Some Thoughts on Fasting and Feasting

     There is, at least in certain places online, a lot of “chatter” about whether or not you should practice intermittent fasting.  Many folks who used to previously tout intermittent fasting as some sort of miracle of modern dieting have backtracked, and now a lot of those “influencers” (or whoever-the-heck they might be) recommend a more standard, traditional approach to dieting for building muscle and burning fat.  Recently, there was even that god-awful “study” from the American Heart Association that showed a “91% increased likelihood of death” from heart complications by following intermittent fasting.  Now, this isn’t the place to discuss the real problems and politics around that so-called study, it will suffice for now to point out that its metrics were just plain wrong.   And, of course, on the flip side of all of that you also have the defenders, rightly so, of the benefits of various forms of fasting.

     My point in this essay, however, is that most of the above—no matter what “side” we’re discussing—simply misses the point.  You need to fast sometime.  Fasting is good.  You also need to have periods of feasting.  Feasting is good.  You need to do BOTH.

     We’re seasonal creatures.  That’s simply the way humans were made.  We have throughout history spent periods of time fasting and periods of time feasting.  Usually this has been associated with religions, such as the Lenten Fast in Christianity and Ramadan in Islam.  In Buddhism, monks of the Theravada tradition (found primarily in Southeast Asia) have been practicing “intermittent fasting” since the time of the historical Buddha, where the monks only eat one meal-per-day, and that is always before noon.  There was even a book written about this called The Buddha’s Diet: The Ancient Art of Losing Weight Without Losing Your Mind.  And, yep, just like with modern intermittent fasting approaches, the monks can eat as much food as they want—or, really, are given during their alms round—at that one meal.  It can be a real feast, but is then followed by almost 24 hours of fasting.

     For most lifters, bodybuilders, or athletes that want to practice intermittent fasting, I think it’s good to do it for only about 6 weeks before switching back to a more “traditional” bodybuilding diet of 5 or 6 meals-per-day eaten every few hours.  But after 6 weeks of constant feeding, you should return to fasting for another 6 weeks.  To be honest, that just might be the best approach for most lifters and athletes.  In fact, 6 weeks seems to be about the limit for almost anything when it comes to physique or performance enhancement.

     You can take the same approach of feast-or-famine and apply it to your training.  Alternate between 6 weeks of high-volume, multi-set, multiple-days-per-week-workouts with 6 weeks of 2-days-per-week, briefer-is-better workouts and you would probably have a pretty damn good route to success.

     You can also take the approach of fasting or feasting and apply it to what you eat.  I have written before on the blog about how the only time in my life that I managed to both build muscle and burn some body fat at the same time was with the “Anabolic Diet.”  With it, you eat a high-fat (80-90% of your total caloric intake), low-carb diet Monday through Friday, and then on the weekends, you stock up on as much carbs as you can handle—even things like donuts and ring dings—for an almost gluttonous carb feast.  It’s extreme, but it definitely works.

     I’m not recommending that you go to that same extreme if that sort of approach isn’t cut out for you, but you can take a similar approach and apply it in other ways.  For instance, if you want to find a subject on the internet that is even more divisive than whether or not you should practice intermittent fasting, it’s the debate between a largely vegan diet (whole foods, plant-based) and a meat-centric diet (Carnivore, Keto, Atkins, et al).  But what do I think? Maybe it’s good to do friggin’ both.  As an Orthodox Christian, I often follow a “vegan” fast for both the 40 days before Easter and the 40 days before Christmas—that one can be tough since Thanksgiving falls during it—as well as periodically at other times throughout the year.  Not only do you not eat any meat or dairy products, you also just don’t eat that much (or, well, aren’t supposed to).  And, yeah, it sucks.  I usually get noticeably thinner by the end of it—including some loss of muscle mass, it must be said.  However, once the fast is over, and I return to several weeks of feasting on big, calorie-dense, meat-forward meals, I notice that it seems to cause me to gain more muscle than, I believe, if I was to just eat “big” non-stop throughout the year.

     Competitive bodybuilders understand this phenomenon very well.  Competitive bodybuilders will, typically, build more muscle over the course of a year of training than their non-competitive counterparts.  The reason being that the extreme pre-contest dieting needed to get down to 4% body fat causes a radical increase in muscle mass when the bodybuilder returns to a high-calorie “bulking” diet; much more than the bodybuilder who simply bulks for a year non-stop.

     There are more methods to this approach than what we’ve discussed so far.  Last year, I wrote an essay on “nutrient timing” where I mentioned the ABCDE diet that was popularized in the old MM2K magazine in the ‘90s.  With it, you spent two weeks of high-calorie “bulking” followed by two weeks of strict, pre-contest-style dieting.  I’m not sure if two weeks is ideal—for some reason, I just think that either longer or shorter durations might be better—but the premise is still reasonably sound.  It is, after all, a period of feasting followed by a period of fasting.  And no matter how you go about doing it, I think it’s an approach we could all utilize in one way or another.