Modern humans have lost touch with their body’s needs and are often mindless about why, what and when they eat. Eating has morphed from a biological need to a cultural norm. For instance, eating three times a day was introduced by Europeans when they migrated to America to make the point that they were more civilized than natives, who ate when their body needed food.
The ritual of fasting has been advocated in several cultures and religions but most have not articulated the rationale behind it. More recently, intermittent fasting has gained significant attention and several studies have shown that this practice helps with weight reduction, helps overcome diabetes and promotes ketosis (fat burning mode), an alternate energy cycle that has longer term benefits compared to glycolysis (fat storing mode). Additionally, fasting also allows your cells to get a break, rest and repair. Some early studies are suggesting that fasting could help with preventing onset of Alzheimer’s disease.
There are two modes of intermittent fasting in vogue. One is the 16–8 in which your day is divided into two zones — a fasting zone that is between 14–16 hours, and a feeding zone that is between 8–10 hours.
During the fasting hours one can stay hydrated and consume normal amounts of water, or have herbal tea. If you wake up feeling hungry, either exercising or drinking warm-hot water/herbal tea will make the hunger pangs immediately fade away.
Consuming added sugar is one of the worst things you can do to your body. It immediately increases the blood glucose level and causes your pancreas to secrete insulin. Insulin binding to the cell is needed for the cell to store energy from glucose. While this is good for short term energy bursts, the excess glucose is stored first in liver (max 100g), then in muscles (max 500g) and finally converted to fat (no limit). In essence, consuming sugar puts your body in fat storing mode. While desserts are an obvious source of glucose, the more insidious one for vegetarians is carbohydrates. Many vegetarians are in reality Carb-a-tarians as they consume prodigious amounts of carbs that breaks down to glucose and immediately triggers the production of insulin. Consequently your body stays in a fat storing mode. Additionally, spikes of glucose induced through a sugar or a carb heavy diet creates repeated cravings for more, resulting in your body being in a perpetual cycle of feeling hungry, consuming short term energy sources, storing excess glucose as fat and craving more. This cycle has nothing to do with calories consumed and some find that they continue to gain weight despite eating lesser and lesser.
To break this vicious cycle, you have to deplete glucose levels in the body, so it stops producing insulin at least for some time each day. Over time, you want your body to move to Ketosis and to turn to stored fat resources for energy. Fasting, and avoiding sugar and foods with high glycemic index is the surest way to do achieve this mode shift.
Caffeine is incorrectly believed to increase alertness and wake you up. Instead, it works by giving you a low. Once it leaves your blood stream, you feel low and crave for more to get back to normal. Additionally, caffeine often comes with milk and sugar to make it palatable which increase glucose and hence insulin. High quality sleep, which is the biggest restorative cycle in the body is impacted negatively by caffeine. So breaking the addiction to caffeine has multiple health benefits.
As far as exercise is concerned, it is critical to maintain muscles. Three key indicators of aging are loss of mobility, decrease in strength and change in posture. Muscles are central to all three. The intent is not to be ripped with muscles but instead to regularly exercise them to prevent atrophy, especially in an age where all house hold chores are done by machines. One should do some weight lifting or other strengthening exercise to build muscles. This can be complemented with any cardio exercise one enjoys, the most effective being high intensity interval training (sprinting if you run, or sprint cycling, in intervals).
In summary,
- Do 14–10 or 16–8 cycle of intermittent fasting.
- Give up eating any dessert or anything that has added sugar. It is absolutely fine to eat fruits in moderation. (no more than 2–3 servings of fruit a day in weight sustaining mode, or 1–2 in weight loss mode)
- Eat grains sparingly (maybe once a week). All grains have high glycemic index and trigger insulin and the fat storing cycle.
- Do something for building and maintaining muscles.
- Be mobile during the day and target 10K steps each day. On alternate days, you can do 10 minutes of interval training.
- Go caffeine free.
The challenge of our generation is not material success as we all have and will have much more than what we need. Instead, the challenge is to increase the health span, which is the percentage of our life we are healthy, plus disease, medication and pain free.