When does fasting actually begin?

(bulkbiker) #21

Or you could say that by not eating since dinner on Sunday I have fasted for 36 hours… which is exactly what I and every other person I have ever spoken to about fasting would say. Hence intermittent fasting regimes of 23:1 where you don’t eat in a 23 hour period and eat within a 1 hour window. Sleepy times are still considered as fasting.

(Robert C) #22

Agree - and this has been what I have noticed myself.

It is far too easy to maintain weight on OMAD but, pretty easy to move down a bit if you go with entire days of not eating (dinner, skip a day, breakfast or later).

(Allie) #23

Me too and I’m not changing it.

(Shane) #24

Does it really matter if you claim to fast for 23 hours instead of 21 doing omad? You are still fasting for the same amount of time either way and no outlandish claims are going to change that.

Breakfast can only be eaten at the end of a fast. You can not skip breakfast, you can only delay it.
I normally eat breakfast around 3-4pm, so if I skip what should have been breakfast on Monday I will have gone nearly 48 hours between meals by breakfast time on Tuesday, but if I deduct sleeping time and other times that it isn’t practical to eat, like in the shower/toilet/work place, I can only claim a couple of hours a day as legitimate righteous fasting hours because I could have eaten for those couple of hours but chose not to.
I feel depressed now, I ate my last meal over 54 hours ago, but I’ve only legitimately fasted a few those hours. I’ve been robbed.

(Robert C) #25

Not sure why you feel robbed?

It is only the pre-food-abstanance period you would deduct (when you wouldn’t have eaten anyway).
After that, fasting adaptations are in full swing and going strong for the rest of the time (as far as I know).

(Bacon is a many-splendoured thing) #26

In normal English usage, fasting begins as soon as one puts one’s fork down. That is why the overnight period between supper and “break-fast” has always, in Modern English and in Anglo-Saxon before it, been called a fast. Use the term any way you want for yourself, but that is the commonly accepted usage.

There is always a certain amount of imprecision in any linguistic usage. Unless precision is of the utmost importance, it is customary to speak of fasting for 24 hours when one eats a single meal a day, even though technically, it is more like 23.5:0.5 fasting. We’ve debated this before, and I personally would prefer to see fewer electrons sacrificed to stating what fasting ought to mean and more to what people actually do.

So here are some questions for the fasters among you: Do you, personally, count the period of digestion, and if so, do you assign it an arbitrary value, or do you have some way of knowing when you’re done digesting? Do you follow Dr. Fung’s terminology, or do you have your own? Does anyone here not count sleep as fasting time? If so, how do you measure your fasting time? I believe the answers to these questions might be quite valuable to those who would like to explore fasting, for whatever reason.

(Shane) #27

That was tongue in cheek. It takes me about 36 hours to burn through glucose stores from the carbs I ate (BG was 3.2 when I last checked) so maybe I’ll make up a new definition for fasting so that it doesn’t start until glucose stores from eaten carbs are depleted. Or maybe I’ll stick with the tradition of calling it the period before break fast.

(Brian) #28

Well said! :slight_smile:

(Robert C) #29

I think you are hitting the nail on the head.

Always eating enough that someone cannot deplete their glucose stores (like someone on non-Keto OMAD that just maintains weight) - would be a frustrating situation (especially if they felt their OMAD investment was hard to maintain).

If you instead either measure or ballpark where your meals actually let you start having fasting adaptations happen, I think you’ll wind up in a better situation if you try to maximize that number of hours per week.

People like high numbers but, 7 days of 1-hour OMAD (i.e. 161 hours “fasted”) does not give you the same results/adaptations as a 161 hour fast (in fact, if you eat enough - it leaves you in maintenance).

(Robert C) #30

I am sort of converting slowly because it is difficult to figure out when the body is actually getting fasting adaptations vs. when I am just hungry or something.

I am moving toward only really counting meals skipped (assuming a common 3-meal-a-day baseline) and counting entire days of no eating (which really seems to help).

(Bacon is a many-splendoured thing) #31

I would expect that really, only exercise will truly deplete glycogen, and then only temporarily. Volek and his team have recently shown that athletes who have been fat-adapted for long enough have the same glycogen levels in their muscle tissue as carb-adapted athletes, which would indicate, I should think, that gluconeogenesis (which we know is a demand-driven process) automatically replenishes depleted glycogen. Since glycogen cannot leave muscle tissue once it has been stored there, the only way to deplete it is to metabolize it, which I would assume means exercise.

(Robert C) #32

I think maybe I got too simplistic here - sorry about that.

What I was trying to say is that the person is getting to the point where ketones are being used instead of sugar burning and insulin is going down.

(Bacon is a many-splendoured thing) #33

Ah. That makes sense.

(Raj Seth) #34

Well I track all my fasts - and I start counting 6 hrs (1/4 day) after I stop eating. I figure that is how long the nutrition is still coming in, so the benefits of being fasted haven’t kicked in yet. Over the last 1.5 years, I have fasted about 1/3 of the time. If I set my timer to 0 then the fasts add up to 3/8 of the time.

Does it matter? Not really - regardless of how I count it, the effect is the same.

If we apply this counting to 3x weekly ADF - IDM’s favored regimen - it would count as 36 x 3 = 108 hours fasted, and 60 hours fed, or 64% fasted, 36% fed. If one deducts the first 6 hours, then it is 90 fasted v 78 fed or 54% fasted v 46% fed. However, to my simplistic way of looking, it is 3 days fasted v 4 days fed. That would be like treating the first 12 hours or the overnight after dinner, as fed. Using that method, I have fasted 29% of the time.

Googly :eyes: yet?

Count the fast the way you want. Its just a number.

PS - I just changed my adjustment factor to 12 hours makes sense to me - I am a data hog!

(Jane) #35

Nobody is claiming adding up individual small fasts equals the same effect as the number of hours consecutively fasting. That’s silly.

Maybe that is where you are coming from with the “don’t count sleeping as fast time”. Because yeah, sleeping 3 nights in a row for 8 hours is not the same as going 24 hours w/o food. I’ll give you that.

(Robert C) #36

Really, I am just talking about the beginning of a fast.

If you have a regular lunch and a large pizza for dinner then, maybe you shouldn’t start counting your fasting hours until well into the next morning. (You’ll lose weight slowly this way because you’ll start needing body fat much later - maybe later than your next meal.)

If you have a regular lunch and only a 4 ounce beef patty for dinner then, maybe fasting adaptations are starting for you around midnight. (You’ll lose weight faster this way because you’ll start fasting sooner and spend more hours needing to feed from body fat.)

The only reason I am suggesting counting fasting hours starting the next morning at breakfast time is that people usually eat about a big enough dinner to get them through to that time naturally. That is, people trying to fast don’t generally eat a large pizza for dinner but, do not necessarily want to try to go to sleep hungry (after only a small beef patty).

#37

Good, I’m on a 34-minute fast.

#38

I start counting time when I finish eating. I include time that I am asleep. I stop counting when I start eating again.

I generally follow Dr. Fung’s terminology that schedules like 16:8, 20:4, or OMAD/24-hour fasts are not fasting, but time-restricted eating (TRE). If you are going to fast “a full day” it means you didn’t eat at all that day, not that you just ate one meal, even though it was almost 24 hours after the last one. “A full day” means skipping breakfast, lunch, dinner and all other meals or snacks on that day. Your next meal is on the next day, which means usually a minimum 36-hour fast to count as a “full day.” Following this terminology, I don’t really think of TRE as IF. IF is full days, up to maybe three days or so; beyond that is probably EF.

I do a combination of TRE and IF: I try to alternate between two days eating and two days not. On eating days, I aim for 16:8, though it often stretches longer. My two fast days add up to about 65 hours usually, from after dinner one evening through two full days of no eating to the third day when I break around lunchtime.