There are many different forms that fasting can take. Some people fast for 24 hours two or three times a week. Some people fast for 16 hours and then eat for 8 hours a day most days. Some people even fast for three days at a time, then take a day break and do it again. There are as many different strategies as there are books on the subject (which is a lot).
The challenge that I started with was what was going to work for me. My job schedule is different every day: some days I start early, some days I start late. I often work late and almost always have to be available for add-on cases until late in the afternoon or early in the evening. Oh yeah, and some days I work for 24 hours in a row. To add a little more complexity, I do not find out what I am doing on a given day until 5 or 6 PM the night before. I have some idea how late I will be scheduled, but don’t find out the details until late the day before. This makes riding my bike very challenging during the week, and I end up trying to sneak rides in during the week when I can and riding on the weekends as much as possible.
After thinking about it for a long time, the solution to fasting I came up with is as follows: I basically have 3 kinds of days, and so I could do 3 different kinds of fasts based on what kind of day I was having.
- Day #1 is a day when I am going to be able to go on a big ride in the morning. This is usually a weekend day. On these days it does not make sense to fast (yet that is, there will be more about fat-adapted exercise coming soon) and so I wake up and have a biggish breakfast with good amount of carbs.
- Day #2 is when I have a big day at work, whether that’s a call or just a long day in the OR. For these days I decided I would fast for 24 hours. I know that seems like a really long time, and it is, but there are ways to make it not as bad as it sounds. I start my fast after dinner (a nice, big filling dinner) and fast until dinner the next night. I drink coffee (a moderate amount), tea, and water during my fast and chew a decent amount of gum.
- Day #3 is most common type of day that I have. It’s a day where I am hopefully going to sneak in a ride in the afternoon, and I’m going to be working most of the day. I decided to do a 16:8 fast (16 hours of fasting and 8 hours of eating) which means eating dinner the night before, skipping breakfast, and eating lunch the next day. It is perfectly suited for my job since I cannot eat in the OR and typically if I miss breakfast the next chance I have to eat is lunch.
- There is also a Day #4 I forgot to mention, which is where I eat like a normal person, 3 meals a day, dessert, snacks, the whole 9 yards. Because “all fast and no feast makes Jimmy a dull boy”, and also because “everything in moderation, even moderation” are words to live by.
Now I had a plan for how I was going to fast, which is the first step, but its
always easier to make a plan than it is to put it into place. And while enacting this plan I had to make sure that I was still taking excellent and safe care of patients, and make sure that my biking was not suffering.
