I’ve been test-driving Martin Berkhan’s Leangains intermittent fasting (IF) protocol for the past four weeks.  For an excellent overview of the program, see his post here.  The rest of this post will be written assuming you read what’s at that link.

My Plan

I wanted to test-drive IF for a few different reasons: first and foremost, to see if I could survive the fasting period.  Second, assuming I survived (SPOILER ALERT: I did), to see if it could fit into my daily schedule.  I was not about to rearrange my life for this or any diet program – not that I could if I wanted to, anyway.

In addition to fitting in with work and family obligations, I planned to continue my current regiment of running 3x/week (3-4 miles per) and lifting 2x/week (few heavy compound lifts, e.g., squats, overhead press, etc.; no isolation work).

The protocol I chose went something like this:

• 1pm: First meal of the day (lunch at work)
• 5pm: Second meal of the day (family dinner)
• 6-7pm: Run or workout
• 8-9pm: Last meal of the day

Water is not only permitted, but encouraged during the fasting period.  Diet soda is also OK (that has really helped to take the edge off when I get hungry, especially toward the end of the fast), as are coffee and tea without milk/sugar (calorie-free substitutes are OK).

As far as what I ate, I didn’t micromanage my macros.  I tried to keep it in the neighborhood of that 40/30/30 carbs/protein/fat ratio and between 2300 – 3000 calories per day, depending on whether or not I was exercising that day (less on rest days, more on work days), but stopped tracking closely after a few days of using FitDay just to get a general sense of what everything’s caloric and macronutrient values were.  I tend to eat the same few things every day anyway, so that made eyeballing the balance a little easier.

My starting weight was 203.  I didn’t take pictures of myself because this isn’t that kind of blog.

How It Went

I started my fast at 9pm on Sunday, Sept. 2.  As I suspected, I was way too busy at work to miss food; in fact, it was often like that before I started officially fasting, and there were also days this month where I didn’t get to break my fast til closer to 2 or 2:30 because I was just that busy.  Weekends, on the other hand, are a different story – it’s much easier to get distracted by the thought of food unless I’m actively involved in something.

That said, a month into it, I feel fine.  A little diet soda takes the edge off the hunger, and I’ve also found the fast period helps me to eat more during the eating window.  Unsurprising, but important for someone like me who generally does not like to eat a lot – in fact, eating too little has been my primary obstacle in making lifting gains over the years.  I just can’t eat like a powerlifter.

Some people report feeling cold in their extremities or a general sense of fogginess.  I was a bit foggy the first day, but ever since I have experienced no negative effects.

I have tried training in a fasted state; I do not like it at all.  Berkhan recommends taking a BCAA before working out in a fasted state.  I haven’t tried that yet, but have had to both lift and run “hungry” in the last month due to weekend time constraints, and I felt very unfocused and tired.  That said, my lifts have continued to progress over the course of the last month, and I have slowly but surely increased the speed and distance of my runs.  My physical performance seems to have had no negative impact from the fasting.

Like I said, I didn’t take any pics, so you’ll have to take my word for it on this: my belly is visibly flatter.  I still have more fat than I would like, but the “spare tire” has deflated a bit.  I weighed in every Sunday, but not at a consistent time and not in a consistent state of fastedness, so take these numbers with a grain of salt:

• Sept 2 (starting weight): 203
• Sept 9: 199
• Sept 16: 200
• Sept 23: 198
• Sept 30: 200

Deviations

There were two occasions this month when I broke my fast early: once at a work function thrown specifically for my department (thanks LIS colleagues!) and once at a family breakfast one weekend morning.  Can’t find the citation, but Berkhan seems to be OK with these slight and occasional deviations; like any behavior support program, the change has to be liveable, and I wasn’t going to let this program turn me into an anti-social jerk.  Two minor breaks out of 28?  I’ll take that.

Besides those, the only other deviations were when I didn’t get to lift or run as often as planned due to work or grad school obligations.  September is a crazy enough month for educators, but when you have two living in the same house plus two kids of your own, the Back-To-School Nights alone take up a week’s worth of evenings.

Where To Next?

I plan to continue the same IF protocol for another month.  I’m hoping that as we get further into the school year and my schedule starts to normalize a bit, I’ll be able to be more consistent with my workouts.  I should also make it a point to weigh in at the same time every Sunday in order to keep the data points a bit purer.  Beyond that, I’m content to let the mirror and the fit of my clothes be the biggest indicator of how well the program is working or not working.

If I sound a bit cavalier or casual, it’s because while fitness is very important to me, it’s not the only thing in my life.  I have a career, a family, graduate school, and a part-time job to squeeze into my 24 hours, so whatever I do fitness-wise has to fit into the spaces in between.  I can usually make it work, but sometimes it’s not possible, and I’m OK with that.  I’m not a competitive bodybuilder or athlete.  What I do try to do if I have to alter the feeding/fasting periods is minimize the impact of the alteration on the overall program (e.g., I’ll fast an extra hour or start early in order to reset the window if necessary).  The beauty of this IF program is that it is flexible.

I’ll report back at the end of October with an update on my progress.  In the meantime, I’d love to hear your questions or your experiences – good or bad – with intermittent fasting.

This post and the next have nothing to do with education, technology, psychology, or special education.  They do have to do with my personal interest in physical fitness and body recomposition, so I guess if anything you might file them under behavior, as it has to do with some recent modifications to my fitness regime.  I started expounding a bit on these ideas on my Facebook page, but figured this was probably a more appropriate venue than a series of status updates and comments.

Background: I’ve always been tall and lean (senior year of high school, I was 6’2″ and 145 lbs.), but not particularly fit (probably best described as skinnyfat, thanks to my insatiable adolescent boy appetite combined with my inability to gain weight, despite guzzling soda by the liter and living a mostly sedentary lifestyle).  I was never much for sports of any kind until I picked up tae kwon do, fencing, and lacrosse in college, during which period running and weightlifting became part of my regular fitness plan.  The organized sports stopped soon after I graduated in 1999, but the running and lifting continued, albeit in fits and spurts, as my teaching career allowed.  I aged, and the weight started to come – some of it muscle, some of it fat.

Fast-forward to Summer 2011: I had kicked my running into high gear and was completing 4-5 mile runs (big deal for me, who never used to be able to make it once around the track in high school) when I was diagnosed with femoral acetabular impingement in my right hip, which basically means the ball head of my femur was misshapen and not rotating smoothly in its socket, damaging the bits all around.  Running stopped abruptly in June 2011 to avoid further damage (though I continued to lift), surgery was late December of that year, and thus began an extended sedentary period while I healed and went to physical therapy.

Winter/spring of 2012, I was 34, and had (unfortunately) triumphed over my previous inability to gain weight, only this time none of it was muscle.  By all objective third-party accounts, my hip rehab was coming along quicker than anyone expected, but my pace of recovery still felt glacial to me.  I blogged about how this course of events impacted my professional life back in January, but never really got into the personal side of it here until now.

I ran my first non-treadmill, outdoor mile since surgery on March 18, 2012 – it was slow, but it was all mine.  From that point on, I gradually increased speed and distance.  I ran my first post-surgery 5K on Memorial Day weekend, and continued running 3-4 miles, including working in some shorter barefoot runs throughout the summer.  I also experimented with the Galloway method of taking strategic walk breaks.  The point is, once my hip got back to normal, I started dabbling in new methods in order to see how my body responded and what the results looked like.

While I was happy with how my running was progressing, I wasn’t losing the spare tire I had earned during my convalescence, despite the increased speed and mileage.  I wasn’t as concerned with my weight (which hovered around 200-205 during this period, but was muscular) as my body fat percentage.  By my best estimate, at my leanest I was around 12-13% body fat; now, it was more like 16-18%.  It doesn’t sound like a big difference, but it was visibly noticeable to me, and lifting and running weren’t having the same effect they did ten years ago.

In hunting around the Internet for possible solutions, I came across Martin Berkhan’s Leangains program.  Click the link for a more detailed explanation of the program than I want to go into here, but an oversimplified explanation of intermittent fasting goes like this: on this program, you only eat during an 8-hour period each day, which means you fast for 16 hours.  There are modifications one can make to the program based on one’s lifestyle and work schedule; I have latched on to the version Berkhan recommends to people with “typical 9-to-5 jobs”: fast from 9pm until 1pm the following day, and eat all my food for the day between 1pm and 9pm.

Much like with my running, I decided to experiment with the Leangains IF protocol to see if it could help me reduce body fat while at least maintaining muscle mass.  I started Leangains on Sept. 2, 2012, so it’s been four full weeks now.  In my next post, I’ll explain what I’ve done, how and why I’ve deviated from the program, what results I’ve seen, my reflections so far, and where I plan to go from here.  In the meantime, I welcome your questions, concerns, and comments, whether this is all new to you, or if you’ve had experience using an IF program.

* Shouts out to the surgeons and staff of Rothman Institute in Philadelphia and Doylestown Sports Medicine Center in Doylestown, PA; I credit the professionals of both organizations with getting me back on two feet in a matter of weeks instead of months.