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August 19 - August 28, 2020
An eat-fast-feast lifestyle need not exclude any foods. Not even birthday cake, donuts, fudge, pumpkin pie, and cannoli. Such treats are among life’s pleasures, and I won’t tell you to forgo them from now on. The problem is that they are common in our modern lives when they should be reserved for truly special occasions.
Let educated sense and prudence be your guide.
Mark fast and feast days for the entire year on your calendar. This will make you less dependent on willpower during weak moments. If an unscheduled birthday party or wedding lands on a day you had marked for a fast, just move the fast up or back one day.
Eating fat doesn’t mean that your meals will be mostly fat by volume. Fat is calorie dense. The almost invisible olive oil on your salad may have more calories than that six-inch cube of lettuce you’ve poured it over.
Get most of your carbs from green vegetables. In terms of volume but not calories, you can follow Michael Pollan’s advice, “Eat food, mostly plants, not too much.”
If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world. —Thorin’s last words to Bilbo in The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien
Just think of Mardi Gras (“Fat Tuesday”). It started as a final party before the long Lenten fast. Yet how many people, wasted in the streets of Rio de Janeiro and New Orleans, really fast and sacrifice for the next six weeks? A feast, wrenched from its context, tends to descend into debauchery.
Jesus fasted for forty days and forty nights before he started his earthly ministry. But in the gospels after that, there’s far more feasting than fasting. So much, in fact, that it seemed to cause scandal.
To speak from my own experience, feasts are a lot more fun and spiritually enriching when they follow a serious fast.
“Work,” Josef Pieper writes in his important study of festivity, “is an everyday occurrence, while a feast is something special, unusual, an interruption in the ordinary passage of time.”
“‘A holiday every day’—even every other day—is an idea that cannot be realized in practice,” writes Josef Pieper. “A festival can arise only out of a foundation of a life whose ordinary shape is given by the working day.” Without meaningful work, the whole thing falls apart: “An idle-rich class of do-nothings,” he notes wryly, “are hard put even to amuse themselves, let alone to celebrate a festival.”3 Fasts and feasts cast light on each other, and on ordinary days. And those ordinary days help give meaning to the fasts and the feasts.
Second, feast days are not days set aside to eat something you shouldn’t. They’re not exceptions to the more proper way of acting.
When all is said and done, however, we should think in terms of whole foods, not abstract parts. Food is far more than fuel.
You don’t directly encounter calories, carbohydrates, fats, and proteins. Even at the level of chemistry, real foods have far more to them. We may think of a chicken breast as just a source of protein. In truth, it’s a complex matrix of hundreds of different elements and compounds, of proteins and fats, of the history of a specific chicken—a history it retains even when it is grilled and served to us with broccoli and cauliflower.
Eating isolated chicken protein, or amino acids from such protein, is not the same thing as eating an actual chicken breast. Taking a vitamin C tablet is not the same...
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Treating food as nothing but fuel is a uniquely modern error. It’s a type of reductionism that had very bad effects in the twentieth century.
Michael Pollan calls this modern trend nutritionism.
A feast enjoyed alone is less a feast than a symbol of loneliness and isolation. We react viscerally to the thought of someone spending Thanksgiving or Christmas or Easter alone.
Even when we’re eating alone, we don’t normally consume whole foods in isolation. Unlike animals, which eat their food raw off the ground, we prepare, cook, and eat food while sitting upright at tables. These foods are usually transformed in recipes and even cuisines, which are themselves far richer and more complex than the individual foods they contain.
If you don’t know what I’m talking about, pause for a minute, go online and find a video of the “Mandelbrot fractal zoom” and run it. It’s easier to experience than to describe in words.
For just bringing down insulin, burning fat, and boosting growth hormone, eighteen to twenty-four hours seems to be the sweet spot.3 For autophagy, we need to fast for a longer period. It may be that for fighting some diseases—such as cancer—longer fasts, whether water-only or mimicking, will be called for.
The Church Fathers noticed that the Bible, and human history, begins with a fast and ends with a feast. Early in Genesis, God tells Adam and Eve that they may enjoy any of the fruits of the garden but for the fruit from one tree.
As John Piper says in A Hunger for God: One might think that those who feast most often on communion with God are least hungry. . . . But, paradoxically, it is not so that they are the least hungry saints. . . . The strongest, most mature Christians I have ever met are the hungriest for God. It might seem that those who eat most would be least hungry. But that’s not the way it works with an inexhaustible fountain, and an infinite feast, and a glorious Lord.
Week One Eat a “ketogenic” diet of high natural fat, moderate protein, and very low carbs (below fifty grams not counting fiber) without simple sugars, grains, or starches. Get about 80 percent of your calories from fat, 15 percent from protein, and 5 percent from carbohydrates.
Week Two Start to restrict your feeding window to 16/8.
Week Three Lengthen your daily fast with a 20/4 routine.
Week Four For three days this week—preferably Monday, Wednesday, and Friday—eat all your food during a one-hour window.
Week Five Mimic a real fast on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Consume one-fourth the number of calories that you normally do—five hundred to six hundred calories. (Think two avocados with lime juice and salt.)
Week Six For the first few days of the week, prepare for a fast longer than twenty-four hours. Shoot for thirty-six to seventy-two hours.
It would be nice to measure insulin directly, but that’s hard and expensive.
The easiest and cheapest tool to test for ketones is a urine strip. A box of 150 strips costs no more than ten dollars. You just pee in a cup, dip the business side of the strip in your urine, pull it out, wait forty seconds, and look at the color change.
But this method has its limits. The strips detect only one of the three ketones your body produces, called acetoacetate. And it doesn’t detect the ones you’re using, but rather the ones that you’re excreting through your urine.
If you want to detect ketones and glucose in your blood, you’ll need to get a blood testing meter. There are several on the market, but I use the DSS Precision Xtra by Abbott.
You’ll also need to buy glucose test strips and ketone test strips. If you buy the meter kit, plus thirty glucose and thirty ketone strips, it will cost you about a hundred dollars.
Costs would get out of hand quickly if you did these tests every day, since the ketone strips cost over a dollar a piece.
The blood ketone test tells you the concentration of beta-hydroxybutyrate (BHB) in your blood. That’s the ketone your brain really likes to run on.
If you’re in ketosis, the meter should give you a reading of at least 0.5 mmol/L. (Don’t worry about the units. Just look at the number.) Ideally, you’d like to see it between one and three mmol/L sometime during the day. This is the range that low-carb researchers Jeff Volek and Stephen Phinney call nutritional ketosis.
Harriet Brown, “The Weight of the Evidence,” Slate, March 24, 2015, http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/medical_examiner/2015/03/diets_do_not_work_the_thin_evidence_that_losing_weight_makes_you_healthier.html.
. C. Zauner, B. Schneeweiss, A. Kranz, C. Madl, K. Ratheiser, L. Kramer, E. Roth, B. Schneider, and K. Lenz, “Resting Energy Expenditure in Short-Term Starvation Is Increased as a Result of an Increase in Serum Norepinephrine,” American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 71, no. 6 (June 2000): 1511–15.
1. Kevin Loria, “The True Story of the Man Who Survived Without any Food for 382 Days,” Business Insider, October 18, 2016, https://www.businessinsider.com.au/angus-barbieri-382-days-without-food-scotsman-fasting-starvation-obesity-2016-10.
mTOR is shorthand for “mammalian target of rapamycin.” Jason Fung provides more details in “Fasting and Autophagy—mTOR/Autophagy 1,” Intensive Dietary Management, at: https://idmprogram.com/fasting-and-autophagy-mtor-autophagy-1/.
For an excellent explanation of the scientific evidence for the power and limits of natural selection and random variation, see Michael Behe, The Edge of Evolution: The Search for the Limits of Darwinism (New York: The Free Press, 2008).
Douglas Axe, Undeniable: How Biology Confirms Our Intuition that Life Is Designed (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2016).
Jared Diamond, “The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race,” Discover, May 1, 1999, http://discovermagazine.com/1987/may/02-the-worst-mistake-in-the-history-of-the-human-race.
