Daily Life WellnessHealth, Fitness & Life Wellness for the Average Joe

If one of the three takes a nosedive, then I have to seriously question whether or not it’s something worth pursuing.

Examples: If a weight loss protocol is working…but makes you perform and feel like hell otherwise, is it worth it? And, unless you’re an elite and/or professional athlete, does it really make sense to boost performance at the gym or on the field…if your overall health suffers as a result?

Enter the great ongoing intermittent fasting experiment…

What’s This Fasting Thing All About?

If you spend any time at all reading about the paleo/primal/ancestral diet, you’re bound to cross paths with the notion of intermittent fasting as a health tool. Defined as “abstaining from food” fasting fits in neatly with the paleolithic idea of nutrition: As example, let’s say you’re a dude trying to survive out on the savanna 30,000 years ago. In order to eat you’re going to need to either kill your food or harvest something growing nearby. If nothing is around to kill or harvest…you go without, at least for a while.

Bingo! A paleolithic fast!

While fasting was certainly unintentional for our ancestors, the thinking is that our bodies actually evolved to handle — and even benefit — from some severe caloric restricition from time to time.

Why would anyone want to do this…intentionally? (Aside from religious reasons.)

Two of the chief reasons people swear by…is as a way to “lean out,” and for it’s “cleansing” or “detoxifying” benefits.

I did my first fast maybe 10 years ago, for three full days. While I can’t remember for sure…I think it was just water for those three days, but it may have been fruit juice and water. (At the time I had a kick-ass juicer that would just inhale everything from carrots to apples…then spit it out as juice milliseconds later. Pretty cool, but a bitch to clean.)

In any case I tried it for it’s potential detoxifying benefits, not that I was all that “toxic” to begin with. It just made sense that my body would need to rid itself of “impurities,” or so I was informed. The thinking was that if my body isn’t expending resources processing food, then it can take a break and toss out the bad stuff that had accumulated over time.

Sounds reasonable, right?

Let me tell you this: it…was…hard. I went from the Standard American Diet (SAD) one day…to zero diet at all for the next three days. The first two days I was craving everything I saw that even resembled food. I’d drive past a McDonald’s and want to storm the place just to get my hands on the McNuggets. And I remember all the justifications my brain would feed me to eat “just a little” of something.

The third day wasn’t so bad, from what I can recall. I remember feeling a lot lighter and the cravings weren’t nearly as bad. But make no mistake, I felt a whole lot better once I ate that first “break-fast” meal.

From a look/feel/perform perspective I can’t say that there were any noticeable improvements after the fast. So, was it a failure? I wouldn’t say so. It was worth experimenting with, at least for the discipline involved.

These days I don’t buy into the whole body cleansing thing. My belief is that, assuming proper or near-proper diet, the body is fully capable of “cleansing” or “detoxing” without the crutch of a 3-day (or longer, as some recommend) fast.

But that doesn’t mean a much shorter fasted period can’t have benefits.

Martin Berkhan (of the Leangains blog) is a die-hard proponent, fasting 16 hours per day. Berkhan’s contention is that the optimal fat burning window is between 12 and 18 hours during the fasted state. His results speak for themselves, though I would never make the claim that fasting daily is best for everyone. You have to tinker with it yourself to know for sure.

And Berkhan isn’t the only proponent of short term fasting. Among the paleo crowd that I follow, short term fasting is commonly agreed upon as beneficial to overall health — though I don’t think there are any definitive, all-encompassing standards as to how to go about it. And, given how wide-ranging a topic this is, I don’t think there ever will be.

I’m experimenting with a Berkan-like approach right now a few days a week — just to see what happens. 16 hours isn’t as difficult as it sounds at first blush. You sleep in an unfed (fasted) state, obviously, then just wait until lunchtime to have your first meal of the day…but…I’m not just forfeiting those calories I would have taken in at breakfast. I’m still squeezing in a normal (for me) caloric load into those 8 hours. Given the smaller window of food intake, the process does require some meal planning logistics.

Of course you can’t just eat anything during those 8 hours. But, assuming your diet is properly dialed in, you may be able take advantage of some fat burning potential during the morning that you otherwise wouldn’t have realized.

We’ll see how it goes…