Anyone who hangs out with me knows that I can get pretty hangry at the drop of a hat. My husband bought me a T-shirt recently that had a picture of a lion leaping onto the back of a water buffalo, with the words "I'm Like This Hungry." Yeah...that's about right. I like to think about it more positively - I just love food. Food makes me happy. Food means family time, it means communion and fellowship and bonding with others. Half of my marriage is built on it.
Okay, I'm sort of kidding on that point. You get it though. I like to eat, which now brings me to the subject of this post - Intermittent Fasting.
Intermittent Fasting (IF) was a really interesting phenomenon to me. Fasting was a concept that I associated with religious faith, i.e. it was a way to show God that you can focus on something else besides yourself for a hot minute. In high school, I participated in a voluntary fast for charity called the 30-Hour Famine, and it was seriously the longest day of my life (I know, #firstworldproblems). I was hallucinating my friends as sandwiches by the end.
It seemed antipathetic from a fitness standpoint though. Wasn't it always better to "fuel the fire" and eat six small meals a day, lest your body go into the dreaded "starvation mode"?
I'm nothing if I don't like trying new things, even if they scare me a little. The general idea behind IF is to schedule a period of fasting, usually ranging from 12-24 hours, followed by a "feeding window" of 4 or more hours. An example of an IF protocol is the Warrior Diet created by Ori Hofmekler which uses a 20-hour fast followed by a 4-hour refeed.
Physiologically, the idea is that while you're fasting, your body's level of blood glucose significantly decreases, resulting in fatty acid oxidation. The hope is that with the lack of glucose, your body will then used stored fat as its energy source. In addition, once you do start eating again, you'll be more insulin sensitive (in very broad general terms, better able to process carbs and nutrients; Type II diabetes forms when you become so insulin resistant that your pancreas stops releasing it properly.*)
The easiest way to implement a fasting window would be to include the 8 or so hours you use to sleep. If you stop eating at 8 pm, go to bed, and skip breakfast, you've likely covered most or all of your fasting window right there.
This still presented a problem for me.
Pretty much the first thing I think about when I wake up is what I'm going to eat. Sometimes, the thought of it is the only thing that gets me out of bed. My brain says okay, you can't sleep anymore if you want to keep your job, but how about some bacon and eggs? And I'm up.
Breakfast, therefore, is quite important to me. I love breakfast food. If I could eat breakfast food for all three meals, I would. I've been known to eat dozens of eggs by myself in less than a month.
So it took me a couple months after I found out about IF to actually try it myself, because every day that I woke up thinking about it, the hangry took over and I ate a bunch of eggs, which I understand is the opposite of what you're supposed to do.
Besides my lack of self-control, another issue gnawed at me too. In my research for IF, there were a lot of warnings out there about the effects of fasting on women - in general, of the very few studies done on this subject, fasting worked great for men and tended to wreak havoc on women hormonally.
Here's a pretty good article on this issue: Shattering the Myth of Fasting for Women.
But there's something to be said about individual responses to things, though, so I decided to try it out - this was about two years ago.
I lasted approximately two weeks.
For most things, I would subscribe to the notion that you need to do it for at least a month to really get a good idea of what the effects are on your body. I just got too cranky and irritable and decided the pain was not worth the potential benefits. I imagine it may have been a hormonal response as well. I had trouble sleeping. I had a general lack of energy. I was hungry. You wouldn't like me when I'm hungry.
Here's the funny thing, though. After my failed experiment two years ago, I've changed a lot about my eating habits. I cut out a lot of sugars from my diet. I started eating a lot more vegetables, more good fat, less crappy carbs, and much less processed food. About five days a week now, I actually follow a pseudo IF protocol in that I don't eat until mid-morning or early afternoon, usually subsisting on coffee with cream and/or butter and even coconut oil (yeah I put all that in my coffee - don't knock it until you try it: Bulletproof Coffee). This is mostly pure fat, which mimics the effects of IF.
Why has this suddenly become okay for me, the hangry monster?
I believe it's because of the food I do eat. Because I'm more conscious of what I put in my mouth, I feel better for longer. I strive to eat good quality, nutrient-dense foods, which means I don't have to eat all the time. My perspective has changed. I've learned what foods satiate me, and I've learned not to be afraid of things I used to be terrified of doing, such as working out on an empty stomach or letting anything touch my coffee except more coffee (I drank it black for most of my life).
I realize all this is a bit unscientific and very personal to myself. However, my main point is that if you eat well, you can learn to incorporate weirdo ideas like fasting into your diet. I don't do it every day, and there are certainly days when I'm downing a delicious omelette in the morning and going out for pizza later (re: hangry days). I don't worry about it, though. I listen to my body, and I've learned that sometimes, it's telling me I don't need to eat for a bit. I can't get too angry about that.
Articles to consider:
The Intermittent Fasting Dilemma
Intermittent Fasting: Science and Supplementation
A Woman's Guide to Intermittent Fasting
*Caveat: I'm not a physician nor a dietician, these statements are all from my own understanding based on reading books and being good at Google searches.