My Intermittent Fasting Mistakes

There was a time I was hitting the gym regularly. This was interrupted when I purchased a home and start remodeling it. I was trying to follow up and resolve any conflicts in remodeling. My intuitive solution was giving a try to intermittent fasting.

That was quite a ballsy move for me at that time because I always thought hunger was one of the triggers for my migraine headaches.

First couple days, headache was coming; I learned understanding migraine symptoms early on otherwise my whole day is ruined. I gave a try to drinking water with a little salt in it. It was a magical moment; migraine was suppressed. Later switched to unsweetened green tea as adjusting salt dosage was not always convenient.

Fast forward, I stuck to this routine every day for 3 years. Green tea or salty water was not even necessary for me anymore. I went down to 186 pounds with 5'11" height. My doctor was not happy with this even though she didn't have much to say to justify her concerns. At that time I got a lot compliments during the last wedding parties we attended just before the pandemic locked down the whole world.

I was rewarding myself generously with ice-creams and chocolates after I broke my fasting. At the end, eating more chocolate was my primary motivation for losing weight.

After this IF victory, I challenged myself into multiple projects with PhD level optimization AI and some other with quite some complexity. I noticed that the chocolate was especially helping me with progressing the AI projects. I thought it might be good time to listen to my doctor and quit IF for a while.

In one year I gained on 36 pounds; the heaviest I ever got.

So what has happened?

Intermittent fasting every day had put me on caloric deficit even though I eat deserts after breaking the fast. Since the eating time window is limited I wasn't getting much calories.

Well, our bodies are very good at adapting to stress; caloric deficit state is causing. This adaptation is in the form of lowering BMR (basal metabolism rate which is the energy your body burns even if you don't do anything). BMR is often around 2000 calories for a normal person. Looks like I have managed to decreased this down to 1000 calories as I was totally fine eating very small one meal.

I was gaining weight quite fast and cycling or walking with my family was not stopping this. Later I learned that the insulin spikes I was having by eating mostly carbs was blocking fat burning.

This vicious cycle continued until I started IF again.

But knowing that I would be lowering my BMR again and being vulnerable to abandoning IF, made me reevaluate the situation. Another valuable piece of information was that I had lost muscle mass while losing weight. Even though I did some yoga it can be considered useful only for maintaining the muscle mass at some point.

The course correction I needed was:

IF every other day: This ensures that I am getting enough calories on average. Non-fasting days allow me to get more calories during the additional one meal (breakfast).

Low carb diet (net 30gr max) every day: Turns out the standard american diet doctors or dietitians recommend is quite carb heavy diet and happens to be the prime culprit for obesity in world. As an engineer, let me quantify things for you. Normal person stores around 500 grams of carbs in their body. Without depleting these carbs which happens after 2000 calories of activity (which is very difficult to do), your body is not tapping into the fat burning. But once you lower the net carbs (carbs minus the fiber) to as low as 30gr, you start burning fat even when you walk. How do you lower your carbs? Is it even possible? Well, that's going to be another article.

Resistance training: Your body tries to adapt and maintain the homeostasis. As part of this adaptation, your body gets rid of the muscle mass if you don't use it. The best way to send a clear message to your body that you need that muscle and even more of it is using it; doing resistance training and progressively increasing the resistance. The active calories burned from this activity also allows you to eat more (good fuel; fat and protein) and increase your metabolism rate. In the long run, the muscle you build through this process also increases the demand for calories which is efficiently provided by fat which is more energy dense and cleaner fuel compared to the carbs.