Periodic Poundage Update - Intermittent Fasting
Let me start off with a disclaimer. I’m not a doctor, a nutritionist, a surgeon, a life coach, or anyway associated with the medical or health profession. I’m not going to stand here and say that I’m so smart and so good with the biggest……….brain that I should be giving any kind of advice. What I’m about to tell you must be taken for entertainment purposes only and is no way saying this is something you should do, just like watching The Walking Dead or listening to the President of the United States.
As you may or may not know (you know) I’m a big fan of Kevin Smith. I enjoy his movies immensely but probably even more I enjoy listening to his podcasts. About two weeks ago I was listening to one of his shows and he started talking about how he fasted for 90 hours and felt great. I couldn’t tell you which show it was because he has too many to keep up with at this point. What I can tell you is that I was amazed that he didn’t feel like garbage after not eating for nearly four days.
His co-host (again, I don’t know which one because he has so many and I honestly didn’t care to take the time to go back and find out) starting talking about intermittent fasting. The guy talking wasn’t sure of the details but it was something like you didn’t eat for 24-hours then you could eat the next day. According to the “guy” this was supposed to be a better idea.
I don’t know what struck me but something did so I decided to look more into this intermittent fasting idea. So I started doing some research (which we all know that in our modern times just means I did a Google search on intermittent fasting) which led me to The Diet Doctor and an article about Intermittent Fasting. You can watch it or read if you want. There were two takeaways that I got from the whole thing.
First, intermittent fasting doesn’t mean that you don’t eat all day. The approach I’m taking is that you don’t eat for 16-hours and then you can eat for the remaining 8-hours of the day. In my case, I’m eating all my meals between 11am and 7pm. That also doesn’t mean that you eat seven pizzas during that 8-hour block. You eat a healthy and nourishing amount of food but just during that time. I figured I could so that pretty easily instead of just starving myself for days at a time.
Second, this approach made sense to me as I thought about human evolution. Again, I’m not a doctor or a scientist of any kind, and this is just my own logic progression so don’t take what I’m saying as the facts. However, it seems to me that ancient humans (I don’t know, let’s say 100,000 years ago) basically lived their life searching for food, eating, having sex, pooping, sleeping, then repeating. So it stands to reason that the human body didn’t evolve to eat a bunch of small meals throughout the day, or even three meals a day. Here is how I imagine one of my ancient ancestors lived:
5:00am - Wake up in order to get some time alone for the horde of kids that won’t leave you alone. Since there is no refrigerator or method of preservation there is no food on-hand. So this guy just sat down to drink some water and stare off into the middle distance.
6:00am - For some crazy reason the 2-year-old is awake already and wanting to eat everything that there is. The guy throws the kid some leftover scraps of buffalo from days before while trying to keep the same kid from diving headfirst off a rock because that seemed like a good idea.
6:45am - The 6-year-old is now awake because the 2-year-old won’t stop screaming her name because the 2-year-old boy wants to play with the 6-year-old girl. While this seems like a cute sentiment, it is actually extremely annoying because what really happens is that the boy and the girl end up just asking the guy over and over again to play with them and he is just barely keeping it together.
7:15am - The dude just can’t take it anymore. The little boy wants to sit on the same rock as the little girl so they start pushing each other off the rock. This would seem normal except there is an identical rock right next to them so they could sit on their own damn rocks at the same time instead of fighting with each other about a stupid fucking rock. Shut up just shut up! The guy has to get out of here. He “must” go hunting in order to provide for his family. Guy leaves the kids in the capable hands of his partner or whoever happens to be around to make sure they don’t strangle each other with deer hides. Not that it matters much. Survival of the fittest, am I right?
8:30am - The hunt is successful but a bit earlier than the guy would like. He is only about half a mile from home and he can still hear the kids yelling and screaming. No way he is going back to that nightmare. He decides he’ll just sit down next to the dead mammoth carcass and make pictures in the dirt with a stick. While avoiding his family for the next two and half hours he accidentally invents writing.
11:00am - After creating the first written language, the guy finally drags the meat back home to start eating for the day. He got out all his frustrations in his pictures so his blood pressure has dropped and the searing pain in his head is gone. This is his first meal of the day which he celebrates by indulging in some extra chops then drinking leftover juice from the grapes that were thrown in a hole 3-months ago.
2:00pm - The guy has been able to tolerate the kids with the help of a big meal and the invention of wine. But now he is starting to feel a little hungover so he needs something else to eat. He doesn’t have the energy to go on another hunt so he grabs several pieces of old deer legs that were left in the hot sun for several days. They are dried up and chewy but make a delicious treat.
3:00pm - The kids are starting to go crazy again. No, he doesn’t want to build a fort. What is a fort? He doesn’t care if you go play outside. What does that even mean? Everything is playing outside. He would be more concerned if you wanted to play inside because that would put you in a cave. He hands them some sharp sticks and tells them to run at each other and see who can knock the other one down first. He leaves again for the hunt.
7:00pm - This hunt did take a little bit longer just because the guy wasn’t really hunting for the first hour, just walking around talking to himself wondering why the kids won’t just shut the hell up. If the 2-year-old says “why” one more time he is going to feed him to the wildebeest. And if the 6-year-old won’t stop leaving her socks in the middle of the floor in one room and her shoes in the middle of the floor of another room she may discover all her socks and shoes were magically transported away by the sungod. In fact, there was no real hunt. The guy just goes back to the same mammoth he killed in the morning, grabs some more meat, then heads back home a few hours later. He claims it was such hard work getting the food but it wasn’t. He just wanted to get away. The family feasts again and chugs several bladders of the rotten grape juice.
And that is how humans evolved to eating on this intermittent fasting schedule. There was no clock telling them it was breakfast time or lunch time or dinner time. It seemed logical to me that the human body was created to be able to store food for long periods of time between those times that food wasn’t available. So it shouldn’t be so hard, and it has been very pleasant, for me to only eat during an 8-hour block during the day. I’ve really liked this eating philosophy and plan to keep it up as long as it is working.
At the last update, I weighed in at 222.2 lbs. I hadn’t been losing a lot of weight with the whole “stuck in side and nothing to do but snack all day long but still doing my best mentality”. After changing up my approach, I’ve lost 5.4 pounds down to 216.8. That is down 3.9% of my total weight since starting to track this diligently. I’m pretty happy with the results and this has been my favorite lifestyle approach.
Stay Healthy!
And now some pictures.
Oh, and are you wondering about the picture at the top of the post. How creepy is that? I was out running and just came across this baby shoe that was hanging on a tree in the woods. That nonsense creeps me out. Just like seeing random kids socks on the side of the road. I’m sure some kid was in a stroller and kicked it off without the parent noticing. That is innocent enough. But all I can think of is where is the rest of the kid? Am I going to run by a scary kid graveyard somewhere down the trail while I’m running. Give me the willies.
