My Alternate Day Fasting Experiment — Part 1
Why attitude Is Batman and everything else is Robin
This is the first part of what happened when I tried ADF — alternate day fasting — for a month. At the time of writing (June 2021) I am still doing this experiment, and I will add further articles to this one.
If you google people’s experience with fasting, you will invariably get a report focused on the short-term results. Pounds lost. Worries about how much is water weight. Pounds regained post-fast. Keytones.
This is all code for: How good am I at fasting?
This experiment is completely different. My history around food is one of compulsion. In 2012 my sugar addiction got so bad that I realised my rage-filled hormonal fluctuations were actually scaring my children. I tried a 30 days experiment in giving up 95% of my sugar consumption (i.e. anything that constitutes a dessert). I have never gone back. In 20314, I began coaching binge eaters, and in 2017 I started The Eating Coach podcast, which has had over 200,000 downloads to date.
I thought I was through with compulsion, but lockdown proved otherwise. Like a group leader for AA who fesses up she has hit the bottle again, I told my listeners.
I am much more interested in using fasting as a way to dismantle compulsion than to get quick fix results. Look, Ma! I’ve lost three pounds on this week’s fast is an expression of wanting to be a good girl/boy, of lack of trust in yourself and a fear of being present with all your imperfections and self-doubt.
When it comes to fasting, attitude is Batman and everything else is Robin.
Because if you can turn this experience into something empowering, you can make it sustainable.
This is exactly what fasting is for me. Because I make those immediate results irrelevant, I am falling in love with this powerful tool for health. It gets easier and easier every day.
Previous Fasting Experience
I decided to investigate fasting in February this year. At that point I started 16:8 intermittent fasting, and progressed to 36 hour fasts twice a week in March. At the start they were challenging with dizziness and ill temper. I then got to the point where single 36 hour fasts were easy.
May proved to be full of too much work, not enough fasting and then finally a much needed holiday. Three weeks of too many junky carbs (eg bread), eaten à la Roadrunner, and not enough fasting. I was very excited to get back into this .
What Does Alternate Day Fasting Mean?
A fasting day starts after my evening meal and continues until breakfast two days later. For example Monday evening until Wednesday morning. 36 hours. So it is really a day and two nights. For that reason, I will talk about fasts rather than fasting days.
A non-fasting day in the above example would be Wednesday breakfast until dinner that day. So about 12 hours.
Therefore the pattern is a 36 hour fast, followed by a 12 hour eating window, followed by a 36 hour fast…and so on.
I never eat dinner later than 6.30pm. These meals are my dividing lines. I am not obsessive about the 36–12–36–12 pattern. For example, I often wake at 5 or 5.30am, and if it’s a non-fasting day, I will eat whenever I want to. So it sometimes ended up being 35 hour fasts. I cannot see that an hour makes a difference.
What about times when work or important social events meant that I needed to break off a 36 hour fast early? I decided to allow that, up to a maximum of 5 times. If any work opportunities cropped up that mean I need to increase this number, I decided to cross that bridge when I came to it.
My period always wipes me out so I chose not fast during that time (it is always 3 days so this is no big deal).
I want to pause here and note again that my lack of slavish adherence to rules is one of the things that has made fasting such a source of joy, such an adventure for me. Strict rule adherence is an expression of lack of self-trust, of being in a parent-child dynamic with your fasting programme…one that too many people rebel against.
Week One
Fast #1 of the experiment revealed to me how like training fasting is — the more you do it, the easier it gets.
I had the a less intense version of the experience of my first couple of fasts back in March — dizziness, irritability and hunger that felt pressing and intrusive.
I also wonder whether I was still getting some kind of after-effect of all the processed carbs I had had in the weeks leading up to the experiment. These kind of foods seem to create their own hunger ecosystem, a hunger that self generates not long after you have eaten. It must be all those gluten exorphins — the morphine-like stuff in wheat that makes its products so damn addictive. I can see why the Romans used to pay their soldiers in wheat, and punish them by replacing those wheat payments with barley!
If you have never fasted, this is what you will be expecting. Hunger that turns into a fire and gets worse unless you stop it.
But what I noticed was how quickly hunger can become abstract, flat and as 2D as a child’s stick drawing. Hunger that you know is there, but you have zero interest in doing anything about.
I did start to get to the point of hunger abstraction late morning. It waxed and waned, then dropped off properly early evening.
Hunger is not a fire that will get worse unless you quash it. It is a tide that will recede if you give it enough time.
Emotional Challenges and Wins
I was surprised at the emotional challenges that ADF brought with it on day three (fast #2). I had a parenting issue to deal with that required a calm head, an ability to step back and problem solve with clarity and creativity. For me in a fasted state, this was a bit like asking Joan Rivers to lead a Zen buddhist meditation retreat. I was completely bowled over by my feelings.
What is strange — and a bit wonderful — was that on fast #3 I came up with the very creative solution I was lacking two days earlier.
What I find is that fasting is a very positive experience that brings creative insights, a forward-looking inspired outlook…but when a complicated problem erupts into a fasting day, my mental and emotional resources seem to go out of the window. There is a lot we can do to manage exposure to such issues (avoid email for example), but this is still something to work on for me.
Mistakes Are Opportunities
The main challenge of week one was low iron. This has been something I have needed to supplement my diet with for a few years now, and I have always been too inconsistent. I feel a bit tired, take some iron, then feel great…and stop bothering with the iron.
BIG mistake when you are doing ADF.
I got my period on day 5 of the experiment. As planned, I missed a fast. Although I had taken supplements the previous two days AND I had an extra day eating, it was not enough. At one point on day 7, I managed to do an impression of a cartoon character who is shot in the behind with a tranquiliser dart. i felt so dizzy that I almost toppled over.
I always look to mistakes as opportunities to optimise what I do. The lesson here is an easy one: Be consistent with taking iron supplements!
Biggest Win of Week One
I ended the first week by going to the pub (it was a non-fasting day). Because of the work I have done reducing my compulsion, I was able to enjoy a normal afternoon out, having a good laugh with my friends. There was no post-fast binge eating. I had some pretty carb-heavy street food and two pints. I could have had more to eat, but I was really quite full on the small portion I ate.
It got better in the evening. The Euros (football) were on TV, and my son wanted some junky carbs to watch one of the matches with. I thought I’d have some too, but I got so involved in a Zoom call with that I forgot to eat. At the end of the call, I noticed I wasn’t even hungry.
I think this is interesting that, far from getting filled up before the fast that started this evening, I wasn’t even bothered about it. In the past, I would have been really hungry by 9pm.
As I write this at 11pm, I am STILL not hungry.
Watch this space for the week two update.
