171. Fit and Lazy

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“If you only ever give 90% in training then you will only ever give 90% when it matters.” – Michael Owen

In the last few years, Intermittent Fasting (IF) seems to have finally found its time under the Sun. Not everyone knows about it, much less talk about it but a critical level of its awareness seems to have materialized. The concept of IF is very simple. Limit the duration during which you consume food. Food includes all kinds of calories – meals, juices, milk etc. All of us indulge in IF by default anyway. We do not consume calories in our sleep – so, most of us end up fasting at least six to eight hours a day. The idea is to increase the duration of this fasting to about sixteen hours a day or even longer. Of course, like all other best practices, this is supposed to work in general but every person who wants to partake of its benefits will have to tailor the method to their specific circumstances.

The premise behind IF: say you typically consume 2400 calories of food in a day. Would the benefits vary if you were to distribute your consumption to once every 2-3 hours throughout the day or if you limit your consumption to being within an eight-hour or shorter window. It seems like benefits significantly outweigh if we were to limit our consumption window. One of the primary reasons why IF holds promise is that by limiting consumption window, we give our digestive system sufficient rest between consumption events. If we ingest calories every 2-3 hours, we do not offer complete rest to our body’s digestive system - this results in our digestive system wearing out quicker and it becomes less sensitive to its triggers such as insulin (which initiates digestion process everyone we ingest calories); food feels less tasty as well. This may eventually lead to metabolic disorders such as diabetes, cardiac impairment etc.

“Breaking a fast feels like the exact opposite of a hangover.” ―?Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Distributing load moderately and uniformly is not suitable for all situations. In mechanistic systems, moderation works whereas in organic systems (more generally, complex adaptive systems), it tends to lead to fragility.

If your goal is to increase your muscle mass, it is better to do exercises with heavy load and fewer repetitions than moderate load with higher repetitions. Also, it may be better to engage in intense workout two to three times a week than moderate exercise six times a week, even when cumulative load may aggregate to the same in both cases.

In running, you engage in a number of training protocols when training for an event like a marathon race or a 10K. You run relatively short but intense training runs called tempo runs and also run long slow runs called LSD (Long Slow Distance) runs. It is advised by coaches to limit intense runs to less than 30% or 20% of your overall running volume. So, you are expected to run slow mostly with periodic, short stints of hard, intense runs. But most runners do not run their slow runs slow enough, leading to burnouts and/or injuries.

“Hard days are the best because that’s when champions are made.” – Gabby Douglas

Would walking ten thousand steps a day really improve health? This may be healthier than doing nothing or doing very little, but I think meaningful benefits accrue only if you were to walk most of these steps within a short time window (say an hour). In fact, 6000-8000 steps in about 45 minutes may be a lot more beneficial than ten thousand steps spread over six hours or more.

In terms of stock markets, there are people (traders) who engage in multiple trades a day and then there are those (investors) who buy/sell just a few times in a year. History indicates that investing holds way more potential for creating wealth than trading. And typically, concentrated allocations to about ten companies tend to create way more wealth than small allocations to large number of companies (forty, fifty or more). Like Warren Buffet says, this becomes a choice between having to be smart everyday vs being smart every once in a while.

“If you know that you are vulnerable to prediction errors, and if you accept that most “risk measures” are flawed, because of the Black Swan, then your strategy is to?be as hyper-conservative and hyper-aggressive as you can be instead of being mildly aggressive or conservative” ―?Nassim Nicholas Taleb

In terms of wealth creation, I believe it is much better to follow a bar-bell approach where you allocate meaningful (large enough) portion of your capital to properly researched “risk” assets and leave the remaining in highly conservative assets. This allows time enough for your risky allocations to play out their cycle(s) while your short-term needs are funded by your reliable, conservative allocations. In general, I do not see any place for “moderate” risk allocation.

Bottomline

“The job of fasting is to supply the body with the ideal environment to accomplish its work of healing.” – Joel Furhman

Animals seem to have evolved for conditions that involve intensity in short bouts with long resting breaks in between. Except during hunting for prey or escaping from predators, most animals engage in leisurely pursuits like sitting around, ambling, chewing and sleeping. We humans are animals too. We have also evolved to thrive like this. However, modern society has developed excessive fascination with balance. As opposed to working intensely and then taking solid, long breaks, we yield under perceived pressure to arrangements where breaks seep into work and work overflows into breaks. Our quality of work suffers because we do not sustain intense work long enough to be able to bring out our best and our quality of rest suffers because we do not completely disengage from work. Balance in the long term is golden whereas balance in the short-term could be at best, middling.

PS: I’m not a doctor or a nutritionist – my views on “Intermittent Fasting” above are purely based on my personal experience and study. You may want to consult a right professional if you want to take it up.

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