Thu, Mar-21-19, 07:09
|
 |
|
|
Plan: Muscle Centric
Stats: 238/153/160
BF:
Progress: 109%
Location: UK
|
|
My three-day fast: what happened when I tried Silicon Valley's latest health craze
Quote:
From The Telegraph
London, UK
21 March, 2019
My three-day fast: what happened when I tried Silicon Valley's latest health craze
Tom Ough
The reported benefits of fasting are so numerous and spectacular that I feel like a quack just listing them, but here goes. Raised fat burning! Lowered risk of Alzheimer’s! Longer life! Lowered insulin! Clearer thinking! Happier gut! Etc, etc, etc. It’s a full menu of bodily goodness, albeit the only full menu you’ll get your cold fingers on if you’re not eating.
The 5:2 diet is a form of intermittent fast that you've probably heard of and perhaps tried. Longer fasts, though, have gained some Silicon Valley trendiness recently without yet percolating down to the rest of us. In theory, if you're someone with good health and a few kilos of body fat, a 72-hour fast – by this I mean a water fast, in which you're allowed to drink – is probably safe and possibly desirable. Here's why: 36 hours is long enough for your body to start ketosis, which is the mode in which it uses fat for fuel instead of glycogen; 48 hours is long enough to stimulate autophagy, the cell-cleaning process that has been linked to longer life but is slowed by eating; and if you fast a little bit longer than that you'll still enjoy both of those benefits while also experiencing a sustained surge of muscle-maintaining growth hormone.
Presumably for these reasons, Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter, just did a 72-hour water fast. With a doctor's approval, I attempted the same.
My last meal was Tuesday dinner, a three-course restaurant meal with my friend Jen. In the style of a Death Row convict, I stuffed myself to the gills. If there had been prisoner-style arrows up and down my clothes, they'd have popped off. We finished dessert, which in my case was an avocado chocolate tart thing, at 7.59pm, and I spent the next sixty seconds smearing the last chocolately remnants off the plate. 8pm. No more eating.
Like many people, I tend not to get particularly hungry in the morning, so the first half of Wednesday was fine. I kept myself busy with a breakfast meeting, which in my case was just a "meeting", and hoodwinked my idiot brain into feeling fed by making myself black coffee before midday and then, in the afternoon, lemongrass tea.
These non-calorific drinks are considered fasting-compatible by Jason Fung, the Canadian nephrologist whose rigorous but entertaining books made him one of fasting's most well-known and persuasive modern advocates. He says obesity is a consequence not of overeating, but of the insulin resistance we slowly acquire by eating sugary, processed, grain-heavy food throughout the day.
Conventional dieting, he says, doesn't work unless we think about the timing of the meal as well as its content. If we limit our eating to a daily window of, say, eight hours, we can help our insulin production return to something like factory settings. If we go 24 hours without eating, even better. If we go even longer than that, well, the world record is 381 days. (He was a big boy, was Angus Barbieri, or he was to begin with; he checked into the Royal Infirmary of Dundee in 1965 weighing 207kg – 32.5 stone – of which he went on, with the help of coffee, black tea and multivitamins, to lose 125 kilograms – 19.7 stone.)
I'd been learning all this from listening to The Obesity Code, Fung's best-known book, during my fast. My afternoon hunger pangs came and went, as he predicted, and I listened to the audiobook on my way home. Maybe it was my incipient state of light-headed caloric deprivation talking, but Fung's encomium to fasting seemed pretty compelling. As he points out, fasting is a traditional part of pretty much every major religion; it's only in the very recent past that we've been snacking constantly. The human body did not spend its millions of years of evolution in environments that provided three square meals every day plus at least two snacks.
The human body, however, has a strong and understandable dislike of going to bed hungry. This wasn't a big problem for me on the first night, but it was harder on the second. As with Wednesday, I'd got through Thursday on black coffee and herbal tea, feeling distinctly less energetic than usual and spending idle moments thinking about food. This got worse when I went to bed. I slept fitfully and had vivid dreams about eating pizza, waking up as tired as when I'd gone to sleep and twice as grumpy.
When I'd started the fast I would have shaken Fung's hand. Now I wanted to yank his arm from his socket and gnaw every gristly morsel from his bones.
I would have cracked well before Friday, frankly, had I not been locked into the fast by professional necessity. (Here's a fun and easy fasting tip: just make it the subject of a newspaper article.) When I was hungry, it was more or less the same level of hunger that I'd experienced the first afternoon, and eating nothing was certainly easier than eating small amounts, but I was still counting down the hours to being able to eat again.
I realised how ungrateful I am for the huge luxury that is being able to eat whatever I like, and how important eating is to socialising. Free of food and free of friends, I spent more time alone, plodding slowly but steadily through housework. Time seemed to slow, an effect which other fasters have reported online.
After another shoddy night's sleep, I crawled back to the office. It was hardly worth the commute. Not only did I have a sackably unproductive working day, I also suffered the embarrassment of being caught using my work computer to look up pictures of junk food.
Fung advises fasters to slowly reintroduce food to their guts, perhaps with a handful of nuts or some leafy vegetables. On finishing work, I disregarded this entirely and picked up a truly squalid quantity of vegan fried chicken. On the dot of 8pm, precisely 72 hours since my last meal, I bit down on golden, peppery batter. It was one of the most magical sensory experiences of my life, although within ten minutes I'd eaten enough to make my shrunken stomach feel sick.
Be that as it may, I'd withstood hunger and social pressure and fatigue to complete the fast. Along the way, I'd lost 4.2 kilograms (just over nine pounds), my body fat, at least according to our bathroom scales, had gone from 21.5 per cent to 18.8 per cent. My blood pressure, according to the doctor, was already quite low but had gone down slightly. Room to play with! Cancel my gym membership!
Most of the 4.2 kilos had been water weight and food in my gut, and so it returned over the next few days. However, I'm now so persuaded of the merits of fasting that I've begun limiting my weekday eating to an eight-hour window, and when I started writing this piece I was attempting an entirely self-motivated 36-hour fast. Then again, I only made it halfway.
Caveat: If I haven't managed to put you off, then great, but please be careful and consult a doctor if in doubt. If you are underweight, don't fast.
|
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/health-...-latest-health/ |
|
Threaded Mode