Reflections after ending a ~2.5 year run of intermittent fasting

I started intermittent fasting in earnest in January 2020. I’ve reflected on it a few times. A few reflections as that run came to an end 2 weeks back –

(1) I started intermittent fasting (IF) at a time when I was feeling unfit. Our kids were 3 and 1.5 and survival ranked higher than self-care on my priority list. I had a non-existent exercise routine and, as I was regularly short on sleep, I felt conscious about the fact that I wasn’t consistently making the best diet choices.

I’d read about the benefits of fasting and the idea of restricting meals to an 8 hour window felt worth a shot.

(2) IF did two things for me right from the get-go. It gifted me 20 odd minutes back in the day that would otherwise have gone to breakfast. It reduced the guilt I felt about my health and helped me feel better about myself. Win and win.

(3) Down the line, I realized that the biggest gift I had from this period was about my comfort with hunger. It helped me realize that I had a lot of capacity to deal with hunger. There were days – especially during the COVID lockdowns or during a particularly long day of work – when I fasted for nearly the whole day. It was no big deal.

I realized I had gotten into a habit of eating when the time came and regardless of how hungry I was. IF reminded me of the importance of hunger and the joy of eating when you are hungry. I think this idea had implications in my life that went well beyond food.

(4) I began wondering about whether IF was a prudent choice in the past months. As our kids have gotten older (life gets a lot better after the youngest turns 3), I have been getting back to a more consistent fitness regime. And as I’ve dialed up both the length and intensity of the morning workout, I wasn’t sure how well fasting played with this.

(5) I finally gave up on IF as one of the changes after reading Outlive. Peter Attia broke down diet control into 3 kinds – (1) Diet restricted (e.g., keto or low carb), (2) Calorie restricted (i.e., breaking down everything on your plate into calories – as athletes do), or (3) Time restricted (i.e., intermittent fasting). While each of these can help people reduce weight, he explained that he noticed that patients who were exercising were losing more protein with this approach.

He also shared some compelling data about protein loss as we age and the importance of ensuring we’re getting the protein we need.

That resonated with me. It was the source of the unease I was beginning to feel as I dialed up my workouts. And while I’m sure there are IF experts who will have found ways to make this work – e.g., by skipping dinner instead of breakfast – I’ve realized from my experiments that it doesn’t work for me.

So, I’ve substituted my missed breakfast meal with a protein shake with whey protein, spinach, and frozen berries. It works great – while more work than skipping breakfast, it still keeps things simple enough.

Overall, IF was a positive experience. It was a habit that helped me during a season of my life when I needed it. And, even as I bid goodbye to that habit, I’ve taken away lessons about simplicity and hunger that will stay with me.

Learning from others’ mistakes

The most efficient means of learning is to learn from others’ mistakes.

This is easier said than done. It is easy to hear or read about someone’s mistakes. To truly learn from them, we have to internalize their pain and think about how we might apply what they learnt when we’re in a similar situation.

The trick is in empathizing so strongly with their pain that we reflect on it as if it were ours.

Then, when the situation presents itself, we stand a chance of changing our behavior and, thus, learning.

What have you shipped

I started working as a product manager a few years back. Someone said – “In the long run, the only thing that’s going to matter is your answer to the question – what have you shipped?

If you can point to a good set of products that have been loved by users and delivered on value to the business, you’ll have done well. And if you can’t, then you’ll have done poorly. It’s a simple as that.”

I think of that note from time to time. When you’re in the process of building the product, it becomes easy to get caught in the internal noise. Your doubts, the team’s feelings, internal momentum, stakeholder feedback, user research, and so on. Some of these may be predictive to the outcome. The key is to not be distracted by any of this and instead to focus on the product.

Ultimately, the product truth will emerge and shine through.. or not.

Everything else is gravy.

Consistency

I didn’t appreciate the value of consistency throughout my childhood. I waltzed my way through most months at school doing the bare minimum. Then I’d go on a crazy sprint when it came time for examinations – pulling multiple all-nighters – to get the job done.

I began experiencing the limitations of this approach in the final 2 years of high school. So, after a rough junior year/11th grade, I decided to salvage my final year with more consistent effort.

Then I fell right back to old habits in my undergraduate years – only to definitively understand that inconsistent efforts result in poor results in the things that matter in this life. And that’s not just grades* – but domains like fitness, relationships, and learning.

This blog was created with 2 goals – to teach myself (a) how to better deal with failure and disappointment and (b) consistency.

And while this practice has delivered on the 2 goals above and many more I didn’t think of at the time, I think consistency has been the habit that has had the biggest impact on the quality of my life. No matter the problem – whether it is as important as figuring out how to improve my fitness or a challenging work issue, or something more mundane such as sorting out our family photos or diagnose a higher-than-usual water bill – I know now that it will be best solved with consistency.

This means breaking the problem down into a set of actions/or a system of actions. Then taking steps toward solving the problem consistently – daily or weekly or even monthly depending on the activity.

Nothing beats small things done on a consistent basis because it often has a compound impact on our outcomes.

*I did eventually trying a consistency focused approach to my academics in graduate school. No all-nighters were pulled and the results, to someone who hadn’t an ounce of consistency for all preceding years in schools, were astonishing. Good processes result in good outcomes in the long run.

Beckham

I watched the Netflix documentary on David Beckham recently. It was a well crafted set of episodes.

In his heyday, David Beckham was one of the best right sided midfielders in the world. His right boot was majestic and his strengths on a dead ball (corners, free kicks) are likely unmatched. But he was also a lot more than that – a global superstar whose impact went well beyond football.

My biggest reflection from the documentary was on the theme of trade-offs. His marriage to Victoria Adams / Posh Spice and the celebrity lifestyle came with it ended his career at Manchester United. After a stint at Real Madrid, he then decided to move to the US at a time when the MLS was a shadow of the league it is today.

To continue his eligibility for selection in the English national team, he made his way back to Italy to play for AC Milan on multiple occasions before finishing his career in France.

It all culminated in a fascinating and successful career as a footballer and global superstar. But it also brought with it many “what ifs.” What if he had stayed on at Manchester United?

What if he’d stayed at Madrid for a few more years and so on?

It is hard to escape the thought that he sold his still-incredible football career short. But then again, he was still wildly successful and has since gone from strength to strength as a co-owner of Inter Miami FC (the club Lionel Messi chose to join this year) while amassing half a billion dollars, and still managing to be the family man he’s so fond of being.

The documentary pauses at all of these decisions and examines the trade-offs from different lenses. Many disagreed with many of these decisions – but such is life. It isn’t a popularity contest.

You’ve got to make peace with the trade-offs of your decisions. And, from the looks of it, he seems to have done just that.