Fasting on keto

As long as you’re eating enough good fats (I eat 14 tablespoons of fat a day, grass-fed butter, coconut oil, lard, avocados) and moderate amounts of protein (can be anywhere between 60 – 120 grams depending on your goal) your body won’t think it’s experiencing famine; it will think “YESSSS!! FOOD! FINALLY!!”

It’s our natural state to eat infrequently. Fasting lowers inflammation which decreases all the nasties: heart disease, diabetes, cancer, dementia, etc.

Dr Jason Fung wrote a great book on fasting. Answers most myths that people have about fasting. Calorie restriction will slow down you metabolism more than fasting will. I tend to fast three days at a time. Actually fasting mimicking because I do drink keto coffee and drink bone broth.

Chronically low energy intake will, in fact, slow your metabolism. It will cause your body to shunt calories away from use for things like mechanical energy and voluntary muscle contraction in order to maintain autonomic function and to prioritize storage of calories in the event of famine.

So, when you hear things like, “I’ve been on 550 calories a day and I have no energy and I keep getting fatter,” that person is not lying to you. They have, in fact, put themselves into starvation mode and the evolutionary response to that is store as many of those calories as possible and take a lot of naps.

Fasting, on the other hand, more closely mimics the nutritional environment in which human beings (for the most part) would have evolved. 3 square meals and all that are a pretty recent development. Fasting on a regular basis will improve your metabolic flexibility in terms of switching fuel substrates with relative ease. It can accelerate your adaptation to nutritional ketosis. It also increases things like growth hormone-which declines sharply in the middle of life. It also has demonstrable anti-inflammatory properties.