The Fast after the Feast

Some people I respect recommend doing an extended fast before holiday feasts. Dr. Peter Attia, one of my Health Sherpas and the medical director for the Zero fasting app, often leads a group fast before Thanksgiving and Christmas.

This is a good approach because it allows you to enjoy holiday feasts guilt-free: you’ve already paid your dues.

For Lisa and me, with our wedding anniversary on Dec. 22, that’s not such a good option. We did our feasting from then through Dec. 26, and I began my extended fast at 5:30 p.m. on Sunday, Dec. 27.

During our feasting period, I had gained 7.4 pounds. And to be candid, I had already crept up a couple of pounds in the first half of the month. So by the day after Christmas I was 10 pounds heavier than my November average.

Clearly this was a lot of water weight based on my high carbohydrate intake. I also felt more stiff, with some carb-based inflammation.

The goal of my fast was to burn through that carb excess quickly to get into fat-burning mode, and so to jump-start the process I began early Monday morning with a high-intensity interval training workout, as Dr. Attia advises.

My Tuesday workout included free weights and a zone 2 cardio workout. This lower-intensity training is at the maximum level of exertion that can be sustained without burning glucose. That’s both necessary, because glycogen stores are depleted by the second day of a fast, and desirable, because it improves the muscles’ ability to burn fat.

Wednesday I did another zone 2 workout for the same reasons.

I had set on my Zero app timer goal at 36 hours, but my real goal was a three-day fast. I wanted to be able to declare victory early in case I wasn’t feeling well. I was able to finish strong, however, and had my fastbreaker just after 6 p.m. Wednesday.

It’s important to not overeat coming out of an extended fast of more than 48 hours, and particularly to not overdo carbs, which cause you to retain water and can throw your electrolytes out of balance.

My keto-friendly first meal is below, although I’ll confess that I did go back for one more stuffed pepper. The graph at right shows results of my morning weigh-ins for December and into today, which was my 300th consecutive day using our Bluetooth scale.

Why the 2.6-pound bump at the end? Last night was New Year’s Eve.

I guess I feasted before and after the fast.

I’ve done several of these longer fasts in the last year. One was five days and another four, and my plan going forward is to do a three-day water-only (or water and black coffee) fast once a month.

I’ll discuss reasons behind this in my next post, along with some interesting findings from the glucose/ketone meter I used for the first time this week.

If you haven’t tried fasting or time-restricted eating, you can take a great first step toward improving your health and vitality as we start 2021 by just not eating in the evenings.

I’m not suggesting some grand New Year’s Resolution that sets you up for failure. Just some #BodyBabySteps.

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Holiday Feasting is Fine

To lose more than 50 pounds each, Lisa and I have adopted a low-carbohydrate, high-fat (LCHF) ketogenic pattern of eating, combined with periods of time-restricted eating or intermittent fasting (IF).

We find LCHF and IF are mutually supportive. Seeking satiety in filling fats means we don’t have carb cravings, which makes it easier to go 16 hours or more without eating, also called a 16:8 fast. We almost always skip breakfast and restrict our eating to an 8-hour window, and frequently that window is even narrower.

Sometimes it’s 18:6 or 20:4, or one meal a day (also called OMAD).

It’s a lifestyle, not a diet. It’s a different pattern of eating. I fully expect we will follow it for the overwhelming majority of the rest of our days.

But as I said in my Top 20 weight loss and health tips post, “Avoidance isn’t always.” We’re in this for the long haul, and we have found that it’s a lot easier psychologically (and accords with millennia of human cultural practices) to enjoy times of feasting that we balance with extended fasting.

Rarely doesn’t mean never.

Some LCHF proponents who I deeply respect take a different view, believing that a massive infusion could be the trigger for those with carb addiction to have a relapse. And as you’re just starting out, I would err on the side of caution until you feel confident you’re well established.

But I would argue that it’s much better to have planned times of carbohydrate excess than to snitch the grandchildren’s french fries as you’ve taken them past the restaurant drive-through window.

You’re in control. You’re deciding ahead of time that for a certain period you will enjoy foods that otherwise would be off limits.

Lisa and I have just come through five wonderful days of feasting.

We celebrated our wedding anniversary, Dec. 22, by having our OMAD be pizza. Lotta carbs.

We enjoyed it so much, we did the same thing on Dec. 23. Note that the pizza shown at right is just for me. It’s gluten-free since I have celiac disease.

And yet because I hadn’t eaten for more than 21 hours, I still had an extended period of low blood sugar and insulin levels.

I also had lefse, a Norwegian potato-based treat with butter and sugar that my dad makes during the holidays. He’s developed a gluten-free version.

Three layers of awesome: gluten-free Oreos, vanilla ice cream and fudge.

From Christmas Eve until Dec. 26, we had small gatherings with my parents and then with some of our descendants that featured high-carb favorites like a traditional family potato dish, tortilla chips with queso, and my favorite frozen dessert.

With the feasting over, it was time for a compensatory fast. But instead of going straight from a high-carb state to an extended fast, I had my last meal be my four eggs/steak/cream cheese/guacamole masterpiece, and I started my Zero fasting app timer at 5:30 p.m. Sunday, with a goal of going at least 36 hours.

Lisa instead opted for a pair of consecutive 24-hour fasts. We limited ourselves to water and mineral water and black coffee, as well as magnesium supplements and some extra salt to maintain electrolyte balances.

How did it go?

I’ll share the results and my reflections on the experience in my New Year’s Day post.

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Don’t Eat in the Evenings

It’s very good news that even the leanest among us has at least 50,000 calories stored in our body fat.

The bad news is that because of when and how frequently we eat, most of us can’t access that stored energy.

Lacking energy, we get tired and hungry and eat more.

We store even more energy in fat, which we still can’t access, and that extra weight means we need even more energy to move our bodies, which makes us still hungrier.

It’s a death spiral.

To access this energy we have locked in our fat stores, we must first burn through enough of our blood sugar to achieve lowered insulin levels.

In the early 1970s that happened naturally for most Americans. We typically ate three meals a day, the last of which was done by 6 p.m. or so. That meant we had about 12 hours of the day during which our blood sugar was elevated, balanced with a roughly equal amount of time overnight with lower blood sugar and reduced insulin.

Photo by Thomas Kinto on Unsplash

We need periods of low insulin to get our fat cells to release fatty acids into the bloodstream, giving our other cells access to their energy. In future posts I’ll talk about more constricted eating windows and longer fasts to extend these low-insulin periods.

But for now, your first goal should be to avoid eating after 7 p.m., or three hours before bedtime, whichever is earlier.

How can you do this?

  1. Make your evening meal your main meal of the day.
  2. In that meal, seek satiety in real food with filling fats and reasonable amounts of protein, but very low carbs (less than 15g).
  3. Eat slowly so your body has time to send you the satiety signals, but eat until you feel full. Don’t go away from the dinner table hungry.

You should have low carbs in all of your meals, but especially in your evening meal. By avoiding carb-related blood sugar spikes, you’ll avoid the cravings that typically come a few hours later.

If you get truly satisfied at dinner, you won’t be hungry later in the evening. You won’t feel compelled to raid the refrigerator.

You’ll also sleep better. Eating too close to bedtime reduces your sleep quality, the importance of which we’ll discuss later in the #BodyBabySteps.

Time-restricted eating and intermittent fasting will be important contributors to your eventual health, but the first step to getting there is to limit yourself to three meals a day, with no late-night snacks.

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Improving Endurance and Performance through Keto-Adaptation

Dr. Robert Atkins scandalized the medical, public health and dietary community in 1972 when he published Dr. Atkins’ Diet Revolution, in which he advocated a significantly carbohydrate-limited diet that promoted consumption of most calories from protein and fat.

Dr. Stephen Phinney is one of the courageous pioneers who was open to studying the effects of a low-carb, high-fat diet in the 1970s instead of just dismissing it.

As he relates the story in the video below, several of his patients who had gone on the Atkins diet reported feeling fine and with plenty of energy, which was contrary to what Dr. Phinney had personally experienced in “bonking” on mountainous bicycle rides from lack of carbohydrates.

I’ve cued the video to where he begins telling this story, and how he was able to demonstrate that the previous studies comparing high and low-carbohydrate diets that led to the practice of “carb loading” in athletes were too short in duration, and consequently had missed the phenomenon of ketogenic adaptation.

My summary of his main points:

  • If you consistently have abundant carbohydrates in your system, your body will use those for fuel and will not access the energy you’re carrying in your fat stores.
  • It takes at least several weeks of a low-carb diet (50g/day maximum) to convert your body to fat-burning. For elite athletes it can take six months to a year to fully adapt and reach previous levels of performance.
  • Once you have become keto-adapted, instead of being limited to the 2,000 or so calories of carbohydrate energy your muscles and liver can store, you have access to 20-100 times as much energy stored in your body fat.
  • For sprinters and those whose contests are over quickly, keto-adaptation is likely not a high-performance strategy. Carbohydrates can supply what they need more quickly.
  • The biggest athletic performance benefits accrue to endurance athletes. Several ultramarathoners have set performance records when keto-adapted, because they don’t need to consume sugar-laden gels for energy as their competitors do. Instead of having blood supply diverted to digestion, they continue getting energy from fat.
  • Adapting to a ketogenic diet leads to better performance and higher sustained energy levels, even for people who aren’t interested in running marathons or participating in even more extreme athletic contests.

This really hit home for Lisa and me when we were helping our son and daughter-in-law move into their third-floor apartment several months ago, in a building with no elevator.

We made scores of trips up and down the stairs carrying furniture and boxes of various sizes, and were struck by how good we felt.

We were able to bound up and down the stairs without getting tired and we worked right through lunch without hunger. We surprised ourselves with our stamina.

Certainly it made a difference that we each were carrying 30 pounds less fat than we had been a year earlier, but as you’ll see from the results of the first experiment Dr. Phinney describes in the video below, the bigger issue was that we were able to access the energy in our remaining body fat to move both ourselves and the furniture.

After an initial decline, obese study subjects’ stqmina increased above baseline following 6 weeks adaptation to a ketogenic diet.

You may have heard of the so-called “Keto Flu” or “Atkins Flu” that often accompanies a change to a low-carb diet. It’s a real but short-lived phenomenon, and you can mitigate the effects on daily activities to some extent through adequate salt intake.

I hope you’ll take 28 minutes to watch this last part of Dr. Phinney’s presentation, to learn how adapting to a ketogenic, low-carb healthy high fat diet can help you lose weight while gaining significant energy for everyday activities.

If you’re interested in the background on how carb-loading became standard practice in sports training, hit the play button below and then scroll back to watch the whole video from the beginning.

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Is sodium bad for your health?

Here’s another item from the “(almost) everything we’ve been taught about diet is wrong” department.

Experts say we should limit sodium intake to 2.3g per day to prevent high blood pressure.

Some people do have sodium-sensitive hypertension, and for them it makes sense to limit salt.

But they are a distinct minority.

This graph tells why:

I took this screen shot from the video below, which I’ve cued to start where Dr. Stephen Phinney is explaining this study.

But before you watch it, let me spell it out for you.

It’s from a study published in 2014 in the New England Journal of Medicine of nearly 102,000 people in 17 countries. You can download the paper to read it for yourself.

The chart shows risk of death or a major cardiovascular event like a heart attack or stroke as it relates to the amount of sodium excreted in the urine.

As Dr. Phinney describes it, the amount of sodium you pee first thing in the morning is well correlated to the amount of your daily sodium intake.

The 1.00 level in the middle of the y-axis shows baseline risk of death, and as you can see it’s a U-shaped curve. Sodium intake of about 5g per day is associated with the lowest risk. Two key points:

  1. If you have a higher sodium intake (right of the middle red arrow), your risk is higher.
  2. If you have a lower sodium intake (left of that arrow), your risk also is higher.

We’ve all heard about the danger of too much sodium.

I’ll bet you didn’t know the risk of death or major cardiovascular event from having too little sodium (#2) is even worse.

Or that the true “sweet spot” for lowest mortality and cardiovascular event risk is about twice as high as the current dietary guidelines.

Amirite?

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Check out My Health Journey for the full story of our health improvements, and my #BodyBabySteps for an approach to how I would do it if I were starting today, based on what I’ve learned.