I have so far experimented with two ways to increase the
positive effects of fasting. While intermittent fasting can be a great tool to
increase autophagy it can also be difficult to eat all the daily nutrition in a
very short eating window.
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| A beautiful place to get your cold-exposure? |
So I asked myself the question: How can I have a larger
eating window while still getting the benefits of prolonged intermittent
fasting (20-23hours a day)? I feel that protocols that implement shorter
duration of intermittent fasting (16-18h) do not evoke the same metabolic
responses as those longer protocols. But with short eating-windows it can be
difficult to digest and absorb all the food, especially if vegetables make up a
big portion of ones daily food.
Therefore having an eating window of around 6-8 hours with
two large meals (high volume due to large amount of vegetables) at the
beginning and the end was my goal. Without compromising the benefits of the
fasting period. I found two ways in which this might be possible: exercising
and cold showers during the fasting period. So far this might not be a new idea
for you. But I believe the trick is to fast for several hours afterwards.
So a typical day might look like this:
·
6:30am wake up and 30 min of bodyweight workout.
Alternating muscle groups daily with three different training days.
·
7:00am cold shower: 1min warm/ 3min cold/ 1min
warm/ 1min cold
·
Continue fasting until 12:00am – lunch: high
vegetable; high in fat, medium in carbohydrate and protein
·
6:00pm-7:00pm – Dinner: high vegetable; high in
fat, low in carbohydrate and medium in protein
This gives me around 5 hours after my sport and cold showers
in the fasted state. If you try this out you will recognize how much different
this approach feels from normal intermittent fasting of same duration.
Exercise is known to increase autophagy and by combining
this with fasting you will increase this effect even further. The body is
basically pushed ahead into higher autophagy similar to several hours of
fasting. You are basically jumping from the 10h to the 16h mark. (Just an idea,
I have not measured it :D)
In this way you have already increased the efficacy of the
fast. The continued fast after exercise forces your body to recycle everything
possible in order to provide for the muscular regeneration. Stress hormones are
released that not only wake you up but also increase fat burning.
If you now combine this with cold showers it will
enhance fat-burning, ketone-production, GABA- and BDNF-release even further.
The cold shower should in theory have following effects:
·
Activation of heat generation in brown adipose
tissue
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This will pick-up glucose and fatty acids from
the blood stream, lowering the blood-glucose spike from the exercise
·
Increase wakefulness through the release of
adrenaline and cortisol
·
Lower body temperature à more calories burned in the
following hours (coming from fat) as you continue your fast
·
Increase circulation (in combination with the
shift to warm water) of blood and lymphatic fluids
·
Enhance recovery from the workout
·
Make you clean and leave you feeling refreshed
After following this protocol for two weeks, I found out that I can combine the benefits of high vegetable consumption and
eating twice daily (an enjoyable, large meal, high in vegetables) with the benefits of a longer daily
fast.
I might even go so far to say that this approach is superior
to the longer daily fasts. The reason is that the huge meal (as in the one meal
a day protocol) takes considerably longer to digest. That basically shortens
the real time spend fasting anyways. Two smaller meals, containing basically
half of the calories digest much better than the giant one meal.
The greatest advantage of this approach for myself so far is that it takes almost no will-power. Eating within a 6 hour window, it is absolutely possible for me not to get hungry.