Breakfast of Champions, or Zero

For years I pursued fasting like an extreme sport

It’s Sunday, and I just swallowed down another unpalatable breakfast smoothie, my seventh morning in a row this week. Whey protein isolate, a pinch of bitter creatine monohydrate, and a scoop of frozen blueberries. The blueberries add a lovely lavender hue, though they don’t do much to cover the taste.

But I loved every chalky sip; the protein grounds me. I’m ready to do twenty pushups. That kind of grounded.

For a long time, it was the opposite. I pursued intermittent fasting like an extreme sport. I used an app called Zero to help me track all the calories I wasn’t eating. I believed that calorie restriction was the key to longevity. That theory’s been around for almost a century, and there’s evidence to support it, at least in rats. When I was a sweet-tooth kid, my grandfather intentionally restricted his diet (although, being a proper Eisenhower Republican, not alcohol.) His goal was to live past 100¹. At family dinners, he ate lightly and skipped dessert. My parents felt this behavior was a tad nutty, but I held him up as a bright example of virtue and austerity, even though child-me could not stop gobbling Ring Dings and Chips Ahoy.

When I reached the age he was then, with my own mortality staring back in the mirror, I found it suddenly easier to access self-control. So I fasted. To my surprise, I wasn’t hungry during the hours I was expecting not to eat. At first, I set my app to the recommended most common “feeding window,” from noon to 8 pm.

Ah, that term, feeding window—imagine, if you will, a soft custard stand in Ocean City, New Jersey. A sunburnt adolescent boy with a Polish accent tips the creamy, over-tall brown-and-white swirl sideways to fit it through the window. And here is your change, a handful of coins too cumbersome to maneuver into your pocket without dropping the ice cream, so you leave it all in the tip jar.

Here’s another tip: no more ice cream for you!

One grows quickly bored with an app that tracks nothing, so before I knew it, I was narrowing the feeding window. I am very competitive, did you know? The app told me I was in the top ten percent of fasters nationwide. That’s only an A-. So, make it no food till 3 pm. Make it no food until dinner is on the table (I prepared it all without tasting—I am, after all, a seasoned cook.) Soon, I was down to a 25-minute “feeding window,” and, bonus, no food at all on Tuesdays. A 47-hour 25-minute fast. I lost track of my reason for fasting, and fasting became the end in itself. Then I read about three-day water-and-coffee fasts, and I had to try that too—achievement unlocked!

When you stop eating, there’s a lot of leftover food in the house, so you don’t have to cook or shop as much. And then you have extra time—it’s a miracle. Imagine all you can get done. On Tuesday nights, my spouse ate Monday’s leftovers. During the three-day fasts, I asked him to warm up his own food. I didn’t tell anyone else what I was doing, not my doctor, not my therapist, not my friends. I planned social engagements around my not-eating, so as not to have to explain what was clearly not going to make sense to anyone else. I also learned that in a pinch it’s possible to get through a dinner party without consuming any actual dinner because no one pays much attention to anybody else.

It seems wild to me now that I’d show up to teach a three-hour writing workshop or a 90-minute movement class, having not eaten for 24 hours, or longer. But I did, week after week. I felt sharp and airy, as if I might float to the rafters while also expounding on theories of narrative distance or leading a roomful of people through Sun Salutation A. During those long fasts, I was brilliantly alive. My brain raced with ideas all night long. I had to keep leaping out of bed to scribble them down. In other words, I was not getting much sleep. My limbs felt carbonated.

You may wonder, did I become extremely thin? Nope, I was about five pounds lighter than I am now, but no—because when you decrease your calorie supply, the body adjusts its metabolism to need less. The body consumes its own muscle. Where was the end game here?

My father used to tell a parable about a man who kept a racehorse. He discovered that when he cut back on the horse’s feed, the horse ran faster. He kept cutting back, and every time he did, the horse ran faster and won more races. The man was saving money and winning money! Eventually, he got his horse down to no feed at all, zero.

The horse died.

Autophagy (literally, self-eating), is a concept in both cell biology and adaptive AI. Proponents of intermittent fasting theorize that twenty-four to forty-eight hours into a fast, your cells begin to consume and recycle their damaged and nonfunctional parts, reducing inflammation, protecting you from tumor growth, and even reversing the damages of aging². You can also induce autophagy through extreme exercise and diet interventions, particularly low-carb diets. The tingly, hyper-alert feeling I had during long fasts was likely a sign of ketosis.

In AI, autophagy is more sinister: a feedback loop in which data-hungry generative AI is fed upon itself: AI begets more AI with only itself to thieve from; hallucinations devolve into further nonsense, spiraling into a slimy self-cannibalizing loop of data corruption known as “Model Autophagy Disorder” (MAD).

We are stardust. We are golden.

But if we have only our own selves to feed on, how do we not implode into meaninglessness; what is the endgame?

I deleted the Zero app. For a long time, I’d read selectively, seeking confirmation that my fasting strategy would make me stronger. But it did not; it untethered me. This summer, I read a book by Gabrielle Lyon, a physician expert in skeletal muscle who argues that sarcopenia—the age-related muscle loss that begins as early as thirty and accelerates—is a major cause of disease and death in elderly and vulnerable populations. In her view, skeletal muscle is a metabolic organ that affects every system of the body, processes glycogen, strengthens bone mass, reduces inflammation, and gives us a hedge against other diseases, such as cancer.

To build and maintain skeletal muscle, you need to do resistance training and consume enough protein, as much as 1 gram per pound daily of your ideal body weight. Even if you are eating three meals every day, that’s an almost impossible amount of protein when you consider that, for example, one egg contains only six grams.

There was no way I could maintain, let alone build muscle on my over-the-top fasting regimen. I’d been resistance and weight training for years, yet my muscle mass was low. By the time I was sixty, I had osteoporosis and even a fragility fracture of my hip— a situation I chalked up to genetic body type. My body was consuming itself. That was the endgame.

One could certainly still argue that there is data to support the idea that calorie deprivation can extend your life. But when you consider that by age eighty, seventy percent of women will have developed osteoporosis, the ultra low-calorie plan starts to look ultra problematic. Women need healthy skeletal muscle to pull on our bones and keep them alive.

Adding more protein, a lot more, which meant adding back calories and meals, allowed me to build back missing muscle mass and bone density. I’m am stronger than I was in my twenties, thirties, forties. I’m ifting heavier weights, sleeping better, doing more pushups, and I no longer feel as if I’m floating away in the ether.

Plus, been-there-done-that: you will feel better if you eat.

1. He made it.

2. Shabkhizan, Roya et al. “The Beneficial and Adverse Effects of Autophagic Response to Caloric Restriction and Fasting.” Advances in nutrition (Bethesda, Md.) vol. 14,5 (2023): 1211-1225. doi:10.1016/j.advnut.2023.07.006