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August 19 - August 28, 2020
Our body is like a hybrid car with a backup gas supply that never gets used because the power charger is always nearby. As long as there is electricity left in the battery, it never bothers to make use of the gasoline.
You see, insulin has hormone buddies, such as ghrelin, who by this point will be screaming “Eat something!” to your brain. (It’s ghrelin that makes your stomach growl with hunger. That little memory aid comes free of charge.)
Think of that elevated insulin as a signal broadcast to every cell in your body: Burn sugar, convert any extra to fat, then send the fat to storage and keep it safe from everyday use.
Again, fat is the best way to store food energy, since it’s more energy-dense than the other two macronutrients: carbohydrates and proteins.
When we started eating this way, there was a dramatic spike in what some call “diseases of civilization”: obesity, high blood pressure, insulin resistance, inflammation, type 2 diabetes, osteoporosis, various autoimmune disorders, Alzheimer’s, and even epithelial cell cancers.
Obesity and diabetes now travel together so often that some researchers refer to them as a single syndrome—diabesity.
I paid special attention to the glycemic index (GI), which was invented in 1981 by Thomas Wolever and David Jenkins at the University of Toronto to help diabetics determine how various carbohydrates affect blood sugar.
The glycemic index has helped millions of diabetics control their blood sugar without recourse to insulin. But it’s never been shown to be all that useful for losing weight, because it fails to capture a lot of nuances. The same food, for instance, can have a different glycemic effect depending upon how ripe it is. Even its temperature and how it’s cooked can make a big difference. Boiled yams are lower on the scale than roasted yams. Cold rice is lower on the index than warm rice. Moreover, the index doesn’t capture the fact that glycemic responses vary from person to person. Some people are
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Watermelon, for instance, is a scary 72 on the glycemic index, but by weight it’s mostly water and soluble fiber. So its glycemic load is very low, meaning it will have a much lower glycemic effect than you would expect if you used just the index to decide what to eat.
The glycemic load measure is an advance, then, on the bare bones glycemic index, and it has a place. It’s limited though. It focuses on blood sugar—important for diabetics—but it doesn’t measure insulin, the more likely culprit in obesity and other metabolic diseases.
The books that did the most to change my mind were Why We Get Fat and Good Calories, Bad Calories by Science magazine writer Gary Taubes, and The Big Fat Surprise by Nina Teicholz.2 Honorable mention goes to Death by Food Pyramid by nutrition writer Denise Minger.3
Fasting takes discipline and practice. But it’s not supposed to be torture.
Set up trip wires between you and failure.
Your liver will start converting your dietary fat into ketones—acetoacetate, beta-hydroxybutyrate, and a by-product called acetone. Your body will use the first two for fuel.
No grains. No starchy plants such as potatoes or starchy beans. No sweet fruit (for now). No refined sugar. None. No sugary drinks. Nada. No sugary syrups. Nope.
And make sure the panel covers the following areas: First, test your hemoglobin (Hb) A1cs—this is a measure of your blood sugar level over a three-month period. It should be below 6 percent. Below 5 percent is better.
Are you a child, severely underweight, pregnant, or nursing? Then you probably shouldn’t fast. Do you have type 1 or 2 diabetes, take hormones, have metabolic problems or an eating disorder? If so, check with your doctor about fasting. You should find a doctor who knows about fasting and ketogenic diets, beyond what he or she picked up in the lounge in medical school. (You can find a list of such doctors at: www.ketogenicdocs.com.) Myths and prejudices are as common among physicians and nutritionists as they are in the general public. If you have severely high blood pressure, talk to your
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This idea of disciplining your natural appetites contradicts a secular myth: the Freudian theory of drives. We’ve all imbibed this idea whether we know it or not. Every urge, we imagine, becomes more and more intense—more urgent—until it’s satisfied. Pop culture constantly claims that if teenagers don’t have sex, for instance, they’ll be repressed and have pent-up desires that will come out in destructive ways.
But for many temptations, it’s just not true that depriving yourself of them will make you want them all the more. Think of pornography for a porn addict, or alcohol for an alcoholic. Satisfying the urge to take one peek at a porn video, or one sip of vodka, doesn’t satiate such people. It titillates the addicts and makes it even harder for them to stay on the wagon.
But fasting reminds us that we aren’t just bodies or souls. We are unities of body and soul. What affects the body affects the soul, and vice versa.
We don’t want just to be declared righteous. We should want to be made righteous.
To be holy is not just to be sanctified, but to be “set apart” from the baser things of the world. And since eating is a biological imperative, fasting is a simple way to set yourself apart.
As St. Pope John Paul II put it during a Lenten message in 1979, “Going without things is to free oneself from the slaveries of a civilization that is always urging people on to greater comfort and consumption.”
Cereal as a breakfast staple owes its origins to Will Keith Kellogg and John Harvey Kellogg, who introduced cornflakes in 1897 as a “healthy alternative,” based on the vegetarianism they practiced as Seventh Day Adventists.2 Did you know you owe your breakfast-eating habits to Seventh Day Adventist beliefs?
This daily rhythm is the so-called 16/8 method popularized several years ago by Martin Berkhan at Lean Gains (www.leangains.com).
As Peter Kreeft observes, “In order to create time to pray, we must destroy time to do something else. We must kill something, refuse something, say no to something.”
Don’t force yourself to eat more once you start to feel full. Force-feeding is rarely a good idea. If anything, slow down as soon as you feel your stomach swelling.
On Sunday, ease up on the fasting since it’s a feast day. Expand your feeding-time window to twelve hours.
True Christian fasting, as Susan Mathews explains, “is not a pitting of the spirit against the flesh, but rather body and soul united together against sin, body and soul converted together to the Lord. The whole man must cooperate with God’s grace. The whole man must love the Lord.”
In the same spirit, the great Orthodox theologian Alexander Schmemann wrote that true “Christian asceticism is a fight, not against but for the body.”
The weight should be heavy enough that you can’t do even one more rep.
If you can do more than twelve reps in a set, increase the weight.
“FIT”: frequency, intensity, and time.
On day seven, have a mini-feast. Eat throughout the day but keep it within a twelve-hour feeding window.
“Our human nature often asks for more than what it needs, and sometimes the devil helps so as to cause fear about the practice of penance and fasting,” wrote St. Teresa of Ávila.
Ketones, unlike regular fatty acids, can cross the blood-brain barrier.
And ketosis, whether achieved by diet, fasting, or both, is certainly associated with mental clarity. Many people report that the sensation is really strong when blood ketone levels reach the threshold of “nutritional ketosis”—about one mmol/L (millimoles per liter).
Our brains are only about 2 percent of our body weight but consume about 20 percent of our energy. Ketosis solves the problem that most humans dealt with for most of history: hungry brains and an inconstant food supply.
Fasting has been shown specifically to increase the body’s production of a growth hormone called BDNF—brain derived neurotropic hormone.
Did you know that hundreds of millions of neurons, that is, brain cells, line your gut from one end to the other?
Researchers now suspect that the link between the brain in your head (with its one hundred billion neurons) and your “second brain,” your gut, is central to your health and your mood. These two “brains” are constantly communicating with each other through a direct line called the vagus nerve.
If you are trying to make a tough decision and the reasons for each choice are equal, a friend may ask: “What does your gut tell you?” In other words, “What does your pre-rational instinct incline you to do?”
There are more microbial cells in your body than there are cells of your body.
Fecal transplant experiments with mice have been shown to cure obesity and metabolic syndrome,7 which are diseases not just of digestion but also of hormones and neuroregulation.
Your microbiome is a complex result of your birth, your upbringing, your environment, your emotional state, and your diet.
Whatever the benefits of supplements, they have not been our source of probiotics for most of our history. Instead, pretty much every traditional cuisine included fermented foods teeming with good bacteria. You should follow tradition here if you want to promote the health of the ecosystem in your G/I tract. Sauerkraut, kimchi, pickles, tofu, kombucha, unfiltered apple cider vinegar, yogurt, and kefir are all good sources (though watch the sugar with yogurt and kefir products). Just make sure you get the stuff that is really fermented. Some pickled vegetables and most tofu are merely soaked in
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The good bacteria thrive on the soluble fiber in vegetables and other plants.
For more on the subject of feeding, fasting, feasting, and brain health, check out Genius Foods by Max Lugavere and Paul Grewal, and Brain Maker by David Perlmutter.12
From his research, Longo has concluded that IGF-1 is a key reason that calorie restriction increases longevity.
IGF-1 pushes our cells to divide, so we need it to grow. But when our body is in “go-go mode” all the time, it prevents the body’s cells from undergoing maintenance.
