Experimenting with Fasting
I distinctly remember the first time fasting was brought up in conversation. While traveling to DC, I visited a friend that lived there. The first thing I noticed was that he looked much thinner than I last saw him. Of course I had to ask how he stayed so fit and he responded:
"I'm on the Whitney Houston diet - one meal a day!"
I was baffled and asked him all of the obligatory questions:
Is it hard?
Are you hungry all of the time?
How do you do it?
Do you feel like you are starving?
Once he responded, my biggest takeaway was that it wasn't hard for him and he wasn't hungry all of the time. This did absolutely nothing to make me want to try fasting - the idea was still too extreme to me.
Fast forward to the pandemic. I had a lot of free time to explore and learn about anything I wanted. I already adopted the keto diet and quickly found out that many who adopt keto also adopt intermittent fasting. As a result, I dug into the topic a bit more.
I'm not going to go into the details too much because I'm not a doctor and there are a lot of other resources out there but my biggest takeaway from what I read about fasting is as follows:
When you eat, your body has to process all of that food - and it's not a quick process.
When you stop eating (by fasting) it frees up your body to do other things like attacking inflammatory cells and other bad things that really have no place in your body.
Your body obtains energy from ketones which are derived from fat that is already stored in your body.
Because your body doesn't have a plethora of energy sources, your brain opts to preserve energy by only allow you to focus on one thing at a time thus enhancing your focus.
I told another friend about intermittent fasting and one day he responded,
"I starved myself like you told me to and I lost three pounds already."
I giggled because I'm not a proponent of starvation. Fasting is not starvation but it may feel like starvation to those who are not already on keto. I believe, and this is just my opinion, that it is much easier to adopt fasting habits when one is already in ketosis from a low carb diet. My experience is fasting with keto so I cannot vouch for fasting without keto.
With that being said, I successfully completed a 36 hour fast and only felt hungry a few times. The hunger quickly disappeared once I drank some sparkling water. I'm still in awe that I could complete a 24 hour fast let alone a 36 hour fast. Progress feels good! I added a screenshot of this experience below.
xx
