Intermittent Fasting

Intermittent fasting works. That isn't the problem.

The problem is what social media has turned it into.

In this episode I break down what IF does, where it earns its place in a smart approach to fat loss and metabolic health, and where the influencer narrative has lost the plot. If you've been told fasting alone will fix your body composition, your hormones, your relationship with food, this one's for you.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome back to another episode of The Rebuild. I hope you're having an awesome day. Today we're going to talk about intermittent fasting. Is it a discipline hack? Is it a biological advantage? Is it a superior diet? Okay. And so honestly, a couple problems I see with fasting that I want to talk about some of the issues first, and then maybe we'll talk about where I see it useful. Fasting can often be used as an excuse to eat poor quality food because someone can kind of hack the calories in, calories out system. And so, as an example, you could starve yourself all day, not really eat much through the day, maybe just have uh, you know, some protein. And if I'm traveling and stuff, I actually utilize this strategy. I just don't make a lifestyle out of it. Um, you know, eat pretty low in the day and then kind of eat whatever you want at night, as long as it's in a certain caloric uh balance, your body composition is going to stay the same. But that isn't the same thing as your total health, right? Brain function, gut health, etc. They all require nutrients, fiber, phytonutrients. Um, and when we just kind of replace uh, you know, that with kind of filling it with junk food because we can and still maintain a great body composition, although still much healthier than being obese, to be honest. Uh, you know, I I think I think we have to remember that our body run runs on these fuels, like you kind of are what you eat in some sense. So that's one of the core problems. Uh, you know, and where it might be used is potentially something like if I want to work on appetite control because there needs to be a window of restriction, I think that's pretty useful. Uh, I I like fasting probably as one of the better tools, personally, because one of the reasons I really like what one of the reasons I really like fasting is it teaches a different level of discipline. Because most people in North America get to like lunchtime, and if they haven't eaten, they think that there's like literally something wrong. And it's so funny because if you would go two or three people ago, like if you were asked your grandparents, and if not, depending on your age, for sure your great grandparents, and or go to almost other any other country where this wasn't made up in culture to sell food and sell things, uh, they think this is funny. Like, you know, if you go to other countries and they're like lunchtime, what does that mean? Like, I eat when the work is done, I eat when there's food. It's not like, oh, it's this time of day on a little iPhone, and so that means my body needs food now. It's not like that. Your body's designed to go weeks and weeks without food, actually. And this sit down if you're a triggered person, because I don't want you to fall down. If you have like 40, 50, 60, 70 pounds uh uh to lose, theoretically, and I'm not talking about the psychology, I'm talking about your body. I could just lock you up with water and salt and uh nutrients, and your body would be getting healthier and healthier by the day that you do not eat at all. It's just that you wouldn't be able to behave that out without having binge cycles and creating poor relationship with food, etc. But we've proven this a lot in the Minnesota Starvation Study in the 50s, where they just wanted to see what happened when people just didn't eat. Guess what? Um, there's a bell curve. You actually get healthier if you have body fat to lose up until you don't have any more body fat to lose. So it's like being malnourished is unhealthy, being overfat is unhealthy. And there's a there's a certain range in between there where you can fluctuate and still have full, awesome health. And that's something I talk about all the time. You don't need to have a shredded six-pack abs to be healthy. In fact, that's probably on the bottom half of the bell curve. For most people to get those abs, they'd probably be considered malnourished and unhealthy. Um, but especially if you have body fat to lose, the last thing you need to worry about is what time the next meal is, straight up. And um, so so that's that's something to just just to pay attention to. And again, it's not not to say that having time meals is bad. I do that for my clients because we need to create structure. That's fine. But I I don't want people to feel like their body's gonna like break down like a car that doesn't have gas. And then they'll say, Yeah, I got a little bit of a headache. Yeah, because your body is a pattern machine and it's trying to get you to stay in homeostasis, which is basically repeating the same things over and over again. I really used to work with when I worked with mostly obese clients, I would tell them, Listen, we're gonna restrict your calories, we're gonna get you eating healthy food, you're gonna get gut health issues, you're gonna get headaches, you're gonna get uh dizzy spells, you're gonna get a bunch of weird shit going on. And they would say, why? And I would say, I don't know. I honestly don't know. We don't know in the literature. I can tell you my theory. It's that your body is you've been giving it comfort and things that it quote unquote likes, and it thinks that now it's not gonna get them, so it's gonna try to make you uncomfortable to go back to where you were the behaviors you were doing before, until and it takes some time of like walking through that eye of the storm, and then all of a sudden gut health gets better, and all those things that got worse temporarily in two weeks feel way better, and that's the uncomfortable part that most people feel that discomfort, then they quit and give up and go back to their old behaviors, thus staying stuck exactly where they were. Okay, and so some of the again benefits is appetite control when so you have a window of reduction. It's not metabolic magic. Fasting does not give you. What about Dylan? What about more growth hormone? Nope, it's just a pea tree isolated study, it's not what it does. What about does it give them? I heard uh they said on TikTok, it'll boost your metabolic rate only while you're fasting, and then it slows while you've eaten, and you have to eat more for your body to kind of catch up because you have to eat a certain amount of calories anyway, and so it's just looking at things in isolation windows that don't make any sense. It's really good for people who aren't just aren't naturally hungry in the morning. That's actually kind of me. Um, it does backfire for high stress individuals who have issues around dopamogenic food because often if they start trying to fast, they're fine while they're fasting, and then they eat one chocolate and it turns into 400 chocolates, which spikes cortisol through the roof and does a whole bunch of negative things as well. And then again, I really don't like it for people with a history history of disordered eating per se. I don't mind a little fasting. We're talking 10, 12 hours, and it's funny because a lot of people hearing this might go, like, oh, that's a long time. No, like three to five days, that's a long time. That's fasting. Anything under anything under 18 hours, I just consider time restricted eating. And that's just my definition of it. And even if that's me being very polite. To be honest, anything under 48 hours really isn't fasting. Not for the autophagy benefits, not for the like the real discipline benefits, not for like the real resilience benefits. Um, you know, and it gives your body a chance to clear out all the toxins without just constantly having to do digesting of food, um, which is aging us. It's why in countries that fast longer and they eat you know one meal a day, once every other day, those countries always have way better health outcomes and live longer, like a lot of the blue zone countries. That's mostly because they're not spiking their insulin and going through the cortisol of eating. And eating is a stress on your body, even if you're eating healthy food. And that that sounds like bad, but like we are a creature that is just walking through stress, basically, no matter what we do, we were designed to adapt to it. And so some of the ways I like using it is like maybe in night shift workers, uh, where we're trying to reset circadian timing. Maybe uh kind of a stress reactive person who doesn't mind skipping break breakfast. Uh I think that's fine. And I do think it works pretty well for someone who has a lot of trouble with like morning and afternoon snacking. But and then again, discipline, resilience, and again, it also can play a huge tool. Like you can fasting is not really a diet style, it's more of a tool that you could attach. I could attach fasting to a carb cycle diet, I could attach fasting to a keto diet, I could attach it to a Mediterranean diet, I could attach it to a carnivore diet, I could attach it to anything because essentially it's just it becomes again a a form of time restriction. And so skipping meals is not the same thing as fasting intentionally. The window kind of matters, how you set it up matters, okay? And so it's a totally fine thing to do, but I think you just want to be careful about how you do it and definitely don't give it its uh any magic. It's not magic. Again, if someone eats uh, you know, if someone eats 14,000 calories Monday to Sunday, and they eat, you know, 2,000 calories over seven days is 14,000 calories, they have the same fat loss benefits as the person who ate 4,000 calories every second day and didn't eat for a day prior, if that makes sense. The math is still the same at the end of the week. You can't get away from that. I know everyone wants to TikTok their way out of that and find some Aikido where they can get out of the responsibility of just managing their budget, manage your caloric budget. It's just like money. It's not, well, what about if I go outside at the right time? Will my bank account get bigger because the sun is higher? Nope. The work you put in equals the money that you make because of the problems you solve. That's the money you have to spend on groceries, that's the money you have to spend on rent. It's the same principle.

unknown 9:15

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 9:15

And if you can remember that, if you learn that, if you swallow that down like a bitter pill and just tell yourself, I'm never allowing anyone to tell me anything different, I promise your health outcomes will be way better off long after I'm gone. And so most of these podcast episodes are done to empower my clients to make sure that they're not following down tricks and rabbit holes and to just give them a download of my take after 15 years of coaching. But if you want personalized one to one help, you can just reach out to me. I would love to help you. And so thank you so much for coming today. I hope you had a great time and uh thank you for being here.