Addicted to optimising health and the truth about fasting.
be mindful about what you read, listen to and believe
Welcome to this week’s wellness.
2 Things from me:
1. Fasting
I’m just about to step up onto my soapbox, but I assure you it’s from a helpful standpoint…
Fasting for ‘improved health’ and weight management has been a popular tool for years. It has various health claims, including improved cognition and autophagy (defined as clearing up unused cells, regenerating and breaking down and reusing old cell parts so your cells can operate more efficiently), increased longevity, and the bonus of regulating your blood glucose.
Some impressive claims… but no evidence to support them. The weak evidence that we do have is in mice and not in humans. We are nothing like mice. Additionally, fasting has not been studied in a healthy or active population.
Do you know what improves weight management and cognition, increases lifespan and longevity and regulates blood glucose efficiently? Exercising, weight lifting, and having a healthy body. It’s not revolutionary, though, and it's not a magic pill or formula, so it's less exciting to market this. But it's the truth, and it is actually supported with evidence.
Fasting works for weight loss because you are just in a calorie deficit and eating less. So, people using this method reduce their body fat, which will help them feel less sluggish, clear up any brain fog and give them more energy. My problem with fasting is not the fact that it comes from all these charlatans trying to make money from you and confuse you with bad science, cherry-picking data and creating sexy diet plans off the back of it. It's the fact that this tool as a method for weight loss is terrible for your relationship with food and sets you up for dysregulated eating patterns, which is very likely to instil binge and restrict cycles.
That’s what rattles me the most. Encouraging people not to eat for extensive periods and marketing it with sexy terms like ‘discipline’ is toxic and is just adding fuel to the fire. We don’t need to be extreme to be healthy.
We will get into training fasted another day, but I’m conscious of the length of this rant.
Side note - if you find some form of intermittent fasting works for you - great; who am I to tell you otherwise?
2. Obsessed optimising health
Don’t get me wrong—as a Sports Scientist, I love health metrics and performance stats—what can be measured will be managed, but I fear we might have gone a little too far. We’ve allowed these metrics to rule our day, dominate our feelings, and keep us in a loop of negative self-talk when we aren’t doing it perfectly.
It doesn’t count unless you put it on Strava or started your apple watch.
I’m all for accountability, and health monitors and trackers definitely offer this, but if you feel yourself getting obsessed with entering everything into MyFitnessPal, fixated on your fluctuating weight on the scale every day, and it’s ruining your day, you are slipping down a perilous slope.
You're allowing technology and data to define how you feel. This can lead to all or nothing mentality because when you miss a day of training or you don’t enter your breakfast into myfitnesspal to then think fuck it, I’m going to have a bad day, eat everything up and start again tomorrow because you’ve messed up.
The same goes for constantly looking back at old pictures of yourself, romanticising ‘how much better you looked back then’—how you’ve fallen off the wagon and just need to get a grip, restrict harder, and be more disciplined. This mindset is holding you back. There is no compassion; it's hyper-focused on a goal or aesthetic. Perhaps even an element of weight bias—the fact that you associate a good body with a leaner body. Get curious about this, where does this stem from?
My advice? Take it off. Stop weighing yourself, stop body checking, taking selfies and constantly monitoring your reflection in the mirror.
Check-in with yourself first thing in the morning and reframe any negative thoughts by focusing on the positive aspects of your day. This is a self-worth issue, and changing your body for aesthetic purposes is only going to exacerbate the problem.
You’ve got to work on your inner, more difficult hypercritical parts. Loving yourself is hard, but that’s what makes it more rewarding.
So let’s just let Bryan Johnson be the human guinea pig. We’ve got enough on our plate to worry about.
Something to consider:
When you have those more critical self-image days, can you step back and reflect on all the hard things you’ve gone through? How far you’ve come and how much you’ve already achieved. You can do this.
Put on something comfortable and remove looking or reading things bound to upset you.
One last thing:
Be mindful of who you read, believe and follow if they have something to sell you.
Claimed functional doctors, chiropractors, influencers, etc., are not nutritionists. They should not give out advice. People like the glucose goddess and Tim Spector cherry-pick data and encourage you to obsess over technical metrics like blood glucose. Your insulin SHOULD rise when you eat carbohydrates; that's literally the role of insulin. You don't need a glucose monitor if you are not pre-diabetic or have any metabolic disease.
Lou X