I started doing Intermittent Fasting
over three years ago. My strategy has always been to just deal with the
hunger. If you ignore it, it goes away. When I first began fasting, I’d
think about my hunger constantly. These days, it barely grabs my
attention. Recently, I was inspired by a post over at my favorite
nutrition website Perfect Health Diet to try an alternate approach to Intermittent Fasting.
Before I go into the changes I tested, let me go over two benefits from Intermittent Fasting.
- By restricting carbohydrates for an extended period, you can shift your body into a state of ketosis. Ketosis has a host of health benefits. One of which is you burn fat at a quicker pace.
- By restricting protein, you can trigger autophagy. This is the
process where cells consume and recycle their own damaged material. This
results in many health benefits, including life extension.
is a detailed explanation of the ketogenic metabolic pathway. The part
of the article I found most interesting was how the use of coconut oil,
which is loaded with short chain fats, can accelerate the production of
ketones.
This means that if you eat a lot of coconut oil (which isSince that post was written, I have done many fasts where I consume
58% short-chain fats), you deliver a lot of fat to the liver for
disposal. The disposal process for fat is conversion to acetyl CoA
followed by either burning in the TCA cycle or conversion to ketones.
nothing but 1 to 3 tablespoons of coconut oil. I find it has a slightly
sweet taste and it does lower my hunger level. To confirm I was still
hitting ketosis, I used Ketostix to measure ketones. After a 16 hour
fast with coconut oil, I was measuring Small to Moderate ketones. Pretty
cool.
Ketostix
Well coconut oil by itself may not be enough for the hungry. Have no fear, the Perfect Health Diet
book came up with another idea. It said you can consume fermented
vegetables on a fast. Wouldn’t the carbs from the vegetables interfere
with achieving ketosis? Nope. From the book:
Most vegetable carbohydrates are intercepted by gut bacteria, which digest vegetable fiber into short-chain fatty acids.If the book is correct, I could eat coconut oil and sauerkraut and still go into ketosis. I decided to test it out.
- Monday night: My last food intake was at 10 PM.
- Tuesday 10 AM: 1 tablespoon of coconut oil, 100 grams of cortido sauerkraut.
- Tuesday 1 PM: 1 tablespoon of coconut oil, 100 grams of ghost pepper sauerkraut.
those carbs might be enough to prevent ketosis. But it didn’t. At 2:30
PM, I tested Moderate ketones on the Ketostix. Victory!
Cortido Sauerkraut – Ketosis never tasted so good!
So if you’ve put off Intermittent Fasting, because you can’t deal with the hunger, you now have no excuses. Get yourself some coconut oil and make some fermented veggies.
