Metabolic and Mental Health

Design a Fast-Mimicking Lifestyle without Fasting and Shrink Waistlines Easily

As some people cannot fast or don’t like fasting, I offer seven alternative options to create similar effects based on decades of experience and observations

This article aims to offer seven building blocks you can review, customize, and create a fast-mimicking lifestyle. They are based on lifestyle choices and natural tools.

As I highlighted the therapeutic and performance values of fasting, some readers ask, “what if we cannot fast?”. Even though many people can fast, there will always be exceptions for various reasons, as I mentioned in previous stories.

My goal is to give as many options as possible to create the beneficial effects of fasting. One of them is nutritional ketosis.

To this end, I posted an article to give options to people from different dietary backgrounds. Here is the link to the article: Enter KETOSIS in Herbivorous, Carnivorous, or Omnivorous Diets Easily and Quickly.

The critical point for nutritional ketosis is that herbivores, carnivores, or omnivores can enter ketosis with minor dietary tweaks without sacrificing their lifestyle or health principles.

However, we can create fast-mimicking effects in the body beyond nutrition. I summarize the critical points under seven headings.

So you can understand the reasons and might choose the relevant options to design your fast-mimicking lifestyle if you cannot fast. My points are not prescriptive but principle-oriented, allowing readers to leverage them.

1 — Stop snacking and sugary drinks.

One of the fasting goals is to control calories and prevent excessive food intake without starving. The easiest way to lower excessive calories is to stop snacking.

Snacking is not natural. Our ancestors did not have access to food every hour of the day. They couldn’t even eat three times a day.

However, in the modern world, people not only eat three times but also consume snacks in between, which increases blood glucose and causes insulin spikes six times a day.

After cutting snacks, I significantly improved my digestive and metabolic health. This approach also improved my mental health. Like thousands of people, I only ate one meal a day for decades and thrived with it.

One meal might look radical to some people, but many of us can achieve three meals unless we have severe health conditions that require frequent eating.

I haven’t seen anyone dying from cutting snacks and stopping sugary drinks, which cause excessive calories and lead to visceral fat accumulation. Besides, skipping a meal can be helpful.

Snacking only started after the 1970s, and since then, obesity stats and people living with metabolic conditions such as type II diabetes, fatty liver disease, and heart disease have skyrocketed.

2 — Consume only adequate calories.

Related to the previous point, even if cut snacks, it is possible to consume excessive calories in three meals. For example, some people consume two thousand calories per meal which makes 6000 calories a day.

However, these people live sedentary and stressful life. If their metabolic rate allows only 3000 calories, they accumulate 3000 calories which turn into visceral fat daily.

Consuming excessive calories and not burning them can lead to the quickest path to obesity and associated metabolic disorders.

So the viable option is to consume only the calories your body requires. Not too much and not too little, as they can cause different issues in the long run, such as obesity and starvation.

The following three sections provide practical guidance on achieving this goal.

3 — Lower carbs and increase healthy fats.

Three micronutrients provide calories. They are carbs, fats, and proteins. The primary energy source for the body comes from carbs and fats, but protein also gives calories, even though its role is different.

I propose lowering carbs and increasing healthy fats because carbs can quickly turn into calories and significantly raise blood glucose, causing insulin spikes.

Healthy fats are slower to digest and have a negligible impact on insulin secretion. In addition, fats create more satiety, and we cannot overcome than like carbs.

Furthermore, fats also can make the body leptin sensitive and prevent food cravings and emotional eating. We can remove carbs as they are not essential, but we cannot entirely remove essential fats as the body cannot create them.

Even though I follow a near zero-carb diet for various reasons, you don’t have to cut carbs entirely. For example, some people get 30% of their calories from carbs, 40% from healthy fats, and 30% from proteins.

As we are all unique, we need to customize our macronutrient requirements based on several factors, such as our age, sex, fitness level, amount of daily exercise, and other lifestyle factors.

If you don’t know how to do that, you might get support from qualified healthcare professionals such as dieticians and sports nutritionists.

4 — Consider fast-mimicking diets.

If you cannot cut carbs and increase healthy fats, there is an option called the fast-mimicking diet introduced by Dr. Walter Longo. This type of diet emulates fasting and provides similar effects on the body.

The fast-mimicking diet has become popular as individuals don’t have to fast and don’t have to follow a ketogenic diet in this program. Some medical doctors use this diet as a treatment method.

Dr. Longo also commercialized the fast-mimicking diet with help from nutritionists and dieticians to make it easy for consumers. Some people love it, and some dislike it.

When I asked people who use them, those who like them are people who can enjoy eating little food and plant-based recipes.

Those who don’t like cannot handle portion control and type of foods as they are mainly plant-based. So meat lovers did not like this program. Some also found them costly.

However, the fast-mimicking diet can be a viable option for some. I documented my perspective in a story titled Here’s the Lazy Way to Fast-Mimicking Diet.

5 — Perform resistance training and HIIT.

After dietary changes, one of the closest lifestyle changes making similar effects to fasting is resistance workouts and high-intensity interval training.

Resistance workouts and high-intensity interval training can emulate fasting by increasing growth hormone, burning calories, reducing blood glucose, lowering insulin, and creating BDNF (Brain-Derived Neurotrophic Factor).

However, we need to be careful with excessive training as these types of workouts, when done too much too frequently, can significantly increase oxidative stress, elevate cortisol, increase inflammation, and even cause injuries.

The critical point is to build strength, flexibility, and agility gradually. In addition, do not exercise before recovering from the effects of previous sessions. We might also need to increase calorie and protein intake slightly depending on the intensity.

6 — Get restorative sleep every night.

Some of the remarkable effects of fasting are increasing the growth hormone substantially, detoxifying the body naturally, making the body more insulin and leptin sensitive, and increasing BDNF.

The excellent news is that restorative sleep can also increase the growth hormone, detoxify the body, improve insulin and leptin sensitivity, and can increase BDNF, giving us better metabolic and mental health.

So getting restorative sleep each night is a viable alternative to cover these valuable fasting functions. When we have a good night's sleep, we feel less hungry and consume less food.

When we get restorative sleep, we also gain more motivation to exercise and have a better mood improving our mental health.

The key point is to develop sleep hygiene, stick to it, and seek timely advice when sleeping issues such as sleep deprivation or insomnia happen.

I documented my experience in an article titled Here’s How I Corrected My Sleep Issues in 7 Steps and Reaped Many Health Benefits.

7 — Consider ketone supplements or MCT oil.

One of the most valuable aspects of fasting is ketosis. It has many health and performance benefits, as articulated in a recent story titled Here’s Why I Choose Ketosis as a Lifestyle Habit.

Thanks to recent advances in science and technology, food and pharmacology manufacturers created products that induce ketosis in around half an hour.

These products became very popular as they are convenient and work well. I tested their efficiency and used them occasionally for various reasons.

Even though they work quickly and are safe for short-term use, we don’t have enough data on their long-term safety. Therefore, we need to use them carefully with support from qualified healthcare professionals.

There might be unexpected side effects for some people. For example, people with type I diabetes must be extra careful to prevent ketoacidosis and should not use such products without approval from their family doctors or medical specialists.

However, MCT oil is a natural product extracted from coconut oil and has been used for a long time by health and fitness communities, especially endurance athletes.

There are more data about MCT oil products as practitioners used them for treating seizures and other neurological conditions.

I also used MCT oil some time ago, which increased the ketone bodies in my bloodstream slightly. The only problem was causing digestive disorders and diarrhea when I took more than 5 mg.

When I took the MCT oil in the correct dose, it was okay. Some people add a teaspoon of it to their coffee in the morning to gain mental clarity.

Eating coconut butter does not have the same effect as the MCT oil is extracted at the right ratio to be effective. MCT oil includes four types of acids hexanoic, octanoic, decanoic, and dodecanoic. The most effective molecules for ketosis are caproic and caprylic acids.

Conclusions and Takeaways

I am adamant about fasting as it has been one of the best tools for my health, fitness, and well-being for decades. I wish we could package fasting as a therapeutic tool one day.

However, such an aspiration is not possible yet. Therefore, I offered alternative ways to reap the benefits of fasting, leveraging healthy lifestyle choices.

Some of these alternatives might work for some people, and some might not. It depends on individuals and multiple factors. However, having numerous options is a great way to customize them based on our needs with support from qualified healthcare professionals.

As fasting has side effects, so do all these options if they are not done correctly. For example, excessive high-intensity training can increase stress and injuries. Finding the sweet spot is crucial to benefit from them.

The vital point is making these choices a habit after designing them carefully for our needs. When we reinforce our behavior and turn them into healthy lifestyle habits, we can create solutions to address the risks of metabolic diseases.

Let’s keep in mind that even though ketosis is a valuable tool, we don’t have to be in ketosis at all times. Therefore a fast-mimicking lifestyle can put us in mild and occasional ketosis, keeping us metabolically flexible.

For most of us, deep ketosis is not essential unless we deal with underlying metabolic issues and other conditions such as seizures or cancers.

Thank you for reading my perspectives. I wish you a healthy and happy life.

Thank you for reading my perspectives. I wish you a healthy and happy life.

As a new reader, please check my holistic health and well-being stories reflecting my reviews, observations, and decades of experiments optimizing my hormones and neurotransmitters. I write about health as it matters. I believe health is all about homeostasis.

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