What they don’t tell you about fasting
Ever since 2004 (when I was 17), I’ve been anywhere from 0 to 40lbs overweight. Sometimes I gained weight because I was eating 10 grilled cheese sandwiches a day, sometimes it was because I drank too much beer and ate too much pizza. The only times I ended up losing weight were by accident, I was either too poor to buy food, or I was working a job that required lots of physical activity and I didn’t have time to eat. It didn’t seem to matter if I was vegetarian for 18 months or if I quit drinking for long periods of time, my weight never really went down except by accident, and it would always go back up after these unplanned lean periods.
Then sometime in 2016, I decided to try this thing called “keto”, and oh my goodness…it worked. That is, it worked for almost a year until I decided I enjoyed chips and salsa too much and gave it up (I was a little stressed at the time and salsa was the only thing that could console me). I ended up getting fluffier and fluffier until I saw pictures from a wedding I attended, and decided I needed to get back on the keto train. As I was brushing up on all the best methods to approach keto I stumbled upon this thing called intermittent fasting in late 2017. Suddenly, you can get into ketosis not by restricting your diet to things like avocado and bacon, but by eating just one meal a day and not worrying about carbs! Too good to be true right? (I was still eating meals that most would consider “healthy”, consisting of lots of cauliflower and not a lot of carbs or anything refined). Next thing I know, I’m seeing numbers on the scale that I hadn’t seen since I was a teenager!
But all good things must come to an end, and 2018 was when my disordered eating came back to haunt me and I began to have one meal a day, of Oreos, Doritos and McDonalds. The weight didn’t come back immedietely, but boy did my face sure get puffy in a hurry. It took about 2 months of eating this way to gain 15 lbs, and I kept thinking I could just do a longer fast to make up for what I was eating, and of course that didn’t really work until I tried…
Alternate day fasting.
What could possibly be more effective than not eating anything for 22 hours at a time? How about not eating anything for 42 or 60 hours at a time! During the summer of 2020 I decided I would give alternate day fasting a try as I had heard about people doing it and having great success with weight loss and resetting their metabolism. I was determined to really do it this time, and kept track of everything I was doing, which was going 42 hours or so between meals, and then having meals comprised of Oreos, Doritos and McDonalds. I still hadn’t addressed my fundamental issue with food which is binge eating complete crap, but it seemed like I had found a real life “hack” where I could eat anything I wanted.
Alternate day fasting worked really well the first month, I lost about 20 lbs and felt pretty good overall. That is until I began having some serious side effects that a lot of fasting people (fastors? Fastingers? Fastsesses?) experience, but don’t really mention in their YouTube videos which is . . . .
Dumping Syndrome
Ever heard of that little side effect that people have after gastric bypass surgery where they say they experience this thing called “having to go to the bathroom within 2.5 seconds of realizing it”? Yeah, that can happen after extended periods of fasting too, and it’s called “dumping syndrome”. I’d say look that shit up, but that would be too accurate a description. You end up living in the bathroom. I experienced horrible stomach pain and bloating, felt like I was going to throw up, went into cold sweats, my heart was racing, and I felt almost as bad as when my appendix died. And did I mention that I ended up basically living in the bathroom? After experiencing all of that pain and horror, I tried a few different methods of breaking my fasts to ease the side effects, but none of them worked. I tried breaking fasts with a small bowl of light soup, and then waiting 6 hours to eat something else, it didn’t work, back to the toilet. I tried only eating one piece of bacon and nothing else for 6 hours and then having a normal meal, it didn’t work, back to the toilet.
Hoping to God that I hadn’t done something to my gut that was irreversible, I decided I was never going to fast again, and instead focus not on weight loss, but on addressing what lead to weight gain in the first place which was binge eating crap food. I figured I could work on losing weight after I had gone a few months eating 2-3 normal sized meals a day that weren’t comprised of Oreos, Doritos and McDonalds.
My side effects never returned, and I’m probably never going to do ongoing intermittent or alternate day fasting again. For now I’m back on keto and 2–3 meals a day, 2–3 reasonably sized cheat days a month, and daily exercise. This seems to be a good balance and something I can maintain for the long term. My face has de-poofed quite a bit since Christmas, my clothes are starting to feel a bit more relaxed, I’m not binge eating anything, and I have made steady progress as far as my scale is concerned. My alternate day fasting experience, was very likely worsened by the fact that I continually broke my fasts with the worst possible foods. Leading to huge swings in glucose and insulin levels, which ultimately led to all of the horror I went thru. Fasting may not be for me anymore, but it’s possible that it could still work for you. Just try not to break your fasts with Oreos, Doritos and McDonalds, or else you’ll find yourself working, living and sleeping on the john!
Caleb Crockett is not a nutritionist and has absolutely no clue what he is talking about. He used to smoke 2 packs a day and still indulges from time to time. He also has a level 10 membership card at the local liquor store. Nothing in this article is medical advice, and my sincerest apologies go to my friend John for using his name for the crapper.
Photo 1 & 2 unsplash.com/@jankolar
Photo 3 unsplash.com/@danielcgold
