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TRF Wars: Fasting For People Who Don’t Need Science
There is probably no faster way to start an argument online than attacking a noun-labeled diet. Carnivore, Keto, Vegan, Plant-based—if you send a tweet saying that one of these diets is terrible, your mentions are going to get flooded with angry people quickly. The science of nutrition and metabolic health shifts often, but most of the evidence is that humans need the nutrients in a very varied diet, and really, the only thing you can do wrong is beige-maxxing (Bread, butter, potatoes, cheese, etc). I have found that people also have firm opinions about fasting, which is strange because, to some degree, all human beings do it. Fasting is not really a “diet”, but the label of intermittent fasting or Time-Restricted Feeding is placed into the same category.
I am a devotee of Time-Restricted Feeding or intermittent fasting. My best success with various weight loss times in my life has always been joined by having a fairly strict eating window. Lots of things work for lots of people to lose weight and get their metabolic health back on track, but nothing has snapped my ass into gear like fasting. There are many different fasting styles, but my general plan at this time is to only eat from 10ish AM to 6ish PM. That is an eight-hour eating window with 16 hours where I only ingest water (or pre-workout in the morning). A reasonable question would be, “Why do you do this, or why does anyone fast?”
The reality is that this is a complicated question to answer. The data shows that fasting helps people lose weight. The “Why” of that weight loss is very much up for debate, but it is straightforward for me. If you aren’t eating, you aren’t eating. I could definitely wake up and have a couple of eggs or a bagel or whatever and then go off to exercise. That would be an additional 350 calories per day, which is around 2400 calories or almost a pound of energy per week. I’ve got enough body fat and stored glycogen to get through any physical exertion without needing food or immediate carbohydrates. I don’t feel particularly hungry when I wake up. So why eat? Outside of habit or societal norms, there isn’t really a reason for an overweight person like myself to NEED a morning meal.
There are also more esoteric answers to why people fast. One that I subscribe to in particular is that the cells in your body need time when they aren’t dealing with food to engage in autophagy. Autophagy is “a natural cleaning out process that begins when your cells are stressed or deprived of nutrients.” Healing the body at a cellular level isn’t at the forefront of most of our minds when we decide to start losing weight, but in the long term, it does make losing weight much more manageable. Diabetes and other consequences of being obese are essentially metabolic dysfunctions.
You’ll find scientists, influencers, or health/wellness people who tell you that isn’t true, that there are different reasons for fasting, or that fasting is dangerous. For example, a Harvard Med article says it is risky to go 16+ hours without eating. I sort of think all of that is bullshit because human beings have been fasting for religious reasons almost as long as humans have been around. We almost assuredly are good at fasting from our not-that-long-ago evolutionary history of being nomadic hunting folks where food was not always assured.
It should be pretty clear that I am not a doctor, not medically trained, and do not know anything outside of clicking around on the internet and reading some books about getting healthier, so fasting definitely could be risky for some people. What I do know is that it is very easy to get caught up in the high blood sugar cycle of feeling hungry every four hours and that the easiest way to escape that cycle is to limit the total hours per day I am ingesting food. Also, it is just a thermodynamic law of the universe that you will lose weight if you consume fewer calories than your body needs to function. This Total Daily Energy Expenditure calculator helped me set a rough goal of how many calories I should ingest daily to lose weight.
If you are straight up just subtracting a 400-ish calorie meal from your day, it is going to be a lot easier to expend more energy than you consume. Far from any scientific mumbo jumbo about cells or autophagy, I just eat less food when I shorten the window per day when I am eating. Maybe even a better benefit is simply changing your mindset around food and discipline. Some days (most days), I really want to slam an egg McMuffin when I am driving home from the gym. Why not, right? I earned it, I burnt the calories, I did the steps. Of course, that isn’t the program and not the relationship I want to have with food.
Building the mental resilience to know that you do not need food is a cool step in the journey. Over the years of over-eating and eating ultra-processed foods, I have tricked my brain and gut into thinking that they need much more food than they actually do. After months of restricted feeding times, I can pretty confidently say I never needed nearly as much food as I thought I did, even on very active days. Additionally, I get a nice dopamine reward if I feel hungry, knowing that my little cells are hard at work repairing damage to my body instead of having to break down the remnants of an Everything bagel.
If you are anything like me, you have definitely Googled “Weight Loss Hacks”, “Secrets To Weight Loss”, “Weight Loss Tricks”. Really, there are not any, which fucking sucks. However, if there were truly one secret/hat/tip/trick that I would give to anyone coming from a similar place to myself, it would be to at least try fasting to see how it works for you. ‘