If I'm dieting for my health (I think?) should I give it up for strength training?

The Question

Hi, Lady.

I heard you on WITHpod earlier this year and immediately downloaded couch to barbell and started lifting. My progress is v e r y slow, but I'm enjoying it, and I feel very good about making my body strong as I age. So many benefits!! (The world does not contain enough exclamation points!!! 😅)

Before I started lifting, I was doing a very mild version of intermittent fasting. Basically I just stopped snacking at night. I'd have dinner, then I'd eat breakfast 12 hours later. There's The Diabetes in my family and I have read (from sources that seem legit?) that intermittent fasting can do good things for blood sugar over the long run. (Also: heartburn. SO much less heartburn when I don't eat at night.)

So anyway, during the Times of Intermittent Fasting, I would sometimes go to bed hungry, which was NOT my favorite experience, but seemed worth it for the other benefits, especially the reduction in heartburn ... ... ...

I know that experiencing hunger is a sign of righteousness in our culture. I would be lying if I didn't admit that feeling a little hungry made me feel virtuous. I never, even in my most eating disordered days, could tolerate feeling hungry. So, maybe it was self-brainwashing, but I thought that the manageableness of the fasting maybe meant my body was OK with it, and I wasn't doing something damaging.

Now, since I started lifting, I've been stuffing my face whenever I'm hungry, even if it's at night. I have NEVER tried to eat so much protein, and it's been hard to do all the chewing during daytime hours! I also have a sort of superstitious worry that if I'm hungry at night then I'd better eat because it must be my body saying I don't have enough protein and it will eat itself and my arms will fall off if I don't put food in it.

But I'm getting better at getting protein in me habitually. And lately I've wondered:

if I am eating enough calories and enough protein in the 12 hours, is it safe to not eat during the other 12?

I don't want to go to bed hungry, but is it safe to do while lifting? (Again - only if the hunger is from the timing of the food and not the quantity or quality of the food.)

Tell me, oh Goddess of Iron, if you know about safely lifting + intermittent fasting, so that I might learn from Thine wisdom.

Adoringly,

Intermittently Hungry

The Answer

Okay, I see and hear what you are asking, and I promise we will get to your actual question in a minute. But first I want to be presumptuous and address the foundations I see lurking underneath your question. I want to do this because I think if we shake the foundation around a little, the actual question that needs to be asked, and its answer, will fall out naturally. (And then I will answer your question, I swear.)

The foundation I want to address here is: Is proactively dieting to head off our family medical history, based on conclusions drawn from “sources that seem legit question mark,” a good idea? Further: Is it still a good idea if it’s getting in the way of other pursuits that may also help our general health?

Far too often, I see people reading that “too much of [x dietary substance] can be bad,” so in a bid for health (or in hopes of offsetting other vaguely unhealthy habits) they take it upon themselves to ingest as little of that something as possible—fat, carbs, salt, dairy, seed oils, whatever.

Respectfully, this is not how anything works. Just because a lot of something can be bad, for somebody, does not mean that the less of it everyone has, the better.

Here is an example: Alice reads a blog about Bob, whose hypertension seems exacerbated by his high sodium intake. “Oh boy,” thinks Alice, “I endeavor to live to be at least a hundred years old, so I better do everything I can to avoid hypertension.” Alice starts obsessing over the sodium content of every single food she eats. She also read on a blog that drinking a lot of water is also "healthy," so she gets a gallon-size water bottle with encouraging messages printed on the side counting down the number of ounces she is drinking, and drinks two bottles a day.

A few weeks later, Alice begins to have random headaches. “I’m probably not drinking enough water,” she thinks. She drinks even more water. She begins to get nauseous to the point of vomiting. She is irritable and having muscle spasms and cramps, but guesses these may just be symptoms of her stomach bug. Then, right in the middle of her workday, Alice has a seizure. She is rushed to the hospital. After a simple test, the doctor figures out that Alice has hyponatremia—a too-low concentration of sodium in her body, thanks to avoiding salt too much, and drinking too much water.

Alice is not a real person, but this is a feasible scenario. Obviously, one can have too much sodium and get kidney stones. But one can also have too little, and go into a coma (this is not a joke).

Sometimes, it is always better to have less of certain things. A lot of mercury causes mercury poisoning. The less mercury you ingest, the better.

But the thing about mercury is that it has no nutritional utility to us. It is just poison. This is expressly not true of sodium, fats, carbs, and basically all micronutrients that the FDA makes everyone go to the trouble of measuring and printing the amounts of it on their foods.

This is probably exasperating information. It can be easier, in a way, to do as little as possible than it is to try and thread the needle of doing enough, but not too much. But the good thing is that working out smooths out a lot of dietary noise that more sedentary people have to worry about. So does attempting to eat “whole foods” most of the time. [^1]

Those are not the kind of flashy directives that get talked about most of the time. And then there is so much BS out there trying to grab our attention and throttle us within an inch of our lives. That BS even has the trappings of scientific research, and sometimes even comes out of the mouths of real doctors (who are being paid handsomely to say it). We end up accumulating thousands of little rules about how to eat and live. Sure, we can’t remember the provenance of any of them. But the fact that we can’t remember where they come from makes it feel like we can’t just all of a sudden stop following them. What if they were correct? What if a really smart person said it, as opposed to, say, Dr. Oz?

In that spirit, let’s look into this IF and blood glucose thing a little further. I found a blog that repeats your assertion that intermittent fasting “helps with blood glucose.” Specifically, the blog says, “Intermittent fasting has been shown to lower blood sugar and cholesterol, which may help reduce your risk for type 2 diabetes and heart disease.” Here it puts a footnote, which points to a 2022 study.

Now, a reasonable person reading this might say, “okay, first I heard Oprah just offhandedly say to intermittent fast for better blood glucose in a Page Six article. But now I have ‘done my research,’ and lo and behold: Not only are there other sources repeating the same suggestion, but they are citing a study! The science: sound! The lifestyle change: unimpeachable!”

But hold on. Hold on.