Amber Tries: The Wolverine Diet (aka 16:8 fasting)

Part I: Useless Preamble

Health trends come and go, each promising to make you fitter, happier, more productive, just like the Radiohead song. If nothing else, the myriad of diets and eating patterns we're bombarded with have certainly helped the economy: eating in weird and non-intuitive ways is a multi-billion dollar business.

In this series, creatively named 'Amber Tries', I put my weak, unfit and pocket-sized body to the test so that you, my stronger, fitter and normal-sized readers, don't have to.

Part II: Method

Just a few years ago, the commonly accepted wisdom is that one should fuel the body with small portions throughout the day: instead of having 3 meals, have 6 smaller ones, because every time you eat your body needs to use calories to digest the food; thereby keeping your metabolism high. 

Seemingly suddenly, the fitness gurus of the world have done a complete 180 degrees back flip: now you're not supposed to eat all day long. You're supposed to intermittently fast, just like our ancestors did: no cave-person ever woke up to a full English breakfast. They had to go out and hunt while hungry, and only feast when they made a kill. 

Therefore, being modern humans, we should do as the Homo Erectus did. 

There are several methods of intermittent fasting. The topic of this post is the Wolverine Diet, thusly named because this is the method Hugh Jackman allegedly adopted to get buffed for his adamantium-clawed alter ego. 

The word 'diet' is a bit of a misnomer here: there is no special food to eat or to avoid. 16:8 fasting is an eating pattern whereby you fast for 16 hours of the day and feast for the remaining 8. You can of course count the time you spend sleeping within your fasting window, so a popular method of doing the 16:8 is to start eating at around noon and finish eating by 8pm. 

Another way to describe this diet is 'skipping breakfast', but no fitness guru ever calls it as it is because a) it sounds unhealthy and b) you can skip dinner instead as well. 

TL;DR: eat for 8 hours and don't eat for 16. 

Part III: Alleged Benefits

Jokes and cynicism aside, it seems like there have been studies which have shown benefits beyond simple weight loss: 

• regulation of blood sugar (by doing something or other to insulin); 
• encouragement of human growth hormones (I need every encouragement I can get in that department but I suspect it's already too late for me); and 
• battle cancer (right). 

Part IV: Amber Tries

I have decided to adopt a pattern whereby I start eating at 11am and finish eating by 7pm. I have really thought this through: 

1. I love sleep above all else. If I can skip breakfast and sleep in for an additional 10-15 minutes each morning, I'm all for that. 
2. Being allowed to have lunch and dinner maximises my opportunity to maintain my relationships (which are all in varying degrees of rockiness) through the sharing of food and alcohol. 
3. I am at a stage of my career where free meals at work is still exciting. If I'm giving up my lunch break to participate in training sessions, I want sandwiches. If I'm going to be working late, I want dinner. 
4. Whilst a slightly unpleasant personality is marginally acceptable in the morning when everybody else is still complaining of a lack of caffeine, not being fully awake or being hungover, as the day progresses it becomes progressively less acceptable to be a pain in the ass. I want to align my hangry moodiness with everybody else's morning syndrome, thereby flying under the radar. 
5. Why start at 11am instead of noon? See reason number 4. 

Day 1

It's Easter Monday public holiday, I slept in until noon. Skipping breakfast has never been so easy. 

Upon waking I was a little big hungry - but the hunger subsided when I drank a large glass of water. For lunch I had a generous bowl of vegetable rice cakes.

By 4:30pm I'm starving. I can't tell whether this is normal hunger - it's afternoon tea time after all - or whether this is hunger caused by my body finally cottoning on to the fact that I owe it one entire meal. Reminding myself that the 16:8 isn't about continuously eating during the 8 hour feasting window, I drink some green tea and resisted snacking.

Fortunately, I have a hearty dinner waiting at 6pm: home-made burrito with pork katsu. Not exactly a paragon of healthy living, these golden, fried, and heavily dressed babies hit the spot. I wash the burrito down with a glass of apple mango juice - again, not the healthiest of choices. Hey - the 16:8 is not a diet, right?

6:30pm: I just finished dinner. With another half hour until I have to stop eating, I wonder whether I should fit in a glass of wine to deal with the sense of horror which is slowly descending upon me, knowing that it's too late to pull out of this 'Amber Tries' series because I've announced it to all my friends and I've already written this long preambling post which I can't bear to go to waste.

Also, I have a feeling I'll be hungry again before I drift off to sleep at around midnight (my body still thinks it's cool to be a night owl despite me looking at my student days in the rear-view mirror).

9pm: I'm mad at myself for deciding to forego that glass of wine.

Off to a promising start.

Day 2

Day 2 is the real challenge: being first day back at work after a glorious 4 days long-weekend, I have  to revert back from my night owl routine, leaving a long 4.5 hours gap between waking up and when food can be consumed.

Hunger, surprisingly, wasn't the problem. The problem turned out to be migraine.

In the late afternoon, I decided to treat myself with a cup of hot chocolate, of which I only consumed half because I started to feel a slight tinge of headache coming on. Not making the connection between the headache and the sugar I just consumed, I went out to dinner which finished with a sweet chai.

Even toward the end of the dinner, my headache was getting ever so slightly worse, but it was bearable. On the way home, however, my head really started to scream at me. I get tension headaches from time to time, as well as the occasional migraine, but this headache was bad. Being jiggled on the bus didn't help either - I felt decidedly queasy.

By then I started to make the connection between sugar consumption and the headache. A quick google search tells me that sugar could be a migraine trigger - the idea being that simple sugar in the blood stream causes insulin levels to spike, which in turn make blood sugar level drop dramatically, thereby causing migraines.

I don't think the problem was too much sugar - half a cup of hot chocolate and a small cup of sweet chai, plus a watermelon salad is hardly over-indulging. I suspect, however, that fasting played a role in messing with my insulin levels, causing my body to react more to sugar than it normally would: this is despite the fact that I didn't consume any less calories than I normally would.

Day 3

As dinner finished at 7:30 last night, I couldn't eat until 11:30. Hunger started being more noticeable this morning. I was literally counting down the minutes until I can break my fast.

I am also more wary of sugar. I got offered a small solid Cadbury chocolate egg, and normally I wouldn't think twice about gobbling a few of them down (or a lot of them), but today I felt like one was definitely enough - somehow it tasted sweeter than I remembered.

At dinner I couldn't resist the dessert (chocolate cake with chocolate icing), but again, to my surprise, I only managed half.

The idea that  that fasting has made me a lot more sensitive to refined sugar could all be inside my head - but hey, this can't be a bad thing, right?

Day 4

Another challenging day for fasting, as tonight is date night.

For the reasons discussed above, I think the pattern I have chosen is the best available, especially now that I've decided to make a small adjustment and push my fasting and eating window back by half an hour (starting at 11:30, finishing at 7:30).

Despite having the least painful fasting pattern available, if I want to continue with it while dating, I will have to:
a) finish work at 6, which is hardly ever possible in my line of work; and
b) pick a spot that's just quick and cheap (not to be confused with 'just, quick and cheap'), rather than somewhere romantic because that would drag the meal out beyond my eating window.

Also Thursday is pancakes breakfast day at work. I bet the one time I can't have breakfast they will serve pancakes with something fancy like maple walnut butter.

16:8 sucks.

Day 5

I cheated. I bought mum some famed eclairs from Lorraine's patisserie, and by the time I got home it was already 8:20pm. We shared them, and I regret nothing.

That's the thing: you need to really commit to this eating pattern, and have a routine which limits your ability to be spontaneous. Worth it? I don't think so.

In other news, sugar stopped affecting me like it did the first couple of days.

Day 6
Weekends often makes fasting in the morning easier, because I usually wake up later and have lunch plans which I need to travel to - and having something to do, somewhere to be, distracts you from the temptation to eat.

I had a very big lunch - in fact, for this entire week, I have had disproportionately big lunches compared to my usual lunches because I have been just starving by the time I eat.

It's only been 6 days, one of which was a cheat day, and i'm utterly, utterly over it.

Day 7
Annnnnd I've completely given up.

I had breakfast at 10, because I was out with my boyfriend and I sure wasn't going to make him starve until 11:30, and I also wasn't going to stare creepily at him over the cafe table while he ate and the cafe staff judged.

Part V: Verdict

One week is probably too short a period to really judge a eating pattern, but here are my thoughts:

Pro:

• More sensitive palette for sugar, particularly in low-grade chocolates: I cannot even swallow a lindor, or Cadbury, or Bertie Beetle. In the past, I have gone through sugar cravings and mindlessly ate them, but for this entire week I have had to spit them out. They seem completely artificial and overly-sweet. 

Cons: 

• 16: 8 fasting affects your social life more than you think it would, especially if you have a partner who isn't fasting, if you have a family, or if you work in an industry where longish hours are the norm. Personally, this is my biggest gripe with the programme, because I tend to socialise over food and drinks. I have had to change my social pattern to accommodate my fasting: I have put off some social events knowing I couldn't possibly fit them into my fasting period; my date night options have been limited to cheap eats only (due to their speed); and I have had to say no a couple of times to morning coffees with colleagues. That's within one single week. Imagine if I actually adopted 16:8 over a longer period of time.
• I had two headaches this week: I have tension headaches from time to time, but very rarely twice in a single week. I can't help but think there may be a link between me messing with my body and my body messing with me. 
• By itself, 16:8 is a pretty shit weight loss tool. In fact, I even put on half a kilo. I think this could be because hunger messes with your brain and you tend to over-eat for your fast-breaking meal, so if you want to actually use the 16:8 as a weight management tool, you still have to count calories. 

Unless I'm getting paid millions to play X-23 (that's female Wolverine for the non-nerds among you), I'm never, ever doing the 16:8 again.

In happier news, tomorrow I get breakfast!!! Never been so excited for breakfast before. That says something.

Part VI: Coming Up Next Week...

Amber Tries Veganism.