Intermittent Fasting
Intermittent fasting has gained in popularity the past 10 years, with fitness professionals making a lot of bold claims. Claims such as “this was the best thing that helped me drop 50 pounds” or “this is the ONLY way to do such & such” are, most likely, sensationalized at best, and fabricated at worst.
I believe that IF can be good for you. I also believe that fasting can be detrimental to your physical and emotional health if you aren’t aware of your states and how it’s affecting them.
What is intermittent fasting? It is an eating pattern that involves alternating periods of fasting and eating (thanks Google AI). If you practice IF, you will generally say that you’re 18:6 or 14:10 - your fasting window is indicated by the first number and your second number is how long per day that you plan to eat. So, in the first example, you would be fasting for 18 out of the 24 hours and eating 6. A typical 18:6 window could look like this: fasting from 6pm until 12pm the next day. You would eat your first meal at 12 and eat until 6pm that night. Our second example would be 14 hours fasted and 10 hours of eating.
Fasting in general can have a lot of physical benefits including, but not limited to, weight loss, improved metabolic health, reduced inflammation and cellular repair. The basis of fasting is that as you fast your body, it has the energy to do some of the reparative work instead of the traditional digestion activity. Simply put, it doesn’t need to be working to digest your food, so it has time and energy to repair.
Fasting can also have mental benefits - some people, myself included, like to have boundaries around our nutrition so that we don’t have to spend the mental energy to decide things. As humans and as women, we often have hundreds of decisions to make every day. If we can simplify and set some boundaries for ourselves, it’s one less decision to even think about. When I practiced IF heavily, I liked knowing that I would start eating at noon and end at 6. It was an unconscious activity that allowed my body to work effectively at that time.
Let’s talk about the potential downsides of IF: mental health. I will be bold and unapologetic in saying that I have struggled with disordered eating for most of my adult life, controlling and limiting my food and it’s quantity when I felt out of control in other areas of my life. Intermittent fasting can be dangerous for me because it moves my controlling nature back to what I am consuming, and it can put me on the slippery slope of undereating. Consistent undereating can hinder your physical progress, especially when lifting, but it can also do grave danger to your metabolic and hormonal systems.
There have been seasons of my life where IF went too far. There have been seasons where it worked. There have been seasons when I didn’t do it at all.
IF can also be slowing physical progress if you’re focused on gaining muscle. If you’re unable to consume the amount of protein, fiber and fats within your eating window, you can be drastically limiting the amount of muscle you put on, no matter how difficult your lifting plan may be. For some, a short eating window is simply not enough time to shovel in all of that food.
If you would like to try IF, here are some basic rules to keep in mind when considering if intermittent fasting is right for you:
Start slow. Start with a 8:16 window and move up from there. Don’t start with the largest number of hours fasted.
Track your progress. If you are on a physical health journey, start to take your measurements on a regular basis. You will hear from me that the scale is man’s stupidest invention - and I don’t want you using it to determine how well you’re doing. Take measurements of your chest, waist, hips, arms and legs. Repeat on a bi-weekly or monthly basis to understand your progress.
Be willing to abandon this method (or anything else for that matter) if you find that your mental health is degrading on your physical health journey. Don’t feel the need to ignore one for the other.
Please remember: anyone claiming that this, or anything else, was THE ONE THING THAT MADE ALL THE DIFFERENCE is lying. They are. I’m sorry. One thing will not make you lose 50 pounds. A whole bunch of things practiced together might! You have to test and learn. And, then you will likely have to test and learn again as you age.
I wish I could tell you the secret; the one thing that will make all of the difference in your physical health. There is no one thing. Think of IF as a tool in your toolkit. It is one thing that could make a difference for you or it could be the thing that slows your progress. Only you know your body and your goals. Do research and decide if you want to give it a try, and if it doesn’t work, try something else.
Find joy in the journey.
