Fasting: A 5-Step Guide
Are you interested in learning how to fast? Instead of obsessing over the "rules," it's best to try out a schedule that works for you. Collect data about your personal experience and adjust as necessary, based on your personalised insights.
Important Concepts Before You Start
• Self-Experimentation is the key to discovering what works, specifically for you. Through my Longevity Concierge, I encourage all my clients to test out their ideas in real life, rather than following standard guidelines. This is all part of understanding your bio-individuality.
• Self-experiments lead to sustainable change and growth to keep you moving forward.
• To achieve optimal results, follow a systematic process, including setting clear goals and progress indicators, defining questions and tracking your progress, always with open curiosity.
• Start with simple and small experiments or actions, while keeping other elements of your routine consistent. • Seek coaching and medical support along the way to gain perspective, expertise and accountability.
At the Longevity Concierge, we use data and devices to help you make outcome-based decisions with precision. This is what I call cracking your Health Hacking Code and it involves making decisions based on your own personalised data and results. When it comes to fasting, I use this approach to help you determine whether a specific fasting schedule is suitable for your needs. The fundamental aspect of this decision-making process is strategic self-experimentation. By conducting experiments, analysing your data, and making necessary adjustments, you improve your chances of reaching your goals...and surpassing them!
A 5-Step Guide to Intermittent Fasting: The W.O.O.S.H. Approach
Here’s a framework to get started:
Step 1: W: Wish
What’s your wish? Decide what you want to achieve with fasting. Why do you want to fast? Maybe you want to lose body fat or perhaps you want to improve your relationship with hunger. You might be looking to increase your lifespan or reverse a diagnosis. Think about what you really want.
Step 2: O: Outcomes
What’s the result you’ll have when this wish is fulfilled? What will you be doing? How will you be feeling? Visualise the outcome of your fasting journey. In order to achieve success, it's important to determine what success looks like. How will you know if you're making progress in the right direction and have reached your goal? Start by considering some of the following outcome indicators: energy levels, blood and urine test metrics, energy levels, athletic performance, recovery time, blood pressure levels, mood and emotions, pain thresholds, mobility, joint stiffness, sleep quality or quantity, age reversal, diagnosis reversal. What is the metric you’re measuring during fasting? Once you have selected your indicator(s), decide how you will measure them and how often. For example, sleep can be measured using specific devices like an Oura ring or Apple watch.
If you want to stop sugar cravings and sugar crashes, wearing a device like a CGM ( Continuous Glucose Monitor) is key. If you want to improve your energy levels, blood work and urine testing can provide key metrics to monitor during fasting to ensure energy efficiency and metabolic optimisation. Or even a simple energy scale: create a scale with -10 being your lowest energy and + 10 being the most energy you've ever felt, then, rank your energy level every day at the same time. The most important thing is to track consistently.
Step 3: O: Obstacles
What’s getting in the way of you fulfilling this wish right now? What are the roadblocks? Be aware of your roadblocks so you can circumvent them.
Step 4 : S: Strategy
Strategy Here’s a data-driven strategy for fasting for optimal results:
Firstly select a fasting schedule that works for you. If you're new to fasting, start with an easy-to-follow schedule, such as Time Restricted Feeding. I prefer to call this Time Connected Eating because it involces connecting when you eat with a specific daily time window. Begin with a 12-hour eating by having a later breakfast or earlier dinner and gradually shorten this by 30 minutes, reaching a 10-hour or 8-hour eating window. If you're an experienced faster, choose something slightly more challenging than what you've done before, such as a 24-hour fast, a 3-day fast, or even a 5-day fast. The key is to choose a schedule that you're at least 90% confident you can follow. Keep in mind the following points:
Make your schedule fit your lifestyle.
Drink plenty of water during your fasting periods.
When you are eating, don’t over compensate and “stock up” by over eating
Before you start fasting, collect the data you’ve chosen to measure in order to establish a baseline of where you’re at right now. This is crucial. Gather at least a week or two of data from your normal routine to compare changes once you start fasting.
Then start fasting according to your chosen schedule. Continue to collect outcome data. Collect data over a timespan where you can see a measurable changes and identify trends. Depending on your specific metrics, you’ll usually start to see patterns with two weeks of data. Avoid changing other variables during your fasting experiment as much as possible. If you alter too many factors at once, you won't be able to distinguish what worked and what didn't. So aim to maintain consistency in other parameters such as stress levels, sleep patterns, supplement intake, exercise levels and other variables while running your experiment.
Then it’s time to evaluate and interpret your evidence by asking yourself the following questions:
Did you achieve the outcomes you established for yourself?
Were you able to adhere to your plan 80-90% of the time?
How did you feel throughout the process?
Do you think you could continue with fasting in the long term, or was it a challenge to maintain for even a few weeks?
And finally, decide on next steps based on your evaluation of your evidence. If the data reflects that you are heading in the right direction, keep doing what you’re doing and continue with your plan. However, if you find that you’re unable to stick to your schedule or you haven’t moved in the direction of your your desired outcome, don’t continue down the wrong path just because you think it's the right thing to do. Instead, go back to the beginning and repeat the W.O.O.P. process.
If you had difficulty sticking to your schedule, consider ways to make it easier. If you were able to stick to your plan, but you didn’t see any measurable changes, consider why this may have been the case. The key is to be objective and analytical in order to understand what happened more accurately, which will enable you to make a wise decision about what to do next. - I call this analyse to optimise. Sometimes it can be difficult to fully understand your data or to be fully objective and this is where expert guidance can be invaluable.
Step 5 : H: HacK
You’ve now hacked your health to unlock the benefits of fasting for:
Reduced inflammation
Enhanced memory
Increased clarity
Stabilised blood sugar
Sustained weight loss
Increased longevity
To Sum Up
Congratulations! ... and with a W.O.O.S.H... You’ve learnt how to fast through self-experimentation and tracking your experience. You’ve decided what you want to accomplish with fasting. You’ve defined clear goals and are tracking your progress closely. You’ve made outcome-based decisions by being curious and making adjustments based on results and data. You’ve chosen a fasting schedule that feels easy to follow and fits your lifestyle. You’ve got expert coaching and medical support to enhance your experience and optimise your results. And you’ve followed the foundational principle of biohacking and the focus of the Health Hacking Code™️ - using data and devices to make decisions with precision.
For bespoke advice and a tailored plan, supported with data and devices to test and track your progress towards meeting your personal health goals, explore my other courses here.
Hello LQ!
If you are interested in learning more ways you could optimise your life then find out your LQ. What is LQ? Well. you’ve heard of your IQ, your Intelligence Quotient, which is a measure of your cognitive intelligence, and your EQ, Emotions Quotient, which is a measure of your emotional intelligence. Your LQ is your Lifestyle Quotient, a research-backed measure of your lifestyle intelligence, telling you how knowledgeable you are about optimising your lifestyle and which area of your lifestyle needs your attention the most.
