I Helped Create the LIFE Fasting Tracker App — How I Feel After Four Months of Time-Restricted Eating
It seems like everywhere I turn somebody is talking about intermittent fasting. I hear about it on podcasts, my friends are trying it, and even my CEO is practicing it.
When I heard that our mobile team at LifeOmic had plans to build an app to help people track their fasts, I tried to be a good information consumer. I searched for evidence of the impacts of this lifestyle on metabolic health.
I found several studies showing that fasting can decrease LDL cholesterol, although results are mixed depending on fasting regimen. Results from a 2007 pilot study suggest that fasting can increase overall cholesterol levels, although this effect was seen among participants who ate all of their daily calories within a 4-hour window in the evening; new research suggests that time-restricted eating may be much more effective when feeding hours are early in the day.
My LDL is usually on the high end of normal, so the possibility of lowering it through fasting was attractive. Many studies on intermittent fasting demonstrate that fasting may improve fat loss without muscle loss, which sounded great to me. But I found that the most intriguing reason to fast was the benefit of autophagy, a seemingly magical state where your body breaks down its broken parts to clean away the trash.
I decided to give intermittent fasting a try. Time-restricted feeding seemed like a safe and effective approach, and by practicing it I would at least develop a better understanding of why and how people might use our app.
I started out on a 16:8 fasting schedule, fasting 16 hours a day and eating all of my daily calories during an 8-hour window. I discovered this fasting approach on the Leangains website, and I tried it because I didn’t want to sacrifice my slowly increasing strength for fasting. I would finish dinner around 6:30 PM and then not eat again until 10:30 AM, after a workout at the gym. I’d been tracking my calories for a while and I was careful not to reduce my calories while fasting.
Soon after I started, my work meeting schedule shifted around a bit and I found myself going to the gym later in the morning, causing me not to eat until around 2 PM. I settled into a 20:4 routine pretty easily and stuck with it for months.
One thing I’ve enjoyed more than I expected was lifting weights or running at the end of my fast, right before my first meal of the day. There is some interesting research showing that fasted weight training followed by a meal might trigger a better muscle growth response, or muscle cell and mitochondrial regeneration. There is evidence that fasted endurance exercise may improve VO(2max), enhance fat oxidation or fat burning, and prime muscle cells to soak up glucose more quickly upon re-feeding, thus improving insulin sensitivity. All of those things sounded good enough to try training fasted, and I never noticed a lack of energy in the gym or while running. In fact, even after a 20 hour fast I often felt full of energy and ready to run when my workout started.
I found not eating for 18–20 hours a day easier than expected. But did anything about my body change?
The most noticeable effect at first was that I felt cold at the end of my fasts. After a couple of weeks that went away, but I was slowly increasing my calories at the same time, so that might have helped keep me warmer. Speaking of calories, despite research showing that intermittent fasting is not necessarily more effective than a calorie restricted diet for weight loss, I definitely needed to increase my calorie intake to avoid losing weight. I’ve been trying to gain muscle, and I found I needed to add about 400 to 500 more calories per day to keep my weight constant after switching to the 20:4 fasting schedule. The combination of eating fewer meals and, for me, needing to eat more calories means that the meals I do eat can be much bigger than before. It’s been fun to make my family laugh at how much food I’m eating at dinner.
By far the most surprising change I’ve noticed is my relationship with hunger and meal times. Before experimenting with fasting, I can remember at times having to eat a late lunch and being absolutely starving. Stomach growling and grouchy, I couldn’t think of anything but food and hunger when delaying lunch by just two hours. Now, it’s common for me to skip breakfast and lunch, go to the gym, not eat until 2 PM and never really get hungry. In fact, I’ve done a handful of 40+ hour fasts and even during those, I don’t experience that old feeling of hunger anymore. I’ll eventually eat again, and the exact timing of it is not that important. The human body adapts incredibly to what it is habituated to. I’d love to know the mechanisms behind this. I now feel much more relaxed about meals, and I hope it’s a change that stays with me.
One piece of advice I’d give to anyone who is interested in trying intermittent fasting is to get baseline biometric screening done before you start. Having a pre-fasting record of things like cholesterol, fasted glucose, IGF-1 and inflammatory markers like C-reactive protein will allow you to check for clear changes that may result from fasting.
I re-tested my cholesterol recently and I had no significant change in LDL or triglycerides. My fasted glucose was low, but it was already pretty low before fasting. I didn’t have any recent numbers for C-reactive protein or IGF-1 to compare against, so I can’t tell if those improved.
For now, I’ve switched back to an 18:6 fasting schedule, giving me two more hours to eat than my previous four hour window. With my goal of increasing muscle, I found that I felt too full trying to cram my calories into four hours, and six hours feels much better. The timing of eating at 12:30 PM and ending at 6:30 PM makes it easy to eat lunch and dinner at social events, which is convenient. I can’t imagine going back to eating breakfast on a regular basis; I tried it for a couple of days on a vacation recently and it felt like I wasn’t giving my stomach a break. I missed the feeling of emptiness, or lightness, that comes from not eating until lunch. I didn’t even make it a week before I dropped breakfast again and felt better immediately.
Intermittent fasting, technically time restricted eating, has been a really unexpectedly pleasant experiment. If you want to give it a shot, and want to connect with others trying it out too, check out the LIFE Fasting Tracker we recently released as an iOS app.
Matt Lavin is the lead developer on the mobile backend services team at LifeOmic. We’re building the services to support the LIFE app using the latest tech with AWS Lambda and GraphQL for serverless APIs. Just like my experiments with fasting, our team is always looking to try new technologies in search of solutions to our problems. If you want to work on a team improving people’s health using the latest technologies, reach out to me on LinkedIn or Twitter.
