I’m not sure if I should post this here or in the Extended Fasting forum, but for the last few weeks I’ve been doing another N=1 experiment on myself.
Before the experiment, my “control” was to do my three rides a week at about the 38th hour of a 40 or 42 hour fast. I do alternate day fasts three days a week (Sun, Tues, Thurs) and eat four days a week. My rides were on eating days, before my meal.
Over the last few weeks, I’d noticed a tendency to get cold hands and feet, along with feeling cold in the house. This is Florida, and while it’s not as hot as it was in August, we haven’t had any real cool weather. We’ve had two nights where it dipped under 70. My wife commented on the cold hands a few times, but it was easy to brush it off thinking, “I’m fine, I just had my hands in cold water”.
The experiment was to bring the ride forward 24 hours to the first fasting day, about 14 or 15 hours since my last meal. With six days of riding earlier, I’ve noticed on at least five out of six that the cold hands have disappeared. On the sixth day, I’m not sure. I’d say less cold than they had been.
Here’s the catch. I don’t actually know what’s different and if it’s good, bad or just doesn’t matter.
I do the same amount of riding (about an hour on the road - 13 to 18 miles, depending on what I feel like doing) and I don’t believe I’ve altered my eating. I’m eating to satiety, not measuring grams of food. According to a calculator I’ve played with, the amount of fat I have available to burn, and using Richard’s 31.5 calories per pound of body fat per day, it tells me I can’t produce the energy I need to burn for minimal, sedentary activity - not even counting the ride. According to that my fat can produce 1000 calories less per day than I was burning, not counting the ride which adds another 500 to 600 calories.
That might imply I was going into starvation mode before and conserving energy, but that doesn’t explain why burning those calories 24 hours earlier would get rid of the shutdown.
It might also be telling me I need to get some fat calories while otherwise fasting.
But you get used to your environment. When I was in AZ, people who had been there a while would be wearing jackets and gloves when it was like 60 out. We went there in February one year (from CT), and I had a sweater on in the morning, and it was brutally hot after about 8am…to someone who keeps their house in the lower 60s during the winter. To them, it was cold.