Sweet Quarantine - China Lockdown Day 5

Today, on my 5th day in lockdown, I decided to Shawshank Redeem myself and "get busy living or get busy dying". I choose to get busy livin' and for me that means not eating.

For at least 3 days. Maybe even 4 or 5 days.

Wait, what?

Yeah, you heard that right: no food, plenty of water and one cup of black coffee just after noon. Dinner on say Tue or Thu evening and then no food until dinner again on Sunday.

In day one and day two of an extended fast (more than 48 hours) I take one spoon of either MCT or coconut oil to kick my body into ketosis (fat-burning mode) and I do a lot of walking, which I did around my hotel room for 2+ hours this morning like a pacing psycho / caged animal.

Everyone is familiar with the concept of fasting / intentionally not eating but I know that I, like most of you reading I'll bet, thought of it as ludicrous, reckless even. Or at the very least, just silly and useless. And once I started to learn more and become interested to try fasting, it just seemed unattainable and downright miserable.

Before we peel back the how of fasting, let's dig into my why.

Over the last few years, I have done 8 or 9 prolonged, multi-day, water-only fasts (72 - 120 hours). It's an age-old practice over the millennia but something that hoomins have lost touch with in modern life.

The reason why I fast is because it may very well be one of the healthiest things I can possibly do. Sleep properly, eat the right things and cut out the bad things, exercise, manage stress, etc, etc. Yes, all good. But fasting? I mean - BOOM! It's my experience and from my research that fasting provides an outsized reward which matches and/or exceeds other practices that I pursue to not just put more years into my life but also more life into my years.

Here's a quote from and a link to the most excellent Dr. Rhonda Patrick who can really back it up my bold statement above with science:

Transformative effects of fasting

Most people who practice fasting report feeling energized and more alert at the end of their fast, which may represent a “resetting” of their body’s natural metabolic rhythms.

This transformative effect of fasting appears to be linked to certain aspects of repair and rejuvenation that are integral to fasting physiology and may provide critical elements in optimizing lifespan and healthspan.

Dr. Rhonda Patrick

www.FoundMyFitness.com

I highly recommend subscribing to her free newsletter and geeking out to her wonky, deep dive podcasts around health and fitness. Take my advice to take her advice - Dr. Patrick is a biologist first and foremost who is TOTALLY data driven - she does not have a fitness video or sketchy supplement to flog. Just the facts, ma'am. Dr. Patrick quit her job in academia to go fully independent and share and unpack all the new studies and data coming out about health and fitness. She fully supports herself via Patreon, but the much of her content is deliciously free and unbiased.

Most people think of fasting to lose weight, and indeed, fasting helps with maintaining lean body composition, but fat loss is the not the main reason why I fast, or even the second or third. Truth be told, over a 3 day fast, I'll typically lose 2-3 kg but half of that is water weight. On average, I'll lose a half kilo a day so 1.5 kg in total or only about 3 lbs.

Why I fast is because of the hormesis benefits. I love the book Antifragile by Nassim Taleb and that concept, of applying stressors in order to make organizations and systems more robust and less fragile, is the key reason for my multi-day fasts.

"Fasting also stimulates hormesis, a compensatory defense response following exposure to a mild stressor (short-term food deprivation) that is disproportionate to the magnitude of the stressor. 

Hormesis triggers a vast array of protective mechanisms that not only repair cell damage but also provide protection from subsequent exposure to more devastating stressors."

Dr. Rhonda Patrick

My immune system response before and after my first try at fasting was night and day and was drastically improved. It may have been me talking myself into it, but damn if I wasn't getting sick far less frequently.

I found that by not eating for 72 or more hours I literally rebooted my immune system.

Holy. Shit. How come nobody ever told me that before when I was insanely running down and destroying my body in my 20's and 30's and getting sick every few months? Why is this not talked about and practiced more?

It's not theoretical. It just works. You don't have to understand the science. You don't have to believe the science even. That's because it's science. You just have to kick your body into fat burning mode (more on that below) and then drink a shit ton of water, wait for 72 hours and then let your biology do the rest.

Fasting can seem very scary, which it can be, but I've gone from suffering through my first one and quitting, To enduring the next couple of fasts. To now, I daresay, outright enjoying it after I was able to get the initial protocol solidly down (more below).

There's a school of thought that our ancestors did a 5:2 diet. 5 days of eating. 2 days of not eating. Just not intentionally. Grunty the cavemen didn't not eat for a couple of days a week so he could humblebrag about it on Twitter or do an IG post of him smiling, abs glistening in the sun while standing next to a sabre-toothed tiger he'd just killed with the caption "Blessed". Grunty and everyone else in his clan sleeping in the cave together piled up like puppies in a pet store simply had no choice.

Two days per week (like they knew about weeks) - that was the average time our ancestors are thought to have spent not eating. I'm on the somewhat extreme side of most people I know since I try to fast 3-5 days every quarter plus undertake one-day fasts every few weeks, which I don't achieve regularly (yet) but let's generously say I fast with water only for 20-30 days a year.

That's *nothing* compared to the 100 days a year (2 days * 50 weeks) of not eating like our ancestors for 7,500+ generations. We are a couple of million years old but let's assume we've been around in this corporal configuration for 150,000 years and a generation is 20 years so 7,500 generations. But let's be even more strict and just start from Home Sapiens some 70,000 years ago who are believed to be indistinguishable from modern us - that's 3,500 generations.

So most of our 3,000+ grandparents got nothing and liked it for 100 days a year. To a caveman, they would gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today because of rain, freezing weather, failed hunts, migration to find better water sources, etc, etc, 100 days a year they went to bed without their dinner as the most wild thing of all.

It was brutal. It was unforgiving. None of them knew they were fasting. Their kids certainly didn't. But you also have to understand they were not all complaining of hunger and walking around like zombies. They were burning fat, they were keto adapted. They were AT THE TOP OF THEIR GAME after 5 days of not eating. They had to be. Or else they would die. They were laser focused on killing that next meal.

We're lucky to live today. Forget our cavemen ancestors, we certainly live better than kings of yore just a few generations ago!!! But. BUT. That does not change the fact that, while our situation has dramatically changed for the better for much of humankind, our biology has barely budged. Same same. We are NOT made to have a stream of food from our gullets through to our buttholes 14 hours/day, 365 days/year. .

I get a lot of strong reactions when I talk about fasting. Crazy! Weird! Huh? Not healthy! Not good for you! Not possible!

But I've come to realize that not eating for a few days is _not_ weird. You wanna know what is bat-shit, crazy-town weird? Eating three times a day, every single day for 99% of lives - to our biology - THAT am cray cray. We've just lost sight of that since we became awash in Hot Pockets and churros.

To help frame the hormesis concept above I like to think of our bodies as a factory. Our factory has been running 14/7, maybe even 18/7 and sometimes 24/7 (college!) for decades and is starting to break down, get messy and underperform.

The foreman pleads with his boss: "Can we just turn off the assembly line for a few goddamn days, shut this factory down, and get our shit together? PLEASE! "

I imagine my body/foreman telling me to stop constantly processing all this stuff and just shut down for a few days or else the staff will just quit. I don't and it gets a bullhorn and tells me by having low energy. By having a cloudy head. By getting sick. By having an auto-immune disease or whatever to get the message across.

OK, so we pull the whistle, send all staff home, we're going to shut 'er down and repair the machines (hormesis). Give the assembly line (intestines) a rest. Clean out all the accumulated garbage (autophagy). Get rid of old inventory (fat). Then we'll restart this whole rodeo after 3-5 days and it will hum like new (immune system/white blood cell count improvement).

So that's the why of my fasting.

My how of fasting is straightforward and something that I lifted from human guinea pig extraordinaire, Tim Ferriss. Tim outlines very thoroughly his prolonged fasting protocol in his book Tools of Titans in the chapter contributed by ketosis king Dom D'Agostino.

Which, thanks to Google Books, you can read below. I double dog dare you to try it out.

Ping me directly if you want more info on fasting and I'm happy to share more.

Lockdown Love and Good Vibes to You and Yours,

Rich