By: Arthur Anderson
I received a lot of great questions about Intermittent Fasting and I wanted to follow up with some more discussion.
“Will Intermittent Fasting affect my diet?” Whether you follow Keto, Paleo, Zone, Whole30, Vegetarian, Carb Cycling or the Special K diet I have yet to find one that won’t work within an IF time frame. Probably the hardest would be the Zone diet because it want’s you to control the amount you eat at each meal and have 6 meals per day. In the IF framework all that really means is that you will have less time between meals.
Intermittent Fasting does not have strict rules like a Keto diet (<30g carbs/day). IF is a way of giving your body time to take out the garbage. You can IF everyday or you can IF once a week or you can IF once a month, find a routine that works with your schedule and abilities. A daily IF routine I find fairly easy 5 days a week when my schedule is routine. Weekends are usually not IF days because they are not routine. A once a week IF routine you might find easier to do on a Sunday and not eat until dinner. A once a month routine would be best accomplished with a 24 hour fast. Intermittent Fasting relates back to our very distant ancestors where during certain periods of the year there was an abundance of food and they ate from sunup to sundown. Other times of the year they may have eaten once a day. You don’t have to be perfect, or all in at 100% for IF to help your health.
“If I do such-and-such will my Intermittent Fasting stop?” Think of your body as a processing plant, converting food into useable resources. When you start to eat, actually when you get ready to eat, your body gears up for digestion by producing saliva, increasing the acid in your stomach, increasing bile production and starting up a myriad of other processes and hormone production like insulin. Once these processes start they don’t stop until your food has been digested, which can be several hours. That being said, adding a little creamer to your coffee or having a cup of bone broth for breakfast isn’t going set you body into full processing mode. But a cup of juice, or a soda, or a bagel will because of the high levels of sugar in these types of products.
Water is very important to consume during your Intermittent Fasting times. We forget how much water we get from the food we eat. For example an egg is 74% water, a sweet potato is 77% water and vegetables are often over 90% water. Combine the lack of ‘food water’ with exercise you can easily put yourself into a deficit situation, leading to dehydration.
Finally, I accomplished a 22 hour fast the other day. It wasn’t planned but the day started with a fasting blood draw in the morning, which led to errands afterwards and a 1 pm workout with the team. By 1 I figured what-the-hell let’s see if I can make it through the workout with eating. The workout was low cardio, high strength. I felt great, didn’t feel run-down. I had my only meal of the day at 4 pm. The next day I felt good, didn’t IF that day as I was a little hungry from the day before, but all-in-all it was an interesting experience.
I hope that I was able to answer some of your questions here.
Feel free to reach out to Arthur for more questions by emailing him, [email protected].