Introduction
“You can break away from the visceral feeling that if you skip a meal or even several meals, you’ll be in danger; that you’ll be weak and miserable, unable to go on. You can overcome the feelings of fear, discomfort, starvation, terror, and loneliness and replace them with liberation, power, and self-control…”
While this is the most fundamental message in it, Fast This Way by Dave Asprey goes beyond the subject of food, presenting fasting as a swiss knife for personal development. Starting with a summary of the author’s journey to healing loneliness and personality deficits, the book provides a refreshing perspective.
Giving some background on shamanism and fasting’s existence alongside the first wall paintings, it claims fasting isn’t limited to going without food. Instead, it means going without. Thus it can be used for any addictive habit, enabling you to be and achieve so much more.
Different Kinds of Fasting
Based on this, it can be said that NoFap and abstaining from liquor and drugs are both forms of fasting, whereas cyclical celibacy intermittent fasting. You apply the method of going without breaking various dependencies. Fasting, the book clarifies, isn’t about deprivation and suffering but giving your body what it needs at the right time. As long as done correctly, fasting is a joyous experience for boosting power and self-control.
“Fasting is about knowing what you need and taking control of it…”
Whether it is food, porn, or social media, by breaking the cycle of indulgence and instant gratification, fasting frees space in your mind granting the ability to reflect and re-evaluate your desires. This allows differentiating psychological cravings from actual physical hunger, which you pretty much never experience.
“When you go without it creates a space in your mind to examine the things you think you depend on, and to discover whether that dependence is truly what you thought it was…” (…) “That goes for sex, companionship, work and many other things as well.”
“Examining your actual needs versus your perceived needs up close exposes how much power you actually have over your body and behavior…”
Taking Things Slow
Also, to appreciate is Dave Asprey’s emphasis on making gradual progress when new to fasting. He recommends employing various IF protocols to facilitate your adaptation. An example would be starting with 8-16, moving to 4-20, and finally transitioning to the OMAD plan.
“Use intermittent fasting to help ease into “going without…””
Pretty effortless, intermittent fasting provides numerous benefits, including regulating insulin, clearing toxins and pathogens, and reducing inflammation via autophagy.
Calories and Food Sources
Like all books of Dave Asprey, FTW doesn’t skip stressing how different calorie sources trigger different hormonal responses, and thus eating them produces non-identical results; also, how the calories-in-calories-out model does more harm than good, keeping you hungry and feeling like crap. On the other hand, due to elevating ketones and lowering ghrelin, IF protocols promote hunger suppression and a healthy relationship with food. FTW addresses food toxicity and how certain foods contain toxins like lectins and others that damage the cells, causing a host of issues.
Another key message is that, while all people can benefit from fasting, your diet plays a role in how you’re going to feel when doing it. Eating junk causes cravings and blood-sugar dysregulations, whereas high-quality keto and paleo diets work (in conjunction) with fasting, giving the best results. The author elaborates on how the food industry, which he calls Big Food, uses our nature and primal instincts to profit.
“Almost everyone has some form of physical or psychological addiction to food. (…) The point is addictions and cravings are built into us, even if you never had a problem with your weight. They are easily activated, and there’s a trillion-dollar food industry I call “Big Food,” that is specifically designed to do just that…”
OMAD
Touching on how besides keeping us (extra) lean by making us burn stored energy, OMAD lowers triglycerides and boosts the good (HDL) cholesterol, Dave Asprey also regards its benefits as unsustainable, claiming it reduces sex hormones, disrupts sleep quality, and thins hair. This is one of the few places where I massively disagree. As one doing OMAD for about 8 years, I never experienced those side effects. In fact, the OMAD plan is the most sustainable dietary tactic I have ever implemented. And trust me, I pretty much tried everything.
I also don’t think you’ll have those issues if you take your time to fully adapt, educate yourself on different food combinations, and achieve high metabolic flexibility via diet cycling and incorporating occasional 48-hour fasts. On the contrary, I cannot confirm the same would happen if you eat junk and jumpstart the plan with no gradual adaptation, as some like to do as a demonstration of discipline. It’s also worth mentioning that I’m on NoFap and use devices like semen retention and cyclical celibacy for the same period.
Another to disagree with is that drinking buttered coffee and plain fasting is the same; they aren’t, nor do they feel the same, which is why I continued to choose the latter for less than a decade. The same applies to the recommended by the author, “protein fasting,” in favor of fiber and his products, especially if you are a hard-training athlete. All the times I experimented with it, limiting protein made me feel like garbage. On the contrary, that never happened with all of my plain 48 hrs fasts. And after many of them, I actually had more energy, feeling rejuvenated.
As long as for sleep, I had great struggles for 23 years. Then I adopted the OMAD plan, repairing my sleep schedule instantaneously. Maintaining around 90% quality, I fall asleep and wake up precisely when I want. And more about that can be found in all my content on the OMAD plan. Speaking of sleep, the author underlines a fundamental truth I wholeheartedly agree with:
“Healthy sleeping promotes your fasting — and healthy fasting promotes your sleep…”
He adds that despite society neglecting its importance, sleep protects and heals us in many ways. That includes reducing cancer and heart attack risks, aiding in cellular repair, lowering inflammation, and helping cleanse cellular waste.
Meal Timing
According to the author, eating before bed interferes with the circadian rhythm, causing multiple awakenings and thus making you feel groggy on the next day. If you watch my channel, you know that this is the second place in this book I greatly disagree with. Like Serge Nubret, General Stanley McChrystal, Rhonda Rousey, and Hershel Walker, I eat my meal right before hitting the sack.
That not only sustains my desired sleep schedule, letting me wake up between 3 and 4 am while feeling refreshed; it also keeps my body and brain running like never before. The reason is erasing digestion out of my day while also taking advantage of food’s downer drug properties when needed, i.e., before going to bed. (As mentioned), that is what fixed my sleep schedule after about two decades of struggle and reckless teenage stimulant abuse.
Like the Bulletproof Diet, Headstrong, and Game Changers, Fast This Way also reveals to the readers the harmful effects of junk light and how using dim lights and avoiding screens before bed is crucial for falling asleep at the right time.
Metabolic Flexibility
It also gets into the favorite-of-mine subject of metabolic flexibility. Unlike fitness YouTubers and celebrities, who teach how to reinforce your food addiction and sugar dependency (by eating every 2 hours), the author unveils that becoming metabolically flexible allows crushing gym sessions with superior efficiency and performance. I wholeheartedly agree with that (as well).As most of my viewers know, fasting trains the body to become a dual-burner and effortlessly switch between using sugar and fat. Reminding how that keeps us in shape without annoying calculations, the author explains that switching fuel sources also strengthens the body.
Then the book gets into the ways contrast showers might facilitate metabolic flexibility and how cold therapy boosts immunity, relieves pain, and helps keep healthy body weight. It also explains the importance of customizing your fasting protocol and how women should consult their doctor when breastfeeding. Contrary to the internet diet culture, the book advocates striving for long-lasting changes versus embarking on trendy yet potentially harmful challenges to get an ego boost.
Spirituality
FTW makes a great point of fasting’s application in spiritual development and understanding yourself better. It reminds the readers that fasting is part of all religions and spiritual traditions. And by using it, their disciples not just strengthen self-control but improve their perception of the outer and inner worlds.
Here, I’d like to add that great yet not typical examples of that are the more traditional methods for obtaining what’s called knowledge and conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel, which is the most fundamental stage of traditions like the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, Thelema, and the whole Western Esotericism. Those methods last 6, 12, or 18 months and include rituals, prayer, meditation such as abstaining from orgasms, and extensive fasting. As the author says:
“Fasting allows you to discover yourself beyond flesh and blood…”
Opening the readers to the spiritual aspects of fasting, Dave Asprey regards it as a meditation on a physical level. While this might seem absurd, it actually makes sense when considering that some of meditation’s key goals include calming and clearing, or switching the conscious mind off, so the deeper consciousness can kick in. On the other hand, fasting drops insulin, triggering a series of processes that put our bodies into a superior state of being. So I see this analogy as appropriate.
Sex
Another I enjoyed is the author’s emphasis on the importance of semen retention for men in contrast to that of more frequent orgasms for women. Like Game Changers, FTW points out how ancient Daoists utilized such practices to sustain vigor and youthfulness. As long as for the second part of this notion, I believe that women might want to further research it on their own.
Also noteworthy are the multiple reminders not to beat yourself up. Just because fasting is about self-discipline doesn’t mean you should be in pain. Moreover, pleasure should always be part of it. And this, I believe, is something all the discipline-glorifying folks should consider regarding stuff outside fasting.
Final Words
In FTW, Dave Asprey recognizes fasting as more than a dietary method, viewing it as a mighty tool for breaking addiction patterns developed by internal and external conditioning. He provokes a powerful insight, which might be recognized as somewhat similar to some of Robert Anton Wilson and even Timothy Leary, who biohackers before the movement began.
Sure, I disagree with or didn’t enjoy stuff like the claims about the OMAD plan, meal timing, and the somewhat frequent advertisement of the Bulletproof products as mandatory for successful adaptation. Although excellent quality, those and other similar products aren’t necessary when adapting to longer fasts, and they also weren’t what let me implement the OMAD plan pretty effortlessly.
Such statements, however, are understandable. After all, the author owns the company. And I (on the other hand) might be easily defined as what the book calls “fasting or OMAD purist.” My favorite sections are about spirituality and utilizing fasting to achieve aims beyond dieting. I also appreciated the personal stories of transformation, those with the excentric shaman Dilaila and the narration by Dave Asprey himself.
