Why Didn't Fasting Work For Me?

Today, we are going to talk about why intermittent fasting didn’t work for you when you tried it.

Intermittent fasting has just become the latest “diet” we are all trying.

It’s like a fad everyone has kinda/sorta/maybe tried because maybe your friend did it, or your sister did it and it seemed easy enough to just skip a meal, so hey, why not try it.

Except the problem is, Intermittent fasting is not a diet. It’s what we would call a protocol or a tool to enhance your actual food protocol.

And to be clear, most of us, when we say Intermittent fasting, we can mean anything from fasting for 12 hours between dinner and breakfast or 36 hours between meals.

Lately even, there are different intermittent fasting regimes for women vs men, post menopausal women vs pre menopausal women. It’s gotten to be quite an industry.

Which is funny, because fasting is at its core, just not eating. And not eating is free. But nonetheless there are fasting bars, fasting mimicking food products that you can also buy.

Ok, I digress…

Intermittent fasting came on the scene as a way of losing weight about 7 years ago.

Now, people have been fasting forever, but this popular type of fasting to reverse diabetes and lose weight and what we are talking about when we talk about fasting now, first appeared about seven years ago through a doctor named Jason Fung.

Jason Fung is a nephrologist in Toronto Canada.

A nephrologist is a kidney doctor. So how did a kidney doctor get into fasting?

Well diabetes and high blood pressure are the most common causes of kidney disease. So many of Dr. Fung’s kidney patients were people with excess body fat, diabetes and high blood pressure. His patients needed to lose weight and change their diets to help their kidneys and their health.

He told them to stop eating.

**Collective gasp of disbelief from every nutritionist in North America!**

He kept going.

He started with a blog. Then gave some presentations. Was on a billion podcasts. Then he had a website and fasting program. Then he wrote a book. Then he wrote a few more books.

He quickly, if not reluctantly, became the face of fasting.

Then the rest of us, even those fasting experts and chiropractors with fasting programs all got on board after he legitimized the practice.

Because before that, certainly in clinical dietetics, it was a no-no that would lead to disordered eating.

Fasting also luckily coincided with the rise of the keto diet + Dr. Satchin Panda’s work on time restricted eating, so a large number of practitioners were sharing all the same information. Me included.

The origin story is important I feel, because like most things, what we are doing now has been altered quite a bit from it’s original design. And fasting is no exception.

In the beginning, you would not eat food for around 16 hours and then have two meals per day. You would drink black coffee, water, plain tea or carbonated water during your fasting time.

When it was time to eat, you’d eat two nice big meals full of healthy fats and very little carbohydrates.

Then you would repeat.

But a big piece of why fasting would work so well is how the two parts worked together.

The Eating + The Not Eating= Results.

This is where the information seemed to disperse into different camps about what you could eat during fasting, what you could eat when it was time to eat.

Did women need special fasting schedules?

How long until we get results?

The forever question of  “will _____ break my fast?”

Here’s what you need to know.

If you have tried fasting, in whatever way you did that there could be three main reasons it did not work for you:

1. You weren’t fasting cleanly.

2. You didn’t repair your metabolic damage first.

3. You didn’t eat right when you did eat.

Let’s dive into #1 first.

Remember how we talked about how everyone got ahold of bits and pieces of the fasting realm and everyone had a little say? Well, because there is a lot we don’t know about fasting and autophagy, there are many people willing to step in and guess and have their own protocols.

Some allow bone broth, some allow cream in coffee, some allow stevia or erythritol, some don’t. Some don’t know what they are doing. Some of us do…

What I’ve noticed in my clients and in this group here in particular is that very few of us are fasting cleanly enough or consistently enough to burn any fat.

But even that reason pales in comparison to what I see the most: women who have metabolic damage can’t burn fat well, even when they fast.

Remember fasting works because your fat-accumulation hormone, insulin falls precipitously and allows your body fat to leave your fat cells and be burned as energy.

If you have metabolic damage, you, by definition, have insulin that stays on too high for too long. You have some degree of insulin resistance. And for most of us, our insulin doesn’t come down fast enough or low enough, even while fasting to allow any fat burning.

The other side of metabolic damage is that your metabolic rate is probably too low. This happens after years of dieting. If you don’t fast cleanly, you’re not triggering your counter regulatory hormones that should come on during fasting to keep your metabolic rate high.

If your fasting with cream in your coffee and bone broth, you’re essentially stimulating your insulin all day on a very low calorie diet. Which will not only not lead to weight loss, but a lower metabolic rate, which makes it harder to burn fat in the future.

And then number three, you are not eating well when you are eating. There are some fasting regimes that allow fasting for 5 days and then 2 days of free-for-all feasting.

This is terribly ignorant of and short sighted if you are really trying to get long-sustained weight loss.

What you eat, when you eat, is a big deal and either sets you up to burn fat or not.

If you eat poorly, you’re stoking the flames of high insulin. Then, when you go to fast, your insulin won’t come down and you’ll wonder why nothing is happening.

If you eat correctly at meals, then you are already priming your body to be ready to burn fat. You're controlling your insulin. You're burning the stored sugar called glycogen so that when you stop eating, your body easily and quickly dips into fat-burning mode.

The other issue I see is trying to just randomly skip meals. That’s not fasting. That’s dieting. That’s bad for your metabolism.

Also, fasting long periods of time in dramatic bursts trying to drop weight quickly is a shortsighted and desperate move that also won’t last.

In the end, the most common reason that women don’t see results when they try intermittent fasting is that their metabolism is damaged and they are fighting themselves.

It just becomes another stressor on your metabolism instead of the healing protocol it has the potential to be.

In the Freese Method, we work diligently on repairing our metabolic machinery and our metabolic hormones first. This is step 1 and 2. Then and only then, do we embark on any time restricted eating intermittent fasting.

And when we do, we do it logically, not reactively. We do it easily and see results. We do it simply and without drama or too many rules.

Because at the end of the day, in the Freese Method you learn how to burn body fat. And fasting is a tool for that.

So if you have not had success with fasting, don’t be too disheartened, but know that that is a pretty big warning light that you are suffering from metabolic damage and we need to fix it if you ever want a chance at controlling your weight.

Remember, you have what it takes to eat well and lose weight, you just need to fix your metabolism first!