The Unexpected Benefits of Intermittent Fasting

Posted On August 2, 2020

For some reason, I barely ate as a kid. I was born very small (only 4 pounds 6 ounces, even though I was born exactly on my due date). And then I just was not interested in eating until I was about 15. I have vague memories of being confused about why it was such a big deal. Now that I have friends with kids, I see how stressful that may have been for my parents at the time. To this day every time I talk to my grandmother, she asks what I’ve been eating and is very happy when I describe my healthy meals. As an adult, I now obsess over nutrition to make up for it. Unfortunately, nutrition at this age doesn’t have quite the same impact but I suppose better late than never?

As a result of these childhood dynamics, whenever I DID express hunger, there was a big emphasis on making sure I ate as soon as possible. So I become a ‘grazer’ and ate small meals 5-6 times a day. I genuinely wonder if my stomach didn’t develop properly since I didn’t eat normally until I was a teenager. I would feel SO HUNGRY and then after a small portion of food, would feel stuffed. It was the running joke in the family.

Intermittent fasting (IF) has been all the rage for years now but I am late to the game mostly because I thought there was zero chance it could ever work for me. I would wake up super hungry and had drilled it into my head that breakfast was the most important meal of the day. So I kind of tuned out all the hype about intermittent fasting and felt convinced it was not for me.

Funny enough, it was a Madfientist podcast that finally got me to open my mind a bit. I started doing more research and found a few blogs that talked about making the conversion from ‘grazing’ to intermittent fasting. I was intrigued and decided to give it a shot. One of the most common schedules is the 16:8, to eat only within an 8-hour window each day and otherwise fast. A frequently cited schedule is to eat between 12pm and 8pm each day. This is totally doable for people who are in the habit of skipping breakfast. I was a bit daunted since I used to eat a big breakfast around 7:30, and then a mid-morning snack around 10:30, and then lunch around 1, another pre-gym snack around 5, and then dinner around 8.

Unfortunately, my approach was a bit aggressive. One day in October 2018 I decided to just start. I developed a massive headache by 11:30. I tend to get headaches easily due to my brain lesions and apparently headaches can be an issue for some people in the beginning.  Even once I ate, my headache was so bad I had to leave work early that day. Oops. In hindsight, I should have worked my way up to it, not jumped straight into the 8-hour window.

Undeterred, on Day 2, I started eating at 10, and then 11, and then 12. I had a bit of stomach growling but I noticed if I drank coffee, tea, or water all morning, it was not that bad. I also realized- if I ignore hunger, it goes away. I had never gotten to that point because I would always eat as soon as I got hungry. I would ever carry Larabars in case I got hungry on the go. So it was quite a revelation to see that hunger just passes, at least the first wave of hunger. So within a few days, I was on the 12p-8pm schedule without much trouble. Within a few months, I noticed I wasn’t hungry until 2. Now some days I don’t even eat until 4 or 4:30. Occasionally I can go with just one meal a day around 4:30 or 5 but most days I eat a primary meal around 2:30 or 3pm, and then a small light dinner (like a salad) around 8 or 8:30.

I feel a bit misled because I had heard so many times that breakfast was the most important meal of the day. But I did a LOT of research before getting into this (given my obsession with nutrition and making up for my lost childhood nutrition). It turns out the basis for that expression was the assumption that if you skip breakfast, you get hungry and eat whatever you can find, like junk food, processed food, etc. But as long as you eat healthy food, it is completely fine and even GOOD to have this fasting window.

The internet is FULL of the well-known benefits of intermittent fasting so I won’t go into great detail. To recap a few:

• Can help with weight loss by increasing your metabolic rate and reducing the amount of food you eat
• Reduces oxidative damage and inflammation in the body, which promotes healthy aging and lowers the risk of numerous diseases and factors for heart disease. I have read a bunch on longevity and this comes up a lot
• Triggers a metabolic pathway which removes waste material from cells and may provide protection against several diseases, including cancer and Alzheimer’s disease
• Lowers blood levels of insulin (which facilitates fat burning) and can reduce insulin resistance, which decreases the risk of Type 2 Diabetes

Beyond this, I wanted to share many of the unexpected benefits I experienced. It has been fairly life-changing and I wish I had started sooner!

Exercise Flexibility: The biggest place I noticed an impact was my workout routine. Before starting IF, I generally exercised in the evenings because it logistically did not work to exercise in the mornings since I would wake up hungry and eat a big healthy meal, and then I couldn’t exercise for several hours after that. And then basically I was always eating as soon as I got hungry so I had to really plan my workout schedule and make sure I ate a small enough snack at exactly the right time. Once I was in the IF groove, it completely opened up my options for exercise. Pre-pandemic, I would do a double-header of classes on both Saturday and Sunday mornings at Equinox so that gave me a MUCH better bang for the buck on my pricey membership! I was doing a minimum of 4 classes a week, plus all my weekday exercise.

Spending Less: Because I am so nutrition-focused, I spend a fair amount on healthy food – e.g. farmers market produce, nuts and seeds which can be pricey, etc. So even though many of my meals are at home, that all adds up. Cutting back to two meals a day has had a significant impact on my cost structure. This was not my motive for starting but given that I discovered it on a FIRE podcast, it was a fitting side benefit!

Lower Maintenance Travel: I realized my hunger patterns made me a rather high-maintenance travel buddy. Most people I’ve traveled with were fine to skip breakfast and were generally more flexible about when to grab a meal. I noticed I often was the one asking if we could stop to eat and my need to eat frequently would sometimes affect the overall schedule for the day (or I would have to burn through 10 Larabars in one trip!) Luckily eating is generally an enjoyable thing to do when traveling so it wasn’t a huge deal but I feel like it opens up a lot more options now that I only need to eat twice a day, and have learned to power through hunger pangs. All this said I am less likely to keep up with IF when traveling because food is one of my favorite travel indulgences. I was pleasantly surprised to see I could easily bounce back to my IF schedule even after a long trip of not adhering to my standard schedule.

More Sleep: I used to wake up much earlier on work days so I could take the time to cook a nutritious breakfast. I now get an additional 45 minutes back in my morning and was able to sleep later on weekdays. This was especially notable before the pandemic since my commute is about an hour-long each way. I think getting enough sleep is one of the most important things we can do for our health and happiness so this was a huge treat. 🙂

All in all, intermittent fasting has had a much bigger impact on my life than I expected. This experience has also reinforced the importance of having curiosity and an open mind to things that seem totally out of reach or not relevant.   If you have been thinking about giving it a try, I highly recommend it. Let me know if you have any questions! If you already practice IF, are there any other benefits you’ve noticed?