Meatless Mondays

What is it called when a carnivore doesn’t eat meat?

A fast.

I’ve recently had a renewed interest in fasting, no doubt because of seeing Jason Fung speak at Low Carb Vail last month.

Shortly after that I was chatting with a friend about it. I said that I don’t fast on a schedule, but that I often eat only one meal a day (most often two meals). I did mention that I’ve long thought it would be fun to fast once a week for a whole day — that would be more than 24 hours, since I don’t eat during the night.

So for the first two Mondays in March, I did just that. (That is, I ate no meat. I did drink my usual coffee, and I had a few spoons of tallow in the afternoon when my energy was dipping.) In practice the first fast was 48 hours, and the second more like 42. I enjoyed it.

Under a fat-based metabolism, one doesn’t normally feel hungry throughout the day. The liver takes care of glucose and all that, much better than for those on a glucose-based diet. So I wasn’t hungry.

I lost a few pounds, and was down to my lowest weight in decades. I know from experience that weight loss from short term fasting is often transient, so I wasn’t really worried about it, or counting on it staying off, but it was still fun.

This past week, however, I have been ravenous. My policy is always to feed my body when it’s hungry. Fighting hunger is a losing battle. If you’re hungry, there’s a hormonal reason. It’s a signal. You can’t change it simply by not eating (except insofar as not eating changes your hormonal state). This is counterproductive. You have to change the signal.

Anyway, today I intended to fast again, but I was hungry and the tallow didn’t help and by the time I got home I was ready to eat. So I did. Besides, I had ribeye jerky waiting for me.