The Biggest Challenge of Intermittent Fasting
If you’ve been following my 90% time-in-range challenge (if not, get up to speed!😉), you probably know that intermittent fasting plays a big role in it.
As the weeks go by, I am becoming more persuaded that it is one great tool leverage as the variability of my blood glucose has never been this low.
Here’s a quick recap of the benefits I have experienced:
stability of blood glucose both during fasting and eating windows (which for me are 19h and 5h respectively, at the moment).
improved insulin sensitivity: I am eating more carbohydrates with a same amount of rapid insulin, when not lower.
improved focus and performance (in both mental and physical tasks).
Before starting the fasting experiment, I was hesitant and slighlty afraid that my mornings would be a painful walk through a valley of starvation and cravings of the breakfast that I should have eaten - but hadn’t.
Not the case!
These concerns make sense though. Being directly related to food itself, they are the first ones we get to consider: being used to eat at certain times, the novelty of either skipping a meal or eating during a different interval of time may indeed cause them to materialise for a while.
But in my experience, a short adaptation period was enough to bring everything back to normal. And if it did for me, an immensely hungry human being, it will do that for you too, guaranteed!
The real challenge
To my greatest surprise, time restricted feeding posed an entirely different challenge, one that has nothing to do with hunger or food per se, and that I didn’t considered at all: making it sound reasonable to others.
I completely underestimated the social importance that is placed around eating, and the pressure that this entails. If you live with your family, friends, or if you work with colleagues, sharing a meal is just something that happens from time to time.
But when you apply some sort of uncommon “restriction”, shift or modification to any activity usually done with others, you’re sort of interrupting a pattern. Here, if shifting the time of meals implies a misalignment with other people’s eating times, it can be seen as something that gets in the middle of a lunch or a dinner together.
Sometimes it can cause a weird or curious look, sometimes no reactions at all (most often people just don’t care about what we do, nobody’s the center of the universe after all!). But there are times when people get annoyed and start to ask questions and/or make comments.
“Why don’t you eat with us anymore?”
“Gosh, you live like a monk, let it go a bit! Aren’t you stressed with all these restrictions?”
“You know, it’s hard to make a plan with you. Can’t you just hang out when we do?”
In those cases, one must be able to explain that there are facets of diabetes that understandably are not so trivial for everyone. We can’t pretend that each individual has the context, the background, the interest or the will to understand all the whys and whats that stand behind our choices.
A sample meal
Let’s use an example of me eating a salad bowl at 6.30 pm. In there, I throw some non-starchy vegs (some greens and tomatoes) some starchy ones (potatoes, beetroots, carrots), some superfoods like spirulina powder, some lentils/beans, some flaxseeds and some vinegar. There are two ways of narrating this bowl:
Giovanni eats a colourful salad bowl at 6.30 pm.
First of all, Giovanni is eating at 6.30 because ‘eating too close to bed time may screw up the quality of his sleep’. He is eating before most people eat their dinner, so he’ll probably miss a chat around the dining table. He can’t eat meat and cheese and other dairy products, so he has to go for lentils for proteins (are they even providing enough proteins, anyway…?). He’s using spiru-something powder probably to compensate for something, and flaxseeds for something else. He gets his fats from flaxseeds instead of oil because highly processed foods like oils are a bomb of empty calories, and seeds are preferable because they’re also packed with proteins. Also, he avoids oils because ‘too much fats increase insulin resistance and make it harder to control blood glucose’, as he says. Additionally, he uses vinegar because it ‘promotes an alkaline environment in his body’.
…you know what, let Giovanni have his dinner alone. It’s better anyway.
99% of the times I have to deal with the second narration, people asking me what I can’t eat because I am plant based, and how do I ‘compensate’, and so on. 1% of the time I can spare a one hour explainer by just saying: “Yeah, this is a salad bowl with some veg. Want some?“
Left: Giovanni’s incredibly complex and sophisticated and so-incredibly-stressful-to-prepare salad bowl.
Right: Giovanni trying to enjoy his salad bowl in peace while being bombarded with questions.
We should not justify our every single action - that would make for a very annoying individual indeed -, but when such actions somehow affect the people around us, then I feel some sort of duty to at least provide some context to make my perspective sound reasonable. Especially when there’s a whole, unnecessarily overcomplicated story being built around a simple meal.
More often than I’d like to admit I fail. To a person without diabetes, explaining that you are trying to optimise glucose stability or your insulin sensitivity can sound very abstract and even “geeky”. And I understand that. I geek out on the underlying aspects of nutrition, others don’t. That’s fine.
Diabetes is not a random game
But what is true is that diabetes is not a random game. Geeking in on the impact of our life choices is a great thing to do. And to some extent, I feel that more people would see improvements in their day to day if they started to dig a bit more.
A diabetic has to do juggle with a number of things that a non-diabetic often ignores - although concepts such as insulin sensitivity, insulin resistance and the interplay between macronutrients, caring about the quality and the timing of what we eat are elements that profoundly affect the life of every single human being.
For how uncomfortable it may sound, diabetics (or any human being, let’s be real) that are serious about their long term health have to do some math and make some choices. Diabetics need to know the nutritional facts of what they are eating, how much insulin they are injecting, the ratio of insulin to carbohydrates, the optimal foods to eat. They also need to accept that it is better to be careful with certain things - eating too close to bed time, at a certain restaurant, and so on - and that sometimes they may even have to postpone or skip a meal due to high blood glucose. It has happened before, it will happen again.
Again, diabetes is not a random game, it requires intentionality and a clear plan.
Intermittent fasting is just an example, but this can be applied to anything: there are factors - mostly sleep, diet and exercise - that we can control to improve our health.
These are levers we can use to our advantage, as long as we know they are there at all.
Not acting on these levers is a choice. And choices have consequences. Some people choose to explore these levers, others ignore it.
In my case, intermittent fasting is giving me a control over my diabetes which I have never experienced before. I am not saying that everyone should live as I live, nor that fasting is the only key to a healthy life (although there’s growing and ever more solid evidence that this could be true). I am just being an advocate of my choices, without pretences. Sometimes I may get harsh comments, and I’ll do my best to explain.
Health is the ultimate wealth
To me, health is just too important, I stand and live by that statement, action by action. If that entails unpopular choices, a trade-off with some social conventions, or upsetting some people that’s fine. I’ll do my best to explain when needed, otherwise I’ll just live my life, and live others live theirs.
Those who really care about us will understand and support us. And hopefully, we’ll be one step closer to a healthier life.
I have claimed that everyone should at least explore the idea of fasting in some fashion. In this post I focus on the benefits I experience as a type 1 diabetic, but in truth it can do good to every one of us in several ways.
David Sinclair is arguably one of the leading experts when it comes to the science of aging, or aging well, I should say. I highly recommend listening to some of his interviews or snippets on YouTube, starting from his appearance at Andrew Huberman’s.
