FAST Forward
A Deep Dive into Longevity
By Valkyrie Holmes
A week ago, I stumbled upon a video entitled “Longevity and Why I Now Eat One Meal a Day”. It really sparked some curiosity as I am now going through a weight loss journey and have been looking at research to become healthier and stronger. In the video, it talks about how fasting can be utilized to detoxify the body, burn fat, and even reverse the aging process.
So you could say that with those possibilities, I was definitely intrigued.
When someone brings up fasting, the idea is usually shut down right away. Not eating for days? Why would that ever be beneficial to someone? Well, Angus Barbieri would argue that it saved his life. This 27-year-old Scottish man fasted for 382 days and lost an incredible amount of weight, around 276 pounds in just over a year! He set the record for the longest fast ever done and kept the weight off until his death in 1990. He survived on water, supplements, tea, and coffee and suffered no ill effects after the study was concluded.
Back in 400 BC, Hippocrates, commonly known as the father of modern medicine, was an avid supporter of fasting, saying “to eat when you are sick, is to feed your illness”. Countless other historical figures made fasting a part of their lives, such as Aristotle, Benjamin Franklin, Plato, and more, all claiming that it had a significant effect on their well being and cognitive state. But in order to truly understand why people choose to voluntarily give up food, we need to understand the history behind why we eat the way we do today.
The Three Meal Conundrum
The truth is, we’ve been doing it for hundreds of thousands of years. Even now, you’re fasting without even realizing it. The minute you stop eating for the day and go to sleep, you’re fasting 8–10 hours, no problem! It’s only been in the last century or so where we’ve really started to see a difference in the way we eat and the culture surrounding food.
The reason we eat three meals a day is not because it's necessary for survival. If you think about it, there’s no way that would have been the case for our ancestors. They would have eaten when there was food and not eat when the food ran out. We have been trained to eat this way because of a development in the Industrial Revolution: the 9–5 workweek.
During this period of working frenzy in larger cities, the “midday meal” was widely popularized and soon became the norm. The reason for this is because workers had to be given a break to rest and eat, which fell around the 12–2 time frame. Because of the overall acceptance of a “food break” period, it began to be called lunch. We can even trace these patterns of breakfast and lunch back to European settlers in the Americas, who saw Native American people as uncivilized and tried to distinguish themselves from the locals. Because they ate whenever they had access to food and not when they were told to, the British adopted the opposite policy: scheduled meal times.
So now people were eating more frequently and grazing on more calorie-dense foods and with this, people were living longer. But this started to take a turn when that excess of calories went from being converted into energy to being stored as fat. Soon enough, 40% of all adults in the US were either overweight or obese and 13.7 million children are following in their footsteps.
If we go back to the American Indians, they were doing everything right. Even when they had settled down and formed agricultural communities, they only ate when they were hungry and not when they thought they had to.
There has been a multitude of studies that state that the most optimum method of eating is small frequent meals throughout the day, but that has been backed with very little evidence and a bias towards specific results. In fact, one study by the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition actually compared those eating breakfast every day to those who did not and found no correlation between eating at a scheduled mealtime and losing weight.
The Fasting Why
Again, fasting has been utilized for thousands of years to achieve peak performance in all sorts of areas. In more primitive cultures, fasting was used as a sort of “coming-of-age” task to be completed and was even mandatory before going into battle for a clear mind in the military space. It continued to play a major role in many religions and was most commonly associated with Judaism (Yom Kippur), Islam (Ramadan), and Christianity (Lent). Women were also fond of it mostly because it helped them achieve a very frail look in the late 17th century.
While many have used it in the past to cure ailments and speed up recovery, it has also been used as a system to combat oppression. Nonviolent protests have taken many forms but Gandhi, along with his followers, set a prominent declaration for Indian independence in motion by doing a 21-day fast in 1930. Some have even considered it to be therapeutic, with spas and treatment centers in Eastern Europe creating personalized fasting regimens for their customers (fasting adjusted to one's own schedule to promote their health).
According to the research, fasting may very well be NECESSARY to living a long, healthy life. A long-term study in multiple animal species found that skipping your breakfast or lunch, a form of intermittent fasting, reduced calorie consumption by 30–40%, which extended their life expectancy by an extra 30%. And in fact, this kind of fasting provides the same benefits as traditional dieting does without people feeling hungry throughout the day and constantly stressing about the times to eat.
The Physiology of Fasting
Let me break it down.
Humans have two direct sources of energy available: glucose and fat stores. Whenever we’d have to go a long time without food, our bodies would adapt from using glucose from incoming sources to the fat on our bodies. This adaptation is called ketosis, in which the body burns fat and makes use of bits called ketones for fuel. Once the body is out of ketosis, it switches back on those glucose receptors and uses them for energy first.
Whenever you eat, your insulin spikes. The glucose in the food is taken into the muscles and brain tissue for energy and excess is stored in the liver as glycogen. Once a person starts fasting, those glycogen stores are still active and burning energy for around 24 hours. After that period, the body goes into lipolysis, a fancy term for switching over to the burning of fat for energy.
But there’s one problem; those fatty acids aren’t capable of reaching the brain!
So what does the body do? It uses the fat broken down through lipolysis for other functions and starts to create ketone bodies, which are water-soluble molecules created by the liver from the fatty acid stores. Since these molecules are water-soluble, they are capable of crossing the “blood-brain barrier” and reaching the brain to power it. After quite a while, usually around the five-day mark, growth hormones become elevated to maintain muscle mass and lean muscle tissues, and your basal metabolic rate is entirely sustained by ketones.
This is all well and fun but won’t it slow down my metabolism? Classic dieting would make it seem incredibly likely but in fact, that isn’t the case at all! When we fast, insulin drops, and your adrenaline levels, aka norepinephrine, rise. Norepinephrine is a stress hormone that improves alertness and attentiveness while also telling your body to release fat encased in your cells. In short periods of fasting, this causes your body to burn through more fat and actually INCREASE your metabolism! A study was done in 2000 where eleven men fasted for three days and researchers saw that their metabolic rate increased by upwards of 14%.
There are plenty of arguments stating that when people fast, they are voluntarily “starving” themselves to lose weight or achieve mental clarity but that’s simply not true. Starvation mode, also known as adaptive thermogenesis, is a long period of time where the body begins to get used to a decreased amount of calories and therefore, burns less for bodily functions.
Imagine you have a car that has a problem with its brakes. You go into the shop and replace them, but the brakes are worn and only last you a month or two. Every time you go into the repair shop, you’re getting old brakes. They still work, but they are constantly breaking your car down. This is exactly how starvation mode works for weight loss. It still helps people lose weight, but they have low energy and their metabolism crashes when they do it for an extended period of time.
This kind of phenomenon can be observed on shows like The Biggest Loser where participants follow an extremely strict diet and exercise routine to see who can lose the most weight at the end of the program. After the show was over, however, almost all of the contestants gained 70% of the weight back. The problem was that now, their metabolic rate did not go up. It stayed a couple hundred calories lower than what it should have been for a person of their size and body weight, making it impossible to support their fit bodies.
While there are no long term studies that have looked at the effects of intermittent fasting in the long term, multiple studies done over month-long periods have been done that show no metabolic slowdown in patients doing intermittent and alternate-day fasting.
Not all fasting is actually ketosis; that process only starts when you’ve either a) used up all of your glycogen stores for fuel or b) have become fat-adapted so your body naturally switches over. The second method only occurs after the body gets used to fasting for long periods of time or over a continuous plan.
Why Fasting?
I could ramble on about the benefits of fasting all day and never run out of things to talk about. But what you’re here for is the why.
By increasing your metabolism, your resting metabolic rate becomes higher. This means that at rest, your body burns more calories to just exist. This is HUGE in terms of weight maintenance because once you’re to a certain goal weight, you can now eat at a reasonable amount without gaining weight, possibly even more than you had eaten previously. Damaged metabolisms wreck people’s mindsets and with the power to reverse that, fasting is legendary!
Fasting also helps with inflammation, which is a common marker for diet-based and chronic disease. On top of that, by drawing attention away from digesting food every day or all throughout the day, your body can take that energy and put it towards fixing things throughout your cardiovascular and cellular systems. Autophagy, the process of cleaning out old, dead cells, is heightened in those who fast for long periods of time. This means that by not eating, your body prioritizes getting rid of useless cells that could contribute to neurodegenerative diseases and cancer.
By not eating, your body hits a reset button. It cleans out your cells, cleans out the body of excess fat, and gives many what’s called a “fasting high”, characterized by a burst of continuous energy and extreme mental clarity. In other words, you become a living, breathing, productivity machine!
The Fasting Cure
Fasting went from something demanded for optimum performance in the military, a gesture of political protest, a form of therapy even, to a method of eating that was demonized by society. And why was it so scary?
Because when you give every single American access to food 24/7, they begin to depend on that food for satisfaction, not just for fuel. It’s like giving a child a lollipop and letting them suck on it for a couple of minutes and then trying to take it away. You definitely won’t be looking at a happy child ready to comply.
When it comes to modern pharmaceutical practices, they thrive off of people being unwell in this day in age. Headache? Take ibuprofen. Back pain? Go to the doctor and get medication. It seems like every problem we have is always being supplemented by drugs and temporary solutions proposed by new companies.
What’s interesting is that as our society becomes more and more advanced, we tend to prioritize adding new things into our lives to make them better. We are constantly coming up with new, smarter ways of doing simple, mundane tasks, making us slower and weaker in many circumstances. Instead of focusing on adding more value to our lives, why don’t we focus on removing the toxicity?
Dr. Alan Goldhamer, the founder of the TrueNorth Health Center, is one of the biggest advocates for fasting to lose weight and regain awareness of the mind. He advises that before starting fasting, read up on it and look at the data for yourself! There are tons of them out there; I recommend reading “The Pleasure Trap” by Goldhamer himself and “The Obesity Code” by Jason Fung, another lead doctor in the world of fasting.
“Today we battle excess, not deficiency. Your health is largely in your own hands and no one else’s. Health is the natural, spontaneous consequence of healthful living.”
So could we all be like Angus Barbieri and fast for a year? Keep in mind: fasting is not meant for everyone. This isn’t me telling you that you need to just stop eating right now. Women who are pregnant or breastfeeding, the elderly, and children shouldn’t take part in fasting unless they are under medical supervision. Besides, this is going without nutrients for a while so before attempting anything drastic, always seek your doctor for advice.
My Fasting Experience
I hope you can see that fasting has opened up a whole new world of possibility when it comes to weight loss. People report not feeling hungry after the first week of intermittent fasting and there are tons of articles that detail exactly how we should perform fasts in the future.
My dad decided to do a form of fasting called OMAD (one meal a day) and has been doing it for five years now with no ill effects. He comes home after work and makes himself a HUGE plate of nachos and then he’s good. I’m not saying that you should just have nachos every day (because even he says it’s bad for him), but he keeps a steady weight and can eat what he wants because he only eats once a day. And he gets enough calories from that meal and the little snacks he has in a short period of time so his metabolic rate doesn’t go down.
He’s found a loophole! And I’ve been trying intermittent fasting as an experiment and I honestly feel so much better. Intermittent fasting is a type of fasting where you don’t eat for a certain period of time during the day but still eat a meal or two. I find that whenever I eat my meals, I get more sluggish and have a bit of “brain fog” afterward, so once I’m done with school (around 12:15), I eat my lunch and all meals after until 8 o’clock. There are all sorts of ways people can work around schedules and weeks with fasting and I really think that it is an extremely powerful, if not, the most powerful tool we have for expelling toxins from our bodies and living longer lives.
So to anyone doing the fad diets and intense calorie restriction, I urge you to look into it. For a seemingly ancient method, it may be even more promising than we think.
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If you have any questions, please email me at vholmes113@gmail.com.
