#63 Experience with 7 Years of Intermittent Fasting - MY STORY

Siim Land (0:00)

What happens if you start living a fasting-focused lifestyle in the long term? What if you fast for so long that you don't know what year it is? What year is it? Welcome to the Body Mind Empowerment Podcast. I'm your host Siim Land, and in this episode, I'm gonna share with you my experience with intermittent fasting after 7 years. Body Mind Empowerment. Get stronger, faster, smarter, quicker, friendlier, more helpful, more driven. Everything the body needs. Control your mind.

When it comes to trendy weight loss strategies, then intermittent fasting is one of the most popular ones. However, intermittent fasting has many other health benefits beyond just burning fat. In fact, its primary purpose shouldn't be to lose those extra inches. Fat. You would want to live a fasting-focused lifestyle no matter how fit you are, because it's gonna promote your body's mitochondrial functioning, improve your biomarkers, trigger stem cell growth, activate autophagy and increase your longevity. For me, the best benefits of intermittent fasting have to do with the boost in brain performance, anti-aging and the more advantageous metabolic flexibility. That's why I've been doing it for 7 years in some shape or form. And to be honest, I'm not planning to quit, because it's just so effective and invigorating. So how did I start? When I started working out in high school, then at first, I didn't know almost anything about nutrition. The only thing me and my friends knew was that you need to lift some stuff and eat protein, which is basically what you need to do, yeah. Awesome, I love protein. But there's some more to it. As I got more results in the weight room, I started to pay more attention to what I was putting into my mouth. I was counting calories, making sure I ate as much protein as I could and tracking my progress. I first heard about intermittent fasting while watching the YouTube videos of the Hodge Twins, who are bodybuilding twin brothers from the States, and they talk about fitness and general life advice. My initial thoughts about IF were quite normal. What do you mean you're not gonna eat breakfast? And I want to quote the Hodge Twins. You're gonna lose all your fucking games. But the Hodge Twins were huge and jacked, and they were eating pretty big meals with burgers and fries and other desserts. So it must have worked for them. And I thought, okay, I'm gonna try this out.

What the Hodge Twins were doing is called the Lean Gains IF Protocol of fasting for 16 hours and eating within 8 hours every day. It's created by Martin Burken, who's an athlete and coach from Sweden with an amazing physique. The idea of the Lean Gains Protocol is quite simple. Your fasting window starts after your last meal the previous day. You fast throughout the night and postpone your first meal a few hours after waking up. Instead of eating breakfast, you wait until noon and have a workout. You lift weights in the fastest state, focusing on compound movements. After the workout, you wait a bit more and then you break the fast. The first piece of food you put into your mouth stops the fasting and starts the eating window. And lastly, you eat all of your daily calories within a 6-8 hour time frame, depending on your goals and preference. There are many ways you can structure this. Maybe you have a first meal at 10 am, and then you go lift in the afternoon, and then you have your second meal post-workout. Or you lift right after waking up, wait until noon, then eat a larger meal with another smaller meal later. The idea is to simply fast for 16 and eat for 8 hours, with a workout put somewhere in the middle. What I did was fast for 16 hours until noon, then eat a small meal of about 500 calories, then go to the gym in 2-4 hours, and then eat the rest of my calories post-workout. I followed this routine for 2-3 years, and it was really effective. I eat for 8 hours and I fast for 16 Looking back at my experience, it was quite easy and enjoyable, but during the actual phase of trying it out, I still had some troubles, and I made a few rookie mistakes.

During the first week or so, I was going to bed hungry because my eating window was from 10am to 6pm. My last meal didn't really fill me up, and I was starving by the next morning, which isn't ideal in the long term. It's generally easier to postpone your first meal of the day by a few hours and fast until noon, rather than have a much longer time gap in the evening. That's why most people tend to prefer skipping breakfast and eating from lunch until dinner. Eating too much before the workout can also be less ideal. Sometimes when you break the fast with too much food, you'll actually feel more tired because of starting to digest the food and going for a snooze.