Intermittent Fasting and Keto Diet
Since around 1 January 2023, I’ve been doing intermittent fasting (IF), as well as a basically ketogenic diet (keto), and logging 100% of food. I’ve tried both before, but didn’t maintain IF for more than a week or two; keto I’d done for weeks/months but travel made it really difficult. This time, there’s a pre-release voice-based social app where a few of my crypto friends are also doing keto + IF pretty aggressively, and that’s enough motivation to keep with it and compete.
Essentially, “free food” (from conferences, office kitchens, included-with-hotels, etc.) is one of my weaknesses. I can afford to basically buy steak and lobster for every meal I ever eat at this point without it massively affecting my budget, but yet, an event with free mediocre pizzas out on a table means I feel some compulsion to eat approximately a pizza; maybe a leftover psychological weakness from when I couldn’t afford to buy $2 pizza whenever I wanted it. I’ve started including the “full lifecycle cost” of food, just like I do with other purchases, in my mental calculations — i.e. I could eat the $30 steak which has $0 health cost, or I could eat the $10 shitty carb-heavy meal which has $50-100 of lifetime health cost attached to it.
(The other weakness is “food opportunity cost” — i.e. when I’m in a place like Japan or Italy, and there is a lot of unique or local or special food, I feel somewhat obligated to try all of it. This is not actually that bad in Japan, as the stuff I’d be trying is mostly crab/fish/steak, but maybe remains a problem when visiting Spain or Central Italy. All-You-Can-Eat Buffets are a special case of this, including hotel breakfasts, but I think I can largely avoid and/or limit to keto-friendly options — even the best Asian hotel breakfast isn’t a 3 star dining experience. )
Intermittent Fasting seems pretty easy. I’ve been using the “Zero” app on iOS, as it produces pretty doughnut graphs and generally has good “streak tracking”, a simple UX, etc. I’ve mostly been doing 16 or 20h fasts every day (usually eating from sometime around noon-2pm until dinner; never eating within 2-4h of going to bed). Big benefits are better sleep (6-8h/night, and getting to sleep quickly), waking up refreshed, and surprisingly, not being hungry most of the time (there’s a window around 6-8h after eating where I’m sometimes hungry for an hour or two, but after 16-20h I’m not hungry at all.). I’ve done 36 and 48h a few times, and am going to try to do 72h every quarter and 168h once a year. This is all fasting with water, tea, black coffee, and electrolytes/salt, so it’s really not that bad. It’s much easier at home, where I have control of my schedule, than while traveling, although “just don’t eat for an extra 4-8 hours” isn’t that hard even then.
Keto diet isn’t particularly hard when I’m preparing at home (and I’ve been at home in Puerto Rico most of December-February this year). I buy great protein (USDA Choice and Prime NY Strip at Costco, organic chicken, bacon without sugar, good quality ground beef, frozen seafood), prepare it, and can easily control what goes into it. It’s a lot harder at restaurants, although there are some chains with very easy keto-friendly options (e.g. In-n-out burger 4x4, protein style, mustard-fried mustard-only, no onion no tomato no lettuce, is a 760 calorie, fat+protein dream). There are some decent “keto food replacements” available as well (almond flours, some weird low-carb pastas made from konjac root, etc.), although I’ve mostly not experimented too much with those, just sticking to meat and low-carb dairy. (I’m going to experiment with some low-carb ice cream and baked good options in my thermomix next, though.)
Logging food (and exercise) into myfitnesspal (and using it to track macros for keto diet as well) has been pretty effective, although it’s annoying having zero, myfitnesspal, an app for a breath ketone meter (biosense), a wifi scale, a blood pressure monitor, and Apple watch (sleep tracker + spo2 + hr), although most of this can come back into Apple Health.
Exercise is the obvious addition; I’ve dome some minimal weights and bodyweight-resistance exercises, but going to add substantial rowing (on a waterrower I bought at the beginning of covid), and I guess use hotel gyms more when traveling. Diet is probably >80% of it, though.
Pretty reasonable progress on even just the secondary metrics (resting heartrate, sleeping breathing rate) so far after ~6 weeks, and have not yet hit the plateau. I’m comparing against the last time I was in Afghanistan (2010) and when I was 13 years younger, and probably in the ~same health now, again, which is a substantial improvement over 2016-2021. Mostly aside from “general health” my goal is to be in better shape than the super-fit 70 year old guys in shooting classes I take, as well as being able to be a not-limited-by-fitness-but-only-by-lack-of-skill idpa, 3gun, and prs shooter. Also preparedness for natural disaster and/or civil war.
Obviously not a doctor, and not medical advice, but the keto+IF+measurement+exercise plan seems like a pretty good, at least for me, and might be good for others.