The Benefits of Alternating Your Fasting Schedule
Adding in some longer fasts is often the key to breaking through insulin resistance.
It’s nice to fall into a fasting routine where you begin eating at the exact same time every day. It makes life predictable, and this gives great results for many people. Many lose the abdominal belly fat, break their processed food addiction, get their A1c back in a healthy range, and have the energy they had in their 20s.
This is what happened when my husband Chris started fasting and consistently stuck to a 16:8. He lost 20 lbs and 5 inches off his waist in 4 months. This was all he needed to lose.
But if you look at the tiny sample size represented by just myself and my husband Chris, you’ll see the two fasting schedule extremes.
While all Chris had to do was fast 16:8, I couldn’t lose a pound—not ONE pound—until I started alternate-day fasting (ADF). This was after doing OMAD 20:4 (One Meal a Day, fasting 20 hours, eating within 4 hours) for SIX MONTHS.
I don’t often mention my unique fasting experience to people when they initially show curiosity about fasting because few people have to do something as radical as that. The majority of people have a fasting story that more closely resembles Chris’ story. However, a few people will have to do something similar to what I did.
How Do I Know Which Category I Fall Into?
Without trying a fasting regimen, you can’t know for sure. But there are some upfront clues that can give you a general idea of which camp you’ll fall into. After listening to over 300 people tell their fasting stories on Gin Stephen’s Intermittent Fasting Stories Podcast, I’ve picked up on some patterns that are well-presented by Chris and me. These are not hard and fast rules, but only clues.
Gender Matters
Men are more likely to find that a shorter window is all they need. Women, particularly those in their 40s and beyond, and especially post-menopausal women, are more likely to need a more varied approach.
Are You Currently Prediabetic or Diabetic? Of, Do You Have a Family History of Type 2 Diabetes?
If you answered yes to any of those, chances are you may need to add in either longer therapeutic fasts or greatly reduce carbs.
Do You Have a History of Dieting?
Those who have dieted frequently in the past may have developed weight loss resistance. If you’ve been thin your entire life and then a tad of midlife weight crept up on you, you’ll probably find a 16:8 will be all the fasting you’ll ever need.
Had a lifelong weight struggle? You might need a few longer fasts to shake things up.
Once again, Chris is an example of what I mean. He’s been thin his entire life. Never once had the word diet entered his brain. His late 40s was the first time that the slightest bit of extra weight crept on, and that was only a mere 20 lbs. He’s the 16:8 poster child.
Do You Tend to Overeat?
Chris has never been a big eater. I have never once seen him eat a large amount of food in one sitting. He’s also picky and definitely not a foodie.
Let me introduce you to the cloth from which I am cut.
First of all, in my tribe, we love all kinds of food. Plus, we just really, really, really like food. Foodies extraordinaire. We like to talk constantly about food, try all kinds of different foods, and we love exotic restaurant experiences.
Secondly, we can put away some serious food. For example, my brothers have a yearly seafood buffet contest. True story: one year, after making seven plates of crab legs disappear, one brother (whose name will be kept anonymous) may or may not have consumed 17 desserts (he won!). Granted, these were the mini desserts that buffets put out—tiny slivers of cake or small dollops of mousse. But still—seventeen is nothing to scoff at.
The genes are strong in such endeavors. No in-law has been able to get within a 25% range of the winner.
Although this contest did not include a ladies’ bracket, if it had, I could have held my own. We are known in my tribe for our bottomless stomachs.
I hope some patterns are starting to emerge for you.
If you’re a picky, small eater who’s never been overweight and comes from a thin family, has no history of diabetes, then a little fasting will likely go a long way.
Are you a foodie who can easily overeat, really likes all food, has a family history of diabetes, and currently has prediabetes? You likely need some extra therapeutic fasting techniques.
But here’s an example of how interesting the male/female thing is. The aforementioned 17-dessert-eating-champion brother has been fasting longer than I have and got down to his high-school weight doing so. But he only had to do OMAD, while I had to do ADF. True, 16:8 wasn’t enough for him. And now that I think about it, he is also low-carb and took up running. If I had been low-carb and a runner when I was doing OMAD, I may not have needed to do ADF. (But I would MUCH RATHER do ADF than have to run every day!)
Why Switch Up Your Fasting Schedule?
If everything is going dandy with fasting, no need to switch anything up.
But if you get to a plateau, particularly as it concerns abdominal weight that just won’t budge, that’s when it’s time to consider longer fasts.
[Dr. Ovadia is great. I love his campaign called Stay off My Operating Table]
The advantage of adding in a longer fast every now and then is that it allows your insulin to drop extra low.
A brief reminder: insulin is your fat-storing hormone. When your basal or background insulin level is high, you feel hungry even though months’ worth of fuel is locked away in long-term storage. (For more on insulin, see last week’s post.)
Lowering the background amount of insulin that’s always in your blood allows your body to unlock fat stores, particularly abdominal fat stores. This is why fasting releases more abdominal fat than low-carb without fasting (see this post for a study that showed this.)
Here’s an example from my own life to show the magic of the longer fasts.
When I did OMAD for 6 months and lost no weight, I was fasting for 140 hours each week. (I fasted 20 hours/day for 7 days a week.) When I started doing ADF, I fasted three times a week for 40 hours which adds up to 120 hours of fasting each week.
So how is it that my body began dropping weight after I began fasting 20 fewer hours each week? After losing no weight for 6 months of OMAD, I lost 7 lbs the first week of ADF, and 17 lbs the first month. The longer fasts worked like magic. Why?
The answer is that once I depleted my 24 hours’ worth of glycogen stores, my body radically lowered my basal insulin level and began burning fat like crazy. All the benefits of fasting piled on: I slowly lost my processed food addiction, I began craving healthier foods, I started having this crazy appetite correction (I’m no longer a runner-up at the seafood buffet contest.)
My ADF Inspiration
The schedule I did, called 3 x 40 (three 40-fasts/week), is the most extreme version of alternate-day fasting. I picked this schedule because I was listening to a podcast put out by Dr. Jason Fung’s colleagues called The Fasting Method. In this podcast, Megan Ramos tells her story as Dr. Fung’s very first fasting patient.
At 27, she was diagnosed with full-blown diabetes. She also worked with late-stage kidney patients as a clinician and watched many of them die. For most of them, their kidney disease was caused by type 2 diabetes. She was terrified by her diagnosis.
One day, before she had told any of her colleagues, she heard some of them laughing in the break room.
“Dr. Fung thinks he can cure diabetes by starving people,” someone said.
“How ridiculous,” commented someone else.
At this point, Dr. Fung was doing his residency. Megan went to find him, and she told him of her diagnosis. He asked her if she was willing to be his first fasting patient, and she said yes.
For the next 6 months, Dr. Fung had Megan fast every Monday/Wednesday/Friday for 42 hours. She says in the podcast that she thought of her fasts as therapeutic treatments. If you had cancer, would you occasionally skip your treatments because you didn’t feel like going? No. You would show up no matter what. This is how she viewed her fasting schedule.
After 6 months, she lost 60 lbs, had no signs of diabetes, and had reversed the fatty liver disease she had since she was 11 years old. This happened 12 years ago. To this day she has kept the weight off and shows no signs of diabetes.
Dr. Fung’s theory worked. But he had Megan do something radical. So I was ready to do something radical too. I dived into the exact same schedule she did. I lost 45 lbs in 7 months. I reversed my prediabetes.
I kept listening to The Fasting Method’s podcasts and found out that the 3x42 is the most common approach they recommend to their clients. But keep in mind that people who pay for fasting coaches are usually in a more dire situation than the average person who starts fasting.
Other Ways to Switch Things Up
The benefit of fasting longer is that you can do something once a week that you wouldn’t want to do every day.
Although the 3x42 is common, you could also get benefits from doing one 40-hour fast each week. People in the fasting community often call this meal-less Monday (although it needn’t be Monday).
You stop eating Sunday around 7 pm and you eat your next meal Tuesday around 7 am if you are aiming for a 36-hour fast (perfect for beginners), 11 am for a 40-hour fast (my fave), or 1 pm if you’re aiming for a full 42-hour fast.
I never made a point of going past 40 hours because when you’re doing the 3x42, you only have 6 hours to eat all your food before you start your next 42-hour fast. I felt much better after giving myself a good 8 hours to get my two meals in.
The Importance of an Up Day
It’s super important to do this right. A zero-calorie day in ADF-speak is called a “Down Day.” This Down Day must always be followed by an “Up Day.” An Up Day means that you eat a minimum of two protein-heavy, hearty, healthy meals. You never want to do a Down Day followed by an OMAD. The Up Day must follow the Down Day like passing the pepper shaker with the salt shaker. They’re a pair.
To illustrate why this is important, let me use an example from my own strange fasting adventures. When I was floundering in my fasting knowledge and in my experimenting/dappling phase (which lasted way too long; I really needed this Substack, which is why I’m now giving it to others), I got it into my little head that I was going to do a 10-day water only fast, partly to prove it could be done, partly for the crazy autophagy, partly because…I can’t remember. Anyway, in those 10 days of not eating one single calorie, I lost 7 lbs.
However, after my first 10 days of ADF, I was down 9 lbs. Let’s think about this for a sec. How could someone lose more weight eating hearty meals every other day than eating nothing in the same period of time?
The answer is that the Up Day is just as important as the Down Day. The Up Day tells the body that after digging deep into its fat stores, there’s plenty of food around and no reason to slow down the metabolic rate. It gives the body permission to dig into the fat stores again the day after eating without fear of starvation.
If you want to do a meal-less Monday, it would look like this: don’t eat all day Monday, make Tuesday an Up Day with a minimum of two large meals in at least 8 hours, and the other 5 days can be whatever you want: 16:8, 20:5, OMAD, it’s up to you. Just remember, don’t do a meal-less Monday and an OMAD Tuesday.
Here are some other schedules you could try:
OMAD 22:2 Mon/Wed/Fri, 18:6 other days
40-hour fasts on Mon/Thurs, Up Days Tues/Fri, 20:4 other days
One 36-hour fast each week. Start fasting Wednesday night, don’t eat Thursday, Friday UP Day. 21:3 other days.
One or two 24-hour fasts each week. Stop eating early on Sunday night, say by 6 pm. Don’t eat until 6 pm on Monday. You wouldn’t want to do this every day. That’s why switching it up can be so effective.
The 5:2 diet has you eat either zero calories or just 500 calories 2 days a week. You can either eat normally the other 5 days (as shown below, but I wouldn’t recommend this) or, better, do two Up Days following the two Down Days and then fast the other three days.
Modified Alternate Day Fasting
This is when you do a “Down Day” that has 500 calories, eaten all at once, and ideally low carb. You would stop eating Sunday night at 7 pm. Sometime Monday evening you would eat only 500 calories. This is not nearly enough calories for one to survive on so you still get Down Day benefits of lowered insulin.
You would then have an Up Day on Tuesday. I personally didn’t have success trying this plan but it’s been a game-changer for some people. Many do Mon/Wed/Fri Down Days.
Downish/Uppish
If you’re doing OMAD Mon/Wed/Fri but not keeping your calories to under 500, that’s a “Downish Day” and you may not need to make a point of making the next day a strict Up Day. However, you might find that you benefit from doing an “Uppish Day;” you have a longer window and eat more food than usual. Let your hunger guide you on the Upish Day.
Here’s a schedule that Dr. Fung recommends for people who want to switch things up but don’t need the super long fasts:
For those who want to try the hard-core ADF schedule, here are two visuals to help you out:
The great thing about all these different fasting schedules is that you can customize them for your unique body and situation. Don’t allow all the different options to confuse you. Instead, if you need a boost, just pick one and give it a good long try before dismissing it. For ADF, I always tell people to give their bodies at least 3 weeks of consistency before they evaluate if it’s for them or not.
You may enjoy listening to my interview with Gin Stephen where I talk more about my ADF journey.
I also had an interview with Graeme Currie, host of The Fasting Highway a while back:
Being constantly hemmed in by highly addictive food is rough at times. Keep working at breaking free and reclaiming your health. Seek and you will find. Switch up your protocol until you find what you’re looking for.
Have you encountered a roadblock?
Until next week, Fast Well and Feast Well,
Leslie Taylor
[This newsletter is for informational purposes only and is not designed as a substitute for medical advice. Talk to your doctor before beginning any dietary changes, especially if you are on medications for diabetes. Fasting while taking certain medications such as Metformin and especially insulin can lead to dangerously low blood sugars. If your doctor does not support fasting, search for a physician who will support your fasting journey. Fasting is not recommended for those pregnant, breastfeeding, or for children and teens still growing and developing. For those with diabetes, personal fasting coaches are available through TheFastingMethod.com. I receive no compensation or ad revenue for anything in this newsletter including links to books, videos, websites, coaching services, podcasts, or supplements.]
Another helpful article!
I did a month of 4:3 42 hour fasts and was miserable and lost 5 lbs for the entire month - which was so discouraging given how hard I found it.
But I didn’t want to give up on ADF because of my insulin resistance and family history of type 2 diabetes. I knew I had to keep trying.
Enter in the 500 calorie down day M/W/F and I lost 5 lbs the first week and then 2 pounds the following. We will see how I do this week!
But I love how you stress the importance of trying the many various versions to see what works!
Great Article
You’ve convinced me to try an extended fast! 👍🏼 It should help me get through this plateau that I’m in!
I’ve been a life long dieter which going to a 36 or 42 hour fast should help me through that barrier!
Thanks
Dave T