Fit Over 40 is not a diet program. It’s not just about what you eat or how much. It is partially about how we feed our bodies to create the most beneficial effects possible in order to produce optimum health and well-being.

While on my own journey to get fit, I spent 2 decades collecting information on weight control, amassing an extensive library of books, articles, videos and reports detailing hundreds of plans and protocols that promised to help me lose weight and keep it off. Every one was filled with examples of people who had successfully followed the advice within and lost incredible amounts of weight, regaining their vitality and restoring the physical health they had long given up on.

Each of these diets had one thing in common. They all focused on WHAT you eat and HOW MUCH you eat. They all worked, for a while. Every diet created what it promised and I was able to lose weight. Some produced 10 pounds of weight loss, some 20 pounds and a few as much as 50 pounds. Few, if any were sustainable long term and failed to teach the lifestyle changes that would be necessary to create a permanent solution. Without sustainability, every short term gain turned into a long term failure and a return of all of the lost weight and often more. Many of the weight loss gurus even suggested that the other guys’ diets were designed for you to fail so you had to keep going back for more advice, their next book, a next set of supplements or the latest and greatest “NEW” innovations in weight loss that they just discovered.

Having spent tens of thousands of dollars on diets; special foods, supplements and vitamins and ending up heavier than ever I finally discovered the one constant in all of the plans and programs that prevented me from finally reaching my goals – ME. I also came to realize that it was not for lack of trying. After all, I had tried everything and I had the hat and the T-shirt to prove that I’d been there. Every diet left me with feelings of deprivation as more and more of the foods that I enjoyed were stripped from my shopping list until I was fairly certain that my next diet would be a breathairian diet where all you took in was air and water. What else was there to give up?

Through constant trial and error, I did eventually work out which foods supported me and which did not, eventually settling on a low to no carbohydrate style of eating. For a guy with an Italian mother, going 20 years without pasta was challenging to say the least. Yet, I learned from repeatedly trying to overcome my body’s rejection of carbs that it was a battle destined for failure. I also learned from Albert Einstein that doing the same things over and over and expecting a different result was insanity. It was definitely time for me to get off of the diet merry-go-round and track down the answers I desperately needed.

I promised my patients who asked what Fit Over 40 was about that it was not going to simply be about a diet or exercise program like every other program they had heard of. I promised that it would be more than that and that there would be real information that I knew would work for them because I knew it had worked for me. This program is about what I found that works.

Never being one to give up, I continued to search for answers and investigate possible solutions that I had not yet discovered. A late night scan of internet TV set me on a path that would prove to be just what I had been looking for. A poorly dubbed Russian documentary on the science of fasting opened up a whole new realm of possibilities for me that I had never before come across. I learned that the Russians had stumbled upon the benefits of fasting by accident and had begun researching it in earnest to determine the limits of the positive results they could achieve in the treatment of everything from obesity to cancer. They treated their patients with fasting periods that ranged from a few days to months with near miraculous results. And they learned about the physiology of fasting and how it helped the body to heal at the cellular level.

What I learned that night was that fasting, long practiced as a religious and social ritual had many of its roots firmly embedded in our physiology. We are actually designed to experience and not only survive but thrive during periods of fasting. Many of the social and spiritual rituals had their beginnings in historical periods of suffering and starvation where the people survived through periods of deprivation either due to natural phenomenon resulting in lack of food or from oppression where availability of food was reduced or denied. The people who experienced and survived the fasting often emerged stronger physically, mentally and spiritually.

The ability to survive periods of starvation and come out of it stronger comes from our evolutionary past where regular, dependable sources of food were scarce and required significant effort to be obtained. Early man could not simply go to a grocery store and buy enough food to last an entire month. He didn’t have a well-stocked pantry or a freezer that could hold stores for months at a time. The early hunter gatherers would go into the forests and fields every day, gather the food they could find and then return to their camp or village to consume whatever they collected. Some days were bountiful, some were not. Sometimes, the earth provided more than enough, sometimes there was little or nothing and sometimes scarcity could last for extended periods of time. It was the ability to survive the lean times that helped early man to continue on and be strong enough to respond when times got better.
Science tells us that all animals have the ability to survive starvation for extended periods. Many mammals fast for the entire winter, not eating or drinking for weeks or months during the coldest times when resources would be at their lowest. We call it hibernation and consider it to be a normal state for these animals to be in but it still amounts to a prolonged period of fasting. Animals are designed for it and we are too.

Fasting and its physiological benefits are tied to the starvation response designed into our bodies. To make it feel less negative and more inviting we’ll refer to it from now on as the fasting response. Once we understand our body’s fasting response and what it does for us, regular fasting as a weight loss and metabolism support technique makes perfect sense.

Since the scientific and physiological discussion on fasting could go on for hours and dive deep into consideration of complex body functions and adaptations, and as this is a discussion for the layman to discover the benefits and beginnings of a self-help technique, we’ll keep the complex stuff to a minimum. A brief search of fasting on the internet will provide a university explanation complete enough to satisfy anyone interested in knowing everything there is to know on the subject.

The Fasting for Dummies explanation of the inherent benefits of fasting (not meant to be an insult in any way) begin with a change in understanding of how the body’s needs for energy are met.

As we have evolved to the point where the availability of food is no longer a significant and recurrent problem, an entire new set of problems developed. An over-abundance of food and an over-indulgence by many of the wrong kinds of foods has led to the lifestyle illnesses of the modern era, obesity, diabetes, heart disease and many other metabolic imbalances that plague us. And, because of dietary recommendations that rely on a predominance of cheap and easy carbohydrate laden foods, we find ourselves over-fed and over-weight.

The brain is primarily fed by glucose, the breakdown product of carbohydrate based foods. When the body’s calorie requirements for glucose are met, our evolutionary protection measures against starvation kick in and the excess is stored as glycogen in the liver and muscles and as fat in our fat cells. The more excess we have, the more fat we store and the fatter we become. The periods of starvation that our bodies are programmed to protect against never take place and our fat stores continue to grow. The real problem becomes that we are not just over-fed, we are under-fasted.

When the body is deprived of a source of glucose (carbohydrates) it uses up its stored glucose in as little as 24 hours and converts over to burning fat for fuel. Fat has more calories per gram than sugar, burns more slowly as an energy source thus increasing our energy output and produces ketones as a byproduct of fat metabolism which the brain uses for energy instead of glucose. So, the body starts to break down its own fat stores for energy, the brain switches over to fat burning bi-products for fuel and the body not only survives the fasting period but thrives through it. In the process, body weight begins to drop and the metabolism resets to normal.

Nature had this all figured out long before we had any idea what was going on. When it started to become apparent that fasting was beneficial for us, even though we did not understand how or why, early man incorporated periods of fasting into their social and religious practices. Once the physiological, mental and spiritual benefits of fasting became more apparent, many social groups and almost every religious order incorporated fasting of some sort into their practices for a variety of purposes including cleansing, purification, mental and spiritual clarity and improvement of physical health.

The physical health benefits are of primary interest to our discussion today. However, that does not in any way diminish the value of the other recognized benefits of the practice.

A key benefit of fasting that makes it not only safe but essential is a process called autophagy.

Autophagy is a normal body process in which weak, dead or dying cells are removed and reabsorbed. In this way, the body conserves energy and recycles valuable resources while it rejuvenates organs and tissues, enhancing their functions. The fasting response simply makes this process more efficient. It is also this physiological enhancement that had so interested the Russian researchers when they discovered that fasting for extended periods could allow the body to heal nearly every condition that they studied, including cancers and metabolic diseases.

When the body is allowed to function normally, without being overburdened with excess nutrients, it redirects its energy to healing and rejuvenation. Much like when all animals, including humans voluntarily reject food when injured or sick until the healing process has had time to do its work. Think of a sick dog curled up in a quiet corner refusing to eat until whatever is ailing has passed.

Ok, I promised not to get too technical in this discussion so why is all of this so important to us on our journey to be Fit Over 40? This brings us back to the fact that we are not just over-fed, we are under-fasted.

Because most of us were taught to eat three meals a day and snack in between to never be hungry and because we live in a society where food is plentiful and easily available, we have learned to ignore our body’s signals that we are full. We have also forgotten the feeling of “hungry”. We eat as a matter of timing rather than a matter of need so our bodies simply do what they have learned over generations and store the excess calories as fat. The astronomical increase in obesity, metabolic conditions and diseases has become our testament to modern living.

The average person today learns from early on that you get up in the morning and eat breakfast – because “breakfast is the most important meal of the day”. Then, we learned in school that we need a mid-morning snack to hold us over until lunch. When we get home from school we need a snack to keep us satiated until dinner which is almost always followed by dessert. And, as adults we know that a late night snack before bed helps us to sleep better. We have no shortage of calories in our day and most of the foods that we have learned to call “comfort” foods are anything but comfortable for our bodies.
And yet, we wonder why we can’t seem to lose weight and why our bodies constantly cry out for a treat as soon as we begin a new diet. We have been programmed and our patterns of eating have been deeply engrained into the folds of our brains.

In order to restore our bodies to metabolic fitness, we need to teach them to remember their inherent controls and signals. This is where fasting is an essential part of the get fit process.

There, I said it. In order to regain control of our metabolism, our weight and our overall health and fitness, we need to remind our bodies of the benefits of NOT EATING. We need to remember what the feeling of “hungry” is. It’s really not as hard as it sounds.

If we are able to reestablish our eating rhythms based on biological need rather than on a social schedule tied to a clock, it is possible for our bodies to restore the controls that they were born with. All it takes is time and consistency.

When most people think of fasting, they get an image of Ghandi on day 30 of a protest or starving people in the midst of a famine. Fortunately, fasting is neither of those and does not have to be hard or painful. In fact, getting the full benefits of fasting does not have to mean that you don’t eat for days or weeks at a time. While there are reasons and benefits for prolonged fasting, this is not necessarily the time to practice it and NOT what we are recommending here.

There are many ways to practice fasting. The key to success in losing weight and healing your metabolism is consistency. It is important to pick a fasting protocol and stick to it with determined resolve to get results. The fasting model that I am about to present will allow the practitioner to gain all of the benefits of prolonged fasting including weight loss, metabolic reset, autophagy and cell regeneration and all without going an entire day without eating. While there are several ways to practice fasting, we want to maximize benefit while minimizing difficulty and optimizing results.

The method that will produce the most benefit with the least pain and make consistency as simple as telling time is Daily Intermittent Fasting. How you pursue intermittent fasting can be dependent upon your goals and purpose for fasting. The key difference in the intermittent fasting methods is in timing. The diet you follow while fasting is less important than when you eat. Whether you follow a Mediterranean, ketogenic, low carb, no carb, vegetarian diet or any of the hundreds of others, so long as you are eating quality food, when you eat outweighs what you eat. No pun intended.
An easy and effective way to get started with intermittent fasting is with a 16:8 (for men) or 14:10 (for women) timing model. This means that a man would take in all calories and nutrition in an 8 hour period, 10 hours for women. For the remaining 16 hours in the day there would be no caloric intake, only water or non-caloric beverages like tea and black coffee. This schedule allows you to eat every day and eat either breakfast or dinner, just not both, at least in the normal social definition.

So, here’s how it would work as an example:

You wake up in the morning and exercise. (Fasted exercise, particularly High Intensity Interval Training (HIITs) optimizes the results of your exercise time AND your fasting which is another topic that will be covered at a later date.) You have chosen a 16:8 Intermittent Fasting (IF) schedule so your first food of the day is at noon. You can call this breakfast if you like. Breakfast is about breaking fast, not time of day so if it helps you to feel like you haven’t missed any meals, it’s ok. The rest of your caloric intake for the day must be completed by 8PM. Then, you don’t take in anything but water until the next day at noon. With this method, you are eating every day and the majority of your fasting time is spent sleeping. Easy.

After 12 hours with no sugar intake, the liver depletes it stores of glycogen and the body converts to fat burning for energy. Provided you don’t load up on carbs and put the glucose back into your system, your body will continue to use fat for energy and burn body fat if you are not bringing in enough calories. One of the benefits of burning fat for fuel is that fat has more energy in it than sugar or protein. When you use fat for fuel you will have more energy, lose weight and reduced hunger levels so you eat less, which makes it easier to stay consistent with your fasting protocol.

There are less aggressive methods of intermittent fasting. However, for weight loss, daily intermittent fasting is the most effective method and easiest to follow for the long run. Other methods like alternate day fasting and 5 day/2 day fasting can be difficult to adapt to and maintain long term. What is most important is that you choose a method that you can commit to and stay with until you reach your goal.

While Intermittent Fasting can create amazing results in weight loss and metabolic enhancement, the benefits can be easily overcome by eating wrong. Continuing to eat a diet high in refined carbohydrates and foods high in glucose or fructose will negate all of your hard work and put you right back where you started, or worse. What you eat is important if you want to get the maximum benefit from your efforts. And, eating what you eat with the right timing for your metabolism will make all the difference.

A diet high in healthy fats, like olive oil, avocado, organic grass fed butter, raw nuts, pastured eggs and animal fats helps to keep your body in fat burning mode. Fats should make up 60% to 70% of your caloric intake. Protein should make up 20% to 30% and low glycemic carbohydrates 10%.

A key factor is that you avoid overeating during your food window. Once you are in fat burning mode, you will experience little if any hunger. Because fat is a slower burning fuel than sugar and more energy dense, you won’t experience as much hunger. Most times, hunger pangs beyond the third day are either due to the mental factor, where you haven’t gotten used to your new schedule or due to thirst. You will likely find that your hunger will disappear when you drink enough water. Try to drink a little more water than you are thirsty for. Staying properly hydrated will help your body with the cleansing process and to keep your metabolism humming.

It will also be important that if you are eating dinner that you stop eating at least 3 hours before you go to bed. This will help to reduce metabolic imbalances and give your body time to adapt and reset.

And there you have it. We are not over fed just under fasted and now you know where to begin to turn your metabolism around and start to move back toward normal. Your body has always known what to do. You have a perfect internal, innate intelligence within you that has been with you since your first spark of life. It grew you from 2 small cells into the person you are and it knows how to maintain you and keep everything running as it was designed to—provided it has no interference.

This is one small step toward removing the interference to your innate power of self-healing and reclaiming your birth right to health and well-being. There are more steps beyond this one but those are a topic for another day. Start with this one.