It’s Tuesday morning and I’m getting ready for my weekly ritual, a cup of coffee with butter, a small amount of raw cheese, and a handful of macadamia nuts. It’s not a combination that I’d rank among my favorite things, and I’m really not even sure if I’d call it good. If I’m being honest though, this has become my favorite part of the week. This small and boring fat-based meal serves the singular purpose of transitioning from fasting to feeding, and given that I haven’t eaten a piece of food in 36 hours, it’s hard to express the excitement I feel leading up to having it.
This past New Years, I wrote a blog post detailing my journey in discovering and attempting to cope with a blood disease. I got sick in 2019, and then COVID hit just as I was starting to get the situation under control. As a result, I had a lot of extra time to explore tools I could use to keep myself feeling well, both through research and through testing concepts on myself.
I’ve known for a while now that time-restricted feeding has many health benefits, and I was doing some of it as long as four or five years ago. At that point I viewed it solely as a means of preservation, both for maintaining gut health and for keeping body fat in check. I’ve never really had gut problems and I’ve never really been overweight, so at best this was a secondary project that I only occasionally focused on. Throughout 2020, however, I started to hear more and more from doctors, scientists, and researchers (mostly through podcasts) about the expanding scope of reasons why fasting might be beneficial. And that was when I decided to start going entire days without food.
Prior to this year, I adhered to a semi-strict protocol of intermittent fasting, eating during an 8-10 hour window (usually from around noon to 8 or 10 pm) and then eating nothing for 14-16 hours until the next day. Towards the end of 2020 I started ramping this up to 18, 20, and even 24 hours, and I noticed that I actually felt better as the time passed, not worse. From that point, I got the idea in my head that going a full day without food would be a good thing to try, and after realizing how doable it actually was, I decided to make it a weekly routine.
The most detrimental day-to-day consequence of having the blood disease that I have is probably best described as chronic fatigue. There used to be days at a time where I struggled to get out of bed, but even now, there are multi-hour periods here and there that impact me to the point where I’m unable to get even the simplest tasks done. There is one day of the week where this essentially no longer happens though… Monday. When I haven’t eaten, I find that my energy level actually skyrockets, and I occasionally even struggle to sleep some Monday nights because I’m too wired. When extending the fast into Tuesday, I’ve found that the effect amplifies even further on the second day to the point where sleep doesn’t even feel like a necessity. It’s easy enough to level myself out with a cup of tea or a hot shower, but the fact that someone with debilitating fatigue can touch the complete opposite side of the energy spectrum amazes me each time I do it.
So why does this happen? The idea that food deprivation would create improved health, specifically through enhanced energy, probably seems pretty counterintuitive. One of the things that’s going on here is that eating does of course provide essential nutrients that are needed for energy, but digesting food is also generally detrimental in the short term, as it diverts energy to the gut to break the food down. It’s somewhat of a paradox, but that’s why we’re talking about “intermittent” fasting and not total starvation. The other mechanism at play is that hunger itself actually stimulates the sympathetic nervous system (the fight or flight response) which results in more alertness. There’s clearly a balance where taking breaks from eating food has significant positive effects, but obviously doing this for too long or creating nutrient deficiencies can pose its own set of problems as well. In reality though, it probably takes several days for fasting to cause real issues, and in the short run all of the side effects are psychological.
This isn’t to diminish the obvious problem, where being really hungry makes it quite difficult to focus on anything besides food. Even my own doctors have told me that they could never do what I do, because they can’t tolerate being hungry for that long. This seems to be only circumstantially true, however, because most people (I used to be one of them) have foods in their diets that are literally designed to ramp up hunger. Processed foods and specifically processed carbs and sugars create a rollercoaster of blood sugar spikes and crashes, and removing them makes it far easier to go long stretches of time without eating anything. Additionally, foods that are higher in fat (ideally healthy fats like olive oil, avocados, grass-fed dairy, etc.) have a satiating effect that keeps hunger in check as well. When all of this comes together properly, you still feel the sensation of hunger, but you are no longer consumed by it.
Whether it’s skipping food for full days or merely trying an intermittent fasting schedule, just about everyone has something to gain by eating less often. More stable energy is probably something most people want, but beyond that, there are clear changes to the immune system and to the brain and to countless processes in the body that are positively impacted when the burden of constant digestion is removed. The most obvious reason to eat less often is to limit body fat, but in reality, it’s just one of many in a long list of considerations.
One thing I hear from people all the time is that food is meant to be enjoyed, and having a highly restrictive diet makes life less fun. There’s surely some truth to that, but binge-eating artificially flavored foods is a dangerously excessive application of this concept. For those of you who are currently victimized by this incomplete way of thinking, I have something for you to try: Don’t eat anything for a whole day… then go eat some real food and notice how great it is. You may not like it as much as I like coffee and butter, but it’ll surprise you just how amazing food can be once you’ve actually gone some time without it.