Quick Check-In Follow-Up (Premium)

Apologies: I didn’t intend to write about this topic for some number of weeks or months, but since publishing From the Editor’s Desk: Check-In (Premium), I unexpectedly obtained some additional data that I would normally have included in that article. So, here’s a quick follow-up. (And besides, From the Editor’s Desk is a Monday thing, so that article was always going to happen on that day.)

In any event, I ended that original article noting that I would experiment with extending my daily intermittent fasts this month, but I wasn’t really sure when I’d actually try that. It’s interesting how something like this can be curiously uncertain—what if I fail? Will this even work? Etc.—and how that can lead to procrastination, especially in my case. But yesterday morning, on Monday, we drove home from upstate New York with my sister and brother-in-law—we had spent the long weekend in the Finger Lakes wine region—and of course everyone had had breakfast but me. Sometime around noon, my brother-in-law, who drove, asked me when I’d want to stop for lunch. And while he didn’t say this explicitly, we were making good time, and it was clear that he’d prefer to just go straight through and keep driving. Understandable.

But I had literally been thinking about that very thing.

Or, about whether I could just skip lunch: I wasn’t intending to experiment with it this soon, but it seemed like a good time to try, actually. And so I asked the car if anyone else would need or want to eat lunch at a normal time or whether they could wait until 2:30 or so when we got home. And everyone was willing to wait, so I decided to go for it, knowing that if it didn’t work out, we could simply stop wherever at any time (and maybe get gas, etc.)

And just like that, I’ve already done my first longer intermittent fast.

As we were driving, I thought about the logistics of this and decided I should record these things in Notion. So I went back and looked at my photos from dinner the night before and saw that we had finished by 7:30 on Sunday night. And since I didn’t have anything after that, including alcohol, I logged that as the start of my fast.

Coincidental to this, yesterday was also the final day for my final continuous glucose monitor (CGM), and it was set to expire at 7:00 p.m. that day. (I will revisit the CGM in early December, or not, based on the blood work results I get then.) As a matter of course, I check it throughout the day by holding the phone up to the CGM and syncing the two, and then I check in the Veri app to see how I’m doing.

And for whatever reason, I went out on a high (or, technically, a low): my blood glucose was terrific on both Sunday and Monday. Overnight, I hit some real lows—60 mg/DL, at one point, and then 69, 75, and 67 before waking up—and on Monday, I started with a morning fasting glucose of just 85 mg/dL (which is optimal and on the low side for me). Various things can impact glucose throughout the day—food, obviously, but also things like exercise—but I wasn’t doing either that day, so I was curious to see what happened during the one and only day I was doing both a longer intermittent fast and logging my glucose levels with the CGM.

And it was interesting enough that I of course now wish I could monitor this in the weeks ahead with another CGM. (I’m trying to resist this.) At 2:00 p.m., about 18.5 hours into my fast, my blood glucose was just 84 mg/DL, which is probably unprecedented for me. But it later hit 77 mg/DL, at about 2:30 pm, and then 72 mg/DL at 6:00 pm. Yikes! I finally broke the fast at 5:35 p.m. when we had dinner at a local restaurant. And my glucose started going up, of course, though the sensor died at 7:00 p.m. My glucose had reached the high 90s, which is completely normal—I had a healthy low-carb dinner—and I ended the day with an average glucose level of just 88 mg/DL, though it likely would have been a few points higher had the CGM kept going. But still excellent.

That last day saw optimal levels for average glucose, glucose variability, glucose oscillation, and morning fasting glucose, so it was a nice way to leave it.

As for hunger, it’s not clear whether this is the Adderall I’m taking for ADHD, my body having adjusted to daily fasting, or some combination—there are too many variables here—but I did not find this fast to be difficult at all. Meaning, I was never hungry. In fact, I probably could have just kept going: my wife walked over to check on me at 5 p.m. when I was just finishing up Tech Nostalgia: Vertical Integration (Premium) to find out when we were leaving for dinner. (She had had a small snack when we arrived home but not a full lunch and was likely more than ready to eat.) If you do the math—7:30 pm from the night before until 5:35 pm last night—that’s a fast of about 22 hours. Pretty good.

Anyway, one day does not count for much, but had I waited just one day to publish that last article, I would have certainly included this information. So here it is. And I will continue experimenting with long intermittent fasts.