My Body Hacking Journey: Keto, Intermittent Fasting, Coffee, and Weightlifting
Where I was, where I am, and where I am going…
Something that I usually don’t talk about, is that I used to be a fat kid growing up…
I battled with obesity and my self-image for many years. Even when I achieved the average weight for my height in middle/high school, I was still unsatisfied. At that point, I started aiming to build a muscular body.
However, there was only so far you can make it with body weight exercises.
So bodybuilding was deprioritized for a while. It was not until I started gaining visually-noticeable weight at the end of freshman year at Georgia Tech did I decided to start working out.
Throughout my SWE internship at UPS, I lifted weights 5x a week and attempted calorie restrictions.
Restricting calories wasn’t exactly easy, nor prioritized, considering I was living with a chef at that time.
That summer didn’t entirely work to my liking.
Yes, I built a bit of muscle. However, you could barely see the definition of the muscles due to the immense layer of fat that laid above the muscle.
That brought me to a well-known realization —
Abs are made in the kitchen and not in the gym.
The fall semester after that internship, I decided that I wanted to live in an apartment that had a kitchen.
No more freshman dorm rooms without kitchens and no more eating out
I also decided to try something else besides basic calorie restriction. That’s when I started practicing a ketogenic + intermittent fasting lifestyle.
Practicing a ketogenic lifestyle means to eat less than 20 grams of carbs per day.
Eating less than 20g of carbs per day depletes the 100g of carbs stored in your liver, causes your body to enter a state of ketosis (not to be confused with the state of ketosis that your body enters due to being diabetic).
When not in a state of ketosis, and you’re eating at a calorie deficit, your body mostly gets its energy from the carbs in your system, a little bit of energy from eating away at your muscles, and the bare minimum energy from your fat cells. This is obviously not optimum. You’re constantly going to be hungry from lack of carbs, as well as you’re going to be skinny not from fat loss, but from the muscle loss. That’s why professional bodybuilders do cycles of bulking and cutting, because it’s hard to build muscle while trying to cut fat.
In ketosis, your body will adjust to using fats instead of carbs as its main source of energy, so you don’t feel hungry from lack of carbs. Additionally, while in ketosis, your body produces more human growth hormone. HGH protects you from muscle loss, even when eating at a calorie deficit.
There are several other health benefits to keto (e.g. regulating insulin) that we won’t go over in this article.
Intermittent fasting is the act of eating only during a certain time period, often referred to as an eating window.
The most common, and also considered the most baseline, version of IF is the 16:8. You fast for 16 hours (including the 8 hours of fasting while you sleep) and only eat during an 8-hour window.
IF has been found to have several health benefits after the 16th-hour mark, the biggest being autophagy (the body repairing itself).
Even if you don’t do IF for the sake of autophagy, it still prevents the act of grazing — constantly eating throughout the day/night.
Even drinking a can of soda every hour adds up quickly, ~200 calories X number of times you drink one (e.g. 8 hours would mean you consumed 1600 calories, most of the calories for your day if you’re following the Standard American Diet). So IF, in general, is great for weight loss.
Utilizing both keto and IF, I lost around 40 pounds in one semester, with 5–10 pounds being pure water weight loss.
I was able to maintain this for a short while, but over the next year, I gained about 20 pounds (not including the 5–10 pounds gained from switching back to carbs).
So last October I decided to get back into a ketogenic lifestyle. From October to December, I lost a bit over 10 pounds.
Not as much weight loss in comparison to the first time I practiced keto, but I did experience the clarity of mind that most ketoers experience, which allowed me to ace interviews and get offers from numerous large tech companies in Silicon Valley.
In January, I was on vacation and was in the process of moving to a new apartment, so I decided to take a break from keto. In February, I got back into it. This time, I planned to experiment with keto in addition to weightlifting and IF.
I wanted to try weightlifting as well, instead of just keto + IF, after realizing my error with doing keto + IF the first time. When I originally did keto + IF, I was simply aiming to lose weight.
However, losing weight is only a temporary fix.
Maintaining the low body fat percentage after transitioning back onto a carb-filled diet is the hard part.
That experience had brought me to the realization that you need to build muscle as well. Having more muscle allows you to eat more and have more fat cells, while still having a nice physique. When you don’t have much muscle, every calorie you eat and every new fat cell created is very visually noticeable.
This time around, 16:8 IF was a lot harder to maintain, considering that I was trying to minimize my use of appetite suppressors (e.g. caffeine).
Most people online state that their eating window is from 12pm to 8pm. That’s pretty easy to maintain, within a few hours of waking up, you finally get to eat at 12pm.
However, I wanted to experiment with IF in respect to my daily calendar. So I decided to start eating at 4pm (normally when my workday ends) and stop eating at 12pm (1. Because I like to account for the days when I want to social eat late at night. 2. Because 12pm is also 8 hours after 4pm).
There were two faults in my logic:
- Keeping yourself from eating for 9 hours on the days I wake up at 7am, or 11 hours on days when I wake up at 5am, is hard. Around 12–1pm I started getting noticeably hungry, and around 2:30pm I start getting headaches and a need to rush home. I’ve started to drink black coffee around 12–1pm in order to stay functional, but caffeine brings its own set of issues, unfortunately 😞.
- I normally start eating at 4pm and stop eating by around 5pm. Additionally, because I’m in ketosis, I don’t really snack (or find snacking as enjoyable since I can’t have any sugar), so I don’t really eat after 5pm. This means I’m technically doing the 23:1 version of IF — fasting for 23 hours and eating for 1 hour. The 23:1 version of IF is also called One Meal A Day. However, OMAD has specific nutrition and calories guidelines on how to do it correctly, which obviously I wasn’t following because I wasn’t intentionally attempting to do OMAD. This may explain why it was so hard for me to stay satiated and got headaches.
I didn’t track my weight loss this month, due to my inconsistencies with IF and Keto (transitioning in and out of keto causes a plus/minus 5–10 pounds due to water weight, so my weight loss tracking would neither be precise nor accurate).
On the brighter side, I did notice positive results with weight lifting.
Some individuals online are against doing keto + weightlifting, because their’s a core belief that you need carbs and need to be at a calories surplus in order to build muscle.
Nonetheless, this belief is due to the traditional way of dieting (simply cutting calories without being in keto), which caused you to lack energy.
However, in keto, you always have energy, even on a calorie deficit, simply due to the fact that your body always has fat cells to use for energy.
Compared to the beginning of the month, I’m able to lift a lot more. My main benchmark was the number of pounds that I could benchpress. I went from being able to bench 110/120 pounds for 10 reps and 3 sets, to being able to bench 140/150 pounds for 10 reps and 3 sets.
I’m going to continue experimenting with hacking my body.
I might try to change my eating window to 1–9pm. I do this grudgingly (I hate to give up, and this feels like giving up) for three reasons:
- I hate getting headaches. One of the reasons I do keto, is for the clarity of mind. I no longer suffer from brain fog after doing intense mental work. So why would I do something else that would cancel out that large benefit?!
- If I want to make IF a lifestyle choice (without constant cheating), I need to make it work for my body. If my body starts breaking down at around 12–1pm, I could try to force my body to adjust to the 4–12pm schedule. But what if it never fully adapts? Then maybe I should just do the simple thing of adjusting my eating window.
- Additionally, drinking caffeine (or anything besides water), have been said to cancel out the benefit of autophagy. In order for autophagy to occur, the body must be fasting. Some say that you stay in fast as long as you don’t have over 50 calories, some say over 10 calories, and some say you can at most have plain tea or black coffee. This is hotly debated. However, since I’m pushing through IF anyways, I might as well experience all its benefits (e.g. autophagy), instead of just the weight loss; so the only way to guarantee that is to just drink water.
I also want to experiment with lazy vs strict keto.
Lazy keto, which is what I’ve primarily done, is to simply eat under 20g of carbs per days in order to enter and stay in ketosis.
Strict keto entails, not only eating under 20g of carbs per day but also eating a certain daily fat to protein ratio because too much protein occasionally breaks the state of ketosis; as well as, cutting out certain foods that cause insulin spikes (e.g. dairy).
When you follow strict keto for about 6 to 9 weeks, you will reach a state even higher than ketosis. This state is commonly called being keto-adapted/fat-adapted.
This is when your body is now used to burning fat as its primary fuel source. You experience greater health benefits, such as being satiated for longer, being able to fast for longer periods of time, and having fewer cravings.
Being fat-adapted is the goal. The state of fat-adapted will allow keto to be more of a lifestyle choice.
Thanks for reading!
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