Question grab bag: men who fast; strongwoman; sports bras for big boobs, part two
Hey Casey aka Swole Woman, need your input on something!
So my older brother (and other men in my family) are really into fasting. Intermittent fasting and now getting into three- and five-day fasts every quarter. He says it helps you live longer, something about autophagy ... Said that on day three of the five-day fast he becomes euphoric. And that he's able to do sprints and other HIIT stuff while fasting. None of this makes sense to me! If I don't eat enough and I'm lifting and doing cardio, I feel it pretty quickly. Like I really feel ill. How could he possibly not be eating and still have energy to work out? Is this just about bodies being different?
I'm not interested in fasting more than intermittently but I do just want to understand what's going on here.
Thank you!
Eyerolling Younger Sister
If I had a dime for every time I had to listen to a guy (and literally it’s always guys) sputter about the euphoria of his first days of fasting, how he doesn’t feel a thing and in fact he feels better than he ever has in his life and it feels like lightning is shooting from his fingers and does anyone else feel like they can see time? I’d have several dimes at least, potentially tens of them.
I have a feeling that this has at least a bit to do with the fact that men, statistically speaking, are less likely to have ever been prompted to give a single thought to what goes into or out of their bodies, so the first time they do it, they are a bit shocked that it makes a difference in how they feel (whereas women tend to have that kind of messaging drilled into them before they can form sentient thoughts). It’s quite possible that you and I and we are just witnessing the raptures of guys realizing for the first time that their actions have consequences.
Anyway, to be somewhat fairer, everyone is affected differently by everything. Some people can tolerate fasting well. Some people melt down if they miss a single meal. This probably comes down to a lot of factors that don’t particularly matter, because we live in the modern world and fasting is not, like, a fact of our reality. It’s just a (dubious) way some people choose to spend their time, an “it worked for me” like all the rest of them. That’s one possible and maybe partial explanation. He may just be right about his individual, personal experience in a way that is not worth arguing about.
Another possible explanation is that three or five days is not long enough for someone to necessarily run through their body’s total energy surplus, depending on what he’s doing that whole time. He may just be able to store enough energy/carbs that he’s not depleted even after that extended amount of time. Another possibility is that he is run-through by that point, and his body has basically kicked into a kind of hormonally driven high-adrenaline mode that is designed to carry him through these periods of starvation, a sort of “last hurrah” before he’d finally crash.
The fact that bodies can do this does not mean that they should, or that it’s better for us. The purported longevity benefits of fasting (usually repeated from bro to bro after being filtered through the the sticky fingers of people like Andrew Huberman, an inherently untrustworthy person) are essentially confusion about what autophagy is and does.