is the whole point of all of this in the first place.

What was most striking about this 17 hour fasting window, shocking even, was that I was never hungry at all, thanks to two things:

1) a high-satiety, low-carb meal the night before,
2) the fact that working out makes your hunger temporarily disappear.

I only really started to think, “hey, it might be kind of nice to eat something” at around 10:45, just a few minutes before I actually ate.

One more thought. Every time you sleep through the night, or at least avoid creeping downstairs and raiding your fridge in the middle of the night, you execute a fasting window of around eight hours. Which means the easiest way to apply intermittent fasting is to incorporate your sleeping period, but then add a couple hours of extra fasting on either side. Start by eating a slightly earlier dinner and deferring breakfast a little the next day. This can get you to a simple ten- or even twelve-hour fasting window quite easily with minimal changes to your routine. Try it.

Once again, we humans weren’t designed to eat every few hours--as much as we tend to get hungry with that kind of timing and think we need to eat. We certainly weren’t built to eat regular, full-size meals consisting of carb-heavy processed foods. And, in an unfortunate case of dietary circularity, it’s the carb-heavy foods themselves that put us on a hunger roller-coaster, making us think we need more food every few hours.

Finally, I’ve repeated this intermittent fasting experiment many times in the past few months, with fasting windows ranging from 12 hours to 19 hours, to see what the results would be. At what point I feel unwell? Would I ever experience severe hunger?

The answers, shockingly, were never and no. I experience some modest sensations of hunger once my fasting window gets beyond 16 hours, but nothing severe and nothing I couldn’t handle. Further, it was interesting to have a chance to observe those mild-to-moderate sensations of hunger. If anything, they were good tests of my Stoic principles, which made me all the more grateful and appreciative of the food I later ate.


Read Next: Minimum Viable Progress


Resources/For Further Reading:
1) The New Evolution Diet: What Our Paleolithic Ancestors Can Teach Us about Weight Loss, Fitness, and Aging by Arthur De Vany, a pioneering thinker of Paleo eating and fitness.

2) Man 2.0 Engineering the Alpha by John Romaniello and Adam Bornstein. Extraordinarily useful (though male audience targeted) book on fitness and diet with excellent discussions on fasting techniques.

3) Antifragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (the entire book is useful, but specific to fasting see pages 365-369).

4) Highly useful four-part series on various aspects of intermittent fasting at Inside Tracker: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4.

5) See also CK’s ragingly positive review of Arthur De Vany’s The New Evolution Diet

6) CK on how to apply “Antifragility” to our diets--and eat better for a lot less money.