Why Holidays Go So Fast
Like with a lot of ancient eating wisdom, fasting-feasting rituals are sympathetic with what's beneficial for the body, mind and tribe.
Please select as applicable:
☑️ Happy Easter
☑️ Happy Passover
☑️ Happy Ramandan
☑️ Happy Long (+/- Intermittent Fasting) Weekend
Whatever you've been celebrating or doing this long weekend, there's lot of fasting, good, bad and fad, happening right now. This, and an increasing stream of questions on how to eat less, when and why, has got us thinking about doing deeper research into the latest on fasting. What's intriguing is how much fasting has been baked into in bonding of communities and slowing right down - ritualised as opportunities for appreciating abundance, personal and collective reflection, resolution and reunion, oft originating from religious holidays. Fast forward a few thousand years, at another emergent layer of reality, nutritional science is uncovering the micro, the molecular and metabolic rationale for rationing ourselves - yet, mostly blind to the macro benefits of fasting, and feasting, together as families and societies.
Like with a lot of ancient eating wisdom, fasting-feasting rituals are sympathetic with what's beneficial for the body, mind and tribe. It is not surprising that fasting turns out to have many physical benefits. We now understand more precisely why, at a deep bio-molecular level, the right kind of fasting can be good for bodies, and perhaps extend lives. So should we not be doing it all the time? There are exceptions, even in orthodox mandates, to fasting. During Ramadan, Moslems are exempt from fasting when on long travels. Does this point to an early sense of fasting being sacred to the sedentary and less important to the fit and active? Would you fast your eight year old child? No. So why not? Same with someone who's carrying a baby. Fasting would be, well, nuts. What about if you're recovering from pneumonia? Or fending off the sarcopenia (muscle wasting) of ageing? As with so much in medicine, timing is everything.
I'm writing this from 1222 metres up in Finse, the highest point in Oslo-Bergen Railroad, after traversing a mighty glacier on a 22.1km ski tour and pulling a 50kg pulk, downing every drop of warm sugary fluid, devouring every morsel for the fuel to carry on. This is with the last group of participants training for our South Pole research expedition. We all are in massive, intermittent calorie deficit. Our fat-burning pathways are well flexed. Our metabolisms are smiling. Our genes are doing all sorts of epigenetic magic in the belief that I'm an organism worthy or staying around for longer. All good stuff. And what joy it is to just take a short break and split a humble sandwich together. Chat about how great it tastes, oddly, because it's such simple food. Or break off a chunk of hazelnut chocolate (70% Cocoa) for a friend who's run out. We vacuum up a strawberry jam and sour-cream waffle cooked with love in a tiny ice-encased hut atop a mountain 2000m above sea level. And what a privilege appreciating a proper meal on our return to base. There's a lot of short and long-term physical and mental gains happening, but not much fasting going on here!
There is no one fast fits all. To fast best is going to be a personal prescription. But a good rule of thumb for healthy adults is this: Burn all your excess fuel stores through a gamut of physical activity, every day. This will earn you a top-up of energy from mostly vegetable, Mediterranean-style macro nutrients, without overfilling. At night stop eating well before you sleep, and don't eat again until breakfast. That means BREAKING your FAST. If you're not in a fasted state when you next eat, you're not having breakfast, you're just having an extra meal. If you're not going to burn off that extra meal immediately your body will be in excess metabolic stress and laying on fat in good and bad places, however enjoyable, sociable or AM business-meeting critical that may be.
We're reviewing the latest on Intermittent, 5-2, Water 24, STS, Prolon Fasting Mimicking, VLCDs, Ketogenic, Don't Mix your Macros, Paleo, and everything else that's trending! And if you think fasting is complex, just wait until you add the microbiome into the mix. We will approach this, as is the essence of our practice and PROJECT150, by asking, "What are really we optimising for?" Try to find the bonds between the mental, physical and inter-personal, and try not to drown in unconnected atoms of facts, and marketing spiel. We'll likely brainstorm on fasting over a nice meal, full of whole foods, just about replenishing the energy deficit we've built up over a productive, and physically active, day. We'll eat slowly, socially and sitting down. We'll try to attentively share our musings with our families, distill it for our young children over dinner, and get remarkably-difficult-to-answer questions from them, opting not to Google the answer at the phone-free table. It is not just about fasting, If you're just missing calories, you're missing a trick. It is the combination of the latest, sophisticated science and simple, ancient wisdom on eating, with others, and when you don't, alone (what we call Nutrition vs 'Notrition') that makes for healthier, happier and longer lives.