A Mormon Who Tried Intermittent Fasting

I’ve been fasting all my life.

That came out wrong. Let me start over.

I grew up Mormon (or, more accurately, as a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — now you know why people call us Mormons instead). It’s a religious and cultural tradition among us Mormons to fast on the first Sunday of every month.

It goes like this: we don’t eat or drink anything for two meals (usually breakfast and lunch on Sunday), and then we donate the money we WOULD have spent on those meals to charity. It’s a spiritual practice with lofty practical aims — to feed the hungry and clothe the naked, to care for the poor. Isn’t that beautiful?

As you can imagine, I became very good at hating it with black-hearted despair every month as a kid. What’s less fun than not eating breakfast for a ten year old? The answer is NOTHING.

Somewhere in the process of growing into an adult who is interested in finding his own spiritual path, the swelling of my hatred for this religious tradition has greatly reduced. But it’s still tough, and it still inspires solitary feelings of ascetic deprivation, with mixed results. I know I should be feeling closer to God, and enjoy an increased sensitivity to things spiritual, but mostly I get cranky and tired.

Over the past few years, though, I’ve heard more and more noise about other, non-spiritual aims for fasting. People like Tim Ferriss, Jimmy Kimmel, and Terry Crews have talked at some length about the health and longevity benefits of different variations on the practice. Curious, and considering myself something of a reluctant expert on the subject, I decided to experiment with some non-spiritual fasting.

The first thing I tried was a three-day fast from any kind of food or calories. I drank a ton of water, slept more than usual, and managed to stay alive.

The first casualty? Asceticism.

I was surprised by how much less stressful it was than I thought it would be. For much of the time, I barely even thought about the fact that I was fasting. When I got hungry, I drank water and tried to sit down and rest. It started feeling like a much-needed break from the unending cycle of consumption. The experience ended up being pleasant and centering in the way I always hoped fasting would be when I forced myself through it for religious reasons.

Of course, I should point out that a huge part of the difference in my experience had to do with water. In my monthly Mormon fast, the idea is to go without both food AND drink for 24 hours. I learned during my 3-day health fast that a lot of the crankiness I had come to associate with fasting was actually just dehydration.

So, yeah, that’s pretty cool. But also, I’m not about to make a habit of going on a 3-day fast every week or every month. After all, regardless of difficulty, the cold biological reality is that if you don’t eat, you don’t have energy. I was exhausted on the second day, and barely wanted to do anything at all on the third. It turns out starvation is not a viable long-term lifestyle choice.

For my next trick, I decided to try out intermittent fasting. There are about as many methods and ideas out there as there are people to champion them, so I picked something very, very simple:

The daily 16-hour fast.

The basic idea is that you confine your eating to an 8-hour window. So, if you finish dinner, say, at 7pm, you don’t eat until 1pm the next day. Basically, you skip a meal, and don’t snack on anything to compensate.

There’s some science around this method, all of which falls somewhere on the sliding scale of dubiety, but it was compelling enough to attract a dilettante like me, so… there you go. I won’t try hard to summarize, but it all has something to do with resetting your metabolism every day, giving it time to rest, and letting your body clear out “toxins,” whatever those are.

The primary motivator for me to give this a go is that I’m in my 30s, and my relationship with food has gradually deteriorated over the last few years. I graze constantly, overeat at mealtimes, and consume far too much sugar. I frequently experience mild heartburn, suffer from the sluggishness of an overworked digestive system, and almost never feel hungry. (In other words, I live in America.)

All of that starts to recast food as a kind of personal antagonist, an ever-present negative energy that slowly fattens and depresses me. Clearly, I need to make some changes. (Without needing to leave America.)

Enter intermittent fasting, which, in a matter of about three weeks, has gone a long way toward solving almost all of those problems.

I’m going to start off listing a bunch of the benefits I’ve personally experienced in the short time I’ve been trying this out.

I’ve got more energy.
I can’t explain exactly why, but in general I feel calmer, happier, and more motivated throughout the day, and especially after about six or seven hours without food.

I eat less junk.
In regular life, brownies, cookies, candy, chips, and all manner of empty calories will materialize in almost any given environment. Arguments to indulge sprout like weeds in the garden of my mind. “Well how unhealthy is it, really?” “Wouldn’t it be better to get a little energy?” “You’ve been working hard, you deserve a snack.” “You’re bored and lethargic, you deserve a snack.” “It’s made of chocolate.” Countering all those arguments is not only exhausting, it’s usually also impossible over the long term.

But when I’m in the middle of a fast, I can turn it all down with the same response: “I’m not eating right now.” It is so much easier to say no to everything than it is to say no to some things.

I get hungry, and it feels AWESOME.
There’s a very ancient pleasure in being eager for your next meal. When you walk down the street, and you’re aware of how hungry you are, and you catch the head-spinning scents wafting away from the taco place on the corner. It’s living, is what it is.

And it’s true that hunger is the best spice. Food tastes better all the time. Because I spend half my day not eating, I appreciate the eating half so much more.

I don’t feel as bad about junk food.
After all, how much damage can I do in 8 hours? Well, OK, a lot — but only half as much as 16 or more.

I need less sleep.
This, I believe, is a function of cutting out the late-night eating. After dinner, that’s it, no matter what time it is. No more food after that, which means by the time I go to sleep, I’ve already been not-eating for a few hours.

Not that there aren’t some drawbacks.

There are some things that have been less than wonderful since I started. However, I’ve also found that each of them can be leveraged to reinforce the lifestyle.

Mistakes can be painful.
One day, after finishing dinner at 8pm, I caved and ate a couple of cookies my wife made at 10:30pm. Which meant that if I wanted to hit 16 hours, I wouldn’t be able to eat until 2:30pm the next day. That was a very sad morning, but guess what? I haven’t made that mistake again.

What you eat matters more.
During one 8 hour window, I mostly ate things like pizza and ice cream. The first half of the next day was a hellish education, and I haven’t repeated that mistake either. The upshot of this is that I’m increasingly careful about what I’m eating while I’m eating.

I get cold.
By the time I really get started with my day, I’ve already not been eating for twelve hours, and my metabolism is no longer producing the normal surplus of heat. So I find myself struggling to stay warm, even in a place like Los Angeles, where winter isn’t real.

That last was probably the most serious, especially since it seemed to coincide with a gradual decline in my energy in the mornings. Not a great result, considering my mornings are usually my most productive hours.

So I decided to try flipping the schedule — eating breakfast and lunch, but basically skipping dinner.

And it works! Some mild hunger pangs start right around the time I go to bed, but they’re nowhere near bad enough to keep me awake. And then, when I wake up, I’m alert and refreshed. After my morning run and a shower, it’s the perfect time to literally breakfast.

Obviously, this is an ongoing experiment, and there are no rules carved on stone tablets. But the experiment has gone so well so far that I don’t see any reason not to make intermittent fasting a permanent lifestyle choice.

And now, more than a quarter century beyond my earliest memories of going to church hangry, I love fasting. It took learning how to fast for my health to finally understand how to fast for my soul.