How are you approaching fasting?

All those simple eating window rules are really easy to remember but more complex in practice. Did you know we can some times be undoing the gains of repair and growth when we compound the stress of fasting?

The key lies in knowing how to become metabolically flexible: aka. switching from burning readily available carbs to fat stores without continuously stressing the system so it can’t heal.

But if we just follow fasting rules without a true read on our stress response, how do we know whether that daily starvation window is helpful or harmful?

Take a 5 minute break….

INSIGHT (what we need)

Know your metabolic flexibility before committing to a fasting fad. 

Before fasting was fashionable, it was religious. Before it was about religion, it was about scarcity. It’s been around just as long as humans have because it exists to elicit a helpful survival response in our systems when food is not available. Along with this survival response comes almost magical states of clarity, insight and drive that help us find more food!

Humans have taken the surprising effects of fasting and given it various cultural meanings: from spiritual, to health-related, to lifestyle badges. Religious fasting is still very prominent today: (celebrated by billions worldwide with Ramadan, Lent, Yom Kippur, many Buddhist festivals, and many shamanic tradition rituals). By abstaining from all food and drink (usually during daylight hours or a handful of days or moon cycles), religious fasters acknowledge sacrifice or suffering, give thanks to that which is sacred, share gratitude for what they have, or nudge the spirit to have dominance over our physical or material appetites. 

Today, fasting is now a lifestyle trend. And we have our smorgasbord of prescriptive options as scientific studies scramble to discover the ultimate longevity elixir to meet the needs of our ageless desires:

Intermittent Fasting (IF): from 16:8/20:4 windows to 5:2 days (eating to restricting) to eat-stop-eat weeklies, and ongoing alternate-day plans. This most recent trend is made more popular in the fitness industry - often training our insulin response for performance gains. (Off-days imply eating what you want to refuel). 

Time-Restricted Eating: eating between sunrise and sunset within about a 12 hour window (depending on where you live or the season). The idea is to mimic the general circadian rhythm of only eating when we were historically most active. This trend came out of the lifespan and healthspan movements to optimize windows where we naturally metabolize better. 

Periodic Fasting: building on the time-restricted eating principles but tend to happen around certain seasons (ie. spring) or certain months to reset the body while eliminating anything from the industrial-food complex. These are secular adaptations of what was likely biblically-based. 

Extended Fasting: fasting for longer than 2 days and up to 30. Many of these are done under medical supervision and are prescribed for those who are experiencing sub-par or chronic conditions where deeper healing is sought. These became popular (outside of the spiritual prolonged fasts) when evidence of autophagy and cellular repair were discovered. 

Partial Fasting: includes lifestyle trends like juice fasting, water fasting, tea fasting and even hyped crazes like the cayenne-pepper-lemonade and cabbage soup fasts. They can create temporary weight loss (mostly water) but are not sustaining and do not reach levels of ketosis or autophagy. 

Dry Fasting: fasting without drinking water. Comes in two forms: soft (allows contact with water, ie. showering) and hard (no contact with water). The studied effects of dry fasting are far more effective than water fasting (ie. 1 day dry is considered equal to 3 days wet — though still being studied). This deeper biohacker trend reflects fasting science hitting the mainstream and being tested with differing variables. 

Though they each undoubtedly have their resultant benefits — I can’t help but feel we’ve lost the plot. We’ve gotten a little hyped on the tyranny of “how” with correlated outcomes but have lost sight of both the why and the what: 

Our “why” of fasting (when it is a conscious choice) is one of paying more attention to our needs versus our wants. Stripping back the bare minimum of what our body actually needs to survive as an incredible machine that can withstand long periods without food (and even water). I’ve been fasting since 2008 — some times extreme but mostly habitual — and the clarity, peace, and drive that emerges is always astonishing. The wonder that our bodies have miraculously evolved to get sharper, more attuned, and eventually more ferocious when we starve as an antidote to our ultimate demise. Which brings me to the “what”: our metabolic flexibility. This idea is implicit in all of the trends listed above, but humans tend to get fixated on prescriptions rather than principles at play. 

When we are metabolically flexible, our bodies efficiently switch between different fuel sources (carbohydrates and fats) depending on our energy demands and their availability. This adaptability is important for our survival when food is scarce….AND it’s important for our optimization when food is plentiful. Which means, at whatever stage of life you are, going after whatever goal: you can adjust your fueling needs for that particular outcome while maintaining your energy levels. We don’t need the yo-yo extremism.

At the start, it looks the same for everyone. You need to kickstart this ketogenic process with long enough fasting windows to turn on the switch from burning glycogen to fat. However, adopting fasting as a lifestyle goes beyond prescriptive trends that can plateau or cause hormonal havoc.

Long term, it looks different for (ie): a biological male trying to enter a body building contest, or a menopausal female trying to loose weight while building muscle, or an overweight teenager needing to clean up their junk food habits. The end goals, hormone responses, and energy demands require some personalization to figure out restriction on timing, feeding, how long to stay in ketosis, and whether or not to hit autophagy at all. Multi-day fasting is not for everyone but shorter duration fasts with exercise and fueling with something like bone broth can still induce autophagy signals while keeping cortisol in check. 

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Where it gets tricky is when we compound stressors. Fasted states are catabolic (pro-repair) when you’re breaking down different storage structures (glycogen, fat, and eventually muscle) in order to create fuel. Post fast, with the right re-fueling, you can enter an anabolic (pro-growth) state. In essence: you can’t have the same goal of longevity and building muscle at the same time. The tricky part of this is knowing what the end goal is, how to stair-step your way there, and how your body responds.

For instance, if you’re a perimenopausal women trying to build muscle, that additional cortisol spike caused by strict fasting schedules can un-do all the gains you’re making at the gym. Finding the right ratio of repair-to-growth requires some more flexibility in programming. This is where the fads of diets, fasts, and 28-day exercise challenges become a waste of time.

Understanding how to integrate fasts for their healing properties with the need to fuel for the energy to manage the other aspects of life (from hard training, to demanding work, to child care, to phases of life like menopause) is a more comprehensive picture that could use more than the approximation of trends. 

INSPIRATION (what we want)

Zero: replace the dieting seesaw by optimizing fasting routines.

Though it’s important to pay attention to what we eat and how much, the gains of fasting far exceed the gains of what’s on the menu. Shift your perspective from what you should be eating to how your body burns energy stores.

• Turn intermittent fasting into a habit to improve mental clarity, physical stamina, and boost energy levels.

• Cut medication down by introducing IF to your daily life and watch how your subpar health indicators change.

• Track windows of fat burning while seeing progress in real time to link your habits with moving the needle.

• Stack habits to leverage the power of four key health habits: Eat. Move. Sleep. Restore. 

• Receive personalized guidance based on your unique health data towards your weight loss goals.

INNOVATION (what we wish for)

CorQ (or Cortisol Quotient): a dynamic number that measures the stress-to-heal ratio of one’s cortisol levels taken from at-home urine tests. 

Stress trackers are unreliable as an aggregate of daily activities from work to exercise to sleep. Personal activity is also unreliable because humans all handle stress differently (ie. you can have spiked cortisol sitting in mediative poses if you have a lot going on in life!). With chronic stress, burn out, and inflammatory issues on the rise, getting an accurate read on normal cortisol levels is paramount to ensure healthy cellular repair can happen.  

• Integrates with future in-toilet urine scanning devices (ie. UScan) as a licensed API to calculate your “CorQ” from collected data. 

• Connects with a corresponding app that automatically displays your dynamic CorQ number to reveal whether you need to reduce stress. 

• Collects data over time to offer both stress-inducing and stress-reducing suggestions based on 24-hour dynamic data. 

• Especially helpful in support of adding positive stressors (like exercise or fasting) with stress reduction habits (like deep rest or carb cycling). 

• Tracks beneficial higher cortisol levels in the morning and waning levels towards the evening to prepare for the necessary repair that happens during sleep. 

• When cortisol levels are out of the normal range for several days, you know to adjust your habits to power down and get more recovery in.

• Enhance your healing or muscle building gains but reducing cortisol levels in the right windows as you fast and train.