John: Hey, John Sonmez from simpleprogrammer.com.
So in this video, I'm going to answer a question, but not a question that someone e-mailed me.
This is a question that I get all the time and I'm tired of answering it individually.
I'm just going to give you why I'm doing this.
I'm a little bit bizarre, right?
I do a lot of crazy kind of things.
As you know, if you follow Get Up and CODE, my podcast on fitness which you can check
out at getupandcode.com, I’m pretty much into fitness and in health, but I do a lot
of weird things in that area.
I'm like Tim Ferriss that I experiment on myself.
One long time running experiment that I’ve been doing that I often get asked about a
lot is the fact that I fast until 5 PM every single day.
I’ve been doing this for 9 months now.
It’s not a fad and so I inevitably get asked why am I doing this.
I figured I’d create this video and share it with you.
Now, before I get into why I'm doing it, I do have to say, although sometimes I may look
like a medical doctor, I am not a medical doctor.
I'm not giving you medical advice.
I'm not a lawyer, not a politician, none of those things so none of this is—the basic
disclaimer, don’t follow or don’t starve yourself to death and then sue me, because
I'm not recommending that you do this, but I'm going to tell you why I do it.
If you want to do it by yourself, fine.
Go ahead.
Anyway, why would I fast until 5:00 everyday?
Well, let me give you a little bit of history of what I’ve done and the kind of experiments
that I have done.
I was doing some bodybuilding back way in my younger days in the acting and modeling
days and doing bodybuilding.
When I was doing bodybuilding, what I did was I would eat 6-7 meals a day and I would
cook those meals, chicken breasts that whole deal.
The idea was that it sped up your metabolism and you need to refill your muscles and have
protein every so often.
That actually turned out to be false, right?
A lot of studies have come out that showed, “Okay, that’s not really true.
You don’t need to eat 6-7 meals a day.
It doesn’t actually increase your metabolism.”
Also, studies have shown that your protein absorption is actually a lot higher than what
you would expect.
If you eat like 200 grams protein in one meal, your body will digest that over time.
You don’t need to break it up into 20 grams here or 20 grams there.
That’s the basis of where I transitioned from there.
I said okay.
I started to learn these things.
I tried eating less meals per day.
I saw I was getting the same results.
Then what ended up happening was I’ve been on kind of different low carb diets and all
these kind of things.
I went to Hawaii last year for 2 months and I didn’t want to make my daughter and wife
suffer of my crazy diet plans.
They wanted to go out and eat and I don’t really go out to eat when I'm eating pretty
clean.
I said, “Okay.
Well, here’s the deal.
If I skip ... I had already been doing some amount of intermittent fasting, which is kind
of like where you fast until noon or you basically skip breakfast and don’t eat until you have
this smaller eating window.
I said, “What if I just extend this?”
What if I said, “Okay, I'm not going to eat until dinner everyday while we’re on
vacation and then we can go out to eat and calorie wise I’ll be fine.”
That’s what I did.
As I started doing that in Hawaii, I actually started getting a lot more lean.
I was already in decent shape, but I started dropping fat.
The other thing that happened is I expected that I was probably going to lose some muscle.
Well, my strengths are going up.
I said, “This is interesting.
This is weird.
How is this happening?”
I actually started looking out there and looking at some studies.
I found this one study that showed that some folks they had put them on basically a one
meal a day fasting for a longer period of time.
In fact, they had done different fasting experiments and they found that the HDH levels in some
of the subjects peak after about 48 hours of fasting, which went against this whole
idea that bodybuilders are afraid of starvation mode, like if you don’t eat, you’re going
to go in starvation mode.
In 48 hours, you’re going to start cannibalizing your muscle.
It turns out that’s not true.
As much as the study can show you that, I experimented on myself and I found that to
be not true.
I found that I was actually gaining more muscle and staying lean by eating one meal a day.
That’s why I started doing it or that’s why I kept doing it.
When I got back from Hawaii and I was going to my regular schedule, I found that I was
actually liking eating one meal a day because I didn’t have to worry so much about what
I was going to eat.
I can work all day long without interruption, which is what I tend to like to do and I didn’t
have to cook.
I hate after—I guess some of it is after doing bodybuilding for such a long time and
cooking 6-7 meals a day.
I just hate it.
I just want to just go to simplified one meal.
Now, it’s been about 9 months.
I’ve pretty much stuck with this.
I think on Christmas Day was the only time I broke this where we have our traditional
cheesecake for breakfast.
I did do that but aside from that pretty much for 9 months, I’ve been doing this.
As you can see, I'm in good shape.
I am retaining my muscle.
I'm staying lean and so yeah.
That’s my story.
Now, again, like I said, it doesn’t mean that this is the only way, but this is working
for me.
That’s why I'm sticking with it.
I do believe that HDH level—I think there is a connection there.
Now, if you’re curious, if you’re working out and lifting weights and stuff, I do take
BCAAs, branched-chain amino acids right before my workout and right afterwards, which I found
from another study that showed that that’s just as effective for preserving muscle as
taking in a protein shake.
That’s pretty much what I'm doing.
Yes, I know it’s a little bit crazy, only not eating until 5:00 and only eating one
meal a day.
Hey, it works for me.
The other side effect of this too, in fact, why I started implementing this is when I
was on vacation in Hawaii, I wanted to make sure that I had some discipline in my life
because you’re out there and you’re having vacation.
To me, I find that it’s really important to maintain some kind of—I would say do
one thing that you hate everyday.
This was something that kept me focused, even though I was out there having a good time.
I still had some kind of discipline in my life, so that when I came back to regular
working schedule, I didn’t lose my discipline because I think you can lose your discipline
if you don’t keep it up.
Anyway, for all of you that were curious about that and for all of you that didn’t know
I was doing the fast until 5:00, now you think I'm crazy, there you go.
If you liked this video, if you want more crazy videos about ridiculous fitness advice,
but mostly programming and life skills, check out the channel.
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Take care.