Does Fasting Help with Deep Work?

00:00:00.000 | [Music]

00:00:04.700 | Moving on with questions about the deep life, our first one comes from Loves Deep Work.

00:00:10.700 | Good name.

00:00:12.700 | This question is, "What are your thoughts on fasting and deep work?"

00:00:19.700 | Well, I will say I do this accidentally quite a bit,

00:00:25.000 | as my wife will tell you and complain about.

00:00:28.000 | Sometimes when I'm really locked in on a deadline,

00:00:30.900 | I will just work all day and not eat.

00:00:32.900 | And I'll be honest, it doesn't seem to affect my work though.

00:00:36.200 | It does make me a real annoying person to be around afterwards.

00:00:39.700 | That's why she does not like that.

00:00:41.000 | My producer, Jesse, though, knows more about fasting.

00:00:45.500 | Jesse, do I have this right?

00:00:46.400 | You don't eat, what, lunch or you don't eat breakfast?

00:00:49.400 | You have some fasting thing going on.

00:00:50.900 | You probably know more about this.

00:00:52.000 | I eat basically just dinner every day.

00:00:55.100 | But I started, I discovered it through Tim Ferriss' podcast

00:00:59.600 | when he was interviewing Terry Crews.

00:01:01.100 | Terry, I saw a picture of him, he looked jacked anyway.

00:01:04.800 | And he's like, yeah, Ferriss asked him if he could do one thing.

00:01:08.300 | You know, he's 50-something at the time.

00:01:11.000 | What would he do?

00:01:11.400 | He goes, "I would have fasted earlier."

00:01:12.800 | And I was like, immediately started doing that.

00:01:15.100 | But I started an eight-hour period.

00:01:17.500 | I did that for like a year.

00:01:18.400 | Then I just narrowed it even more.

00:01:19.800 | So now I just eat dinner.

00:01:22.000 | So what do you get out of that?

00:01:25.400 | What was Terry Crews pitching?

00:01:27.500 | If you do it, you get cut.

00:01:29.400 | Oh, interesting.

00:01:30.600 | Like, because you're, it all comes down to calories in and calories out.

00:01:35.000 | So, I mean, I wanted to get more cut and I work out a lot anyway.

00:01:41.100 | And it was amazing.

00:01:42.800 | It was like, I immediately, well, not immediately, but over time,

00:01:46.600 | like, I got a lot more cut, more cut than I've ever been.

00:01:49.900 | And I've been doing this now for like four or five years.

00:01:52.200 | So, by the way, those are all phrases you would never hear at a computer

00:01:56.800 | science faculty meeting.

00:01:58.600 | I wanted to get more cut.

00:02:01.100 | I mean, I'm working out a lot anyways.

00:02:03.000 | These are all, these are all phrases you want to hear.

00:02:05.200 | But what about your concentration ability?

00:02:07.600 | Do you get hungry?

00:02:08.600 | Do you get, do you find that you're not able to think as clearly?

00:02:11.000 | Do you get the opposite?

00:02:11.900 | When it comes to this question about deep work, what do you think the impact

00:02:15.200 | would be?

00:02:15.500 | I think you actually think more clearly.

00:02:18.600 | Are you hungry?

00:02:19.700 | Do you get hungry?

00:02:20.400 | Yeah, I definitely get hungry, but every day is kind of like a battle.

00:02:24.400 | So like every day you kind of just get through it and eventually you get

00:02:28.100 | to the evening and you can eat and it's, you know, and the other thing

00:02:32.700 | about it too, is you can't really gorge at night either.

00:02:35.700 | You still got to eat healthy if you, especially as you get older and

00:02:38.100 | stuff.

00:02:38.500 | So that's one thing I realized.

00:02:40.500 | And, but the healthy food, just the nature of that food also probably

00:02:44.300 | just regulates what you can eat, right?

00:02:46.400 | Because if you're eating vegetables or whatever, there's only so much

00:02:49.500 | you can eat.

00:02:50.000 | Whereas if it was like a bag of tortilla chips, you could probably

00:02:53.100 | crush three of those.

00:02:54.800 | Yeah, you can't eat any processed foods for the most part, unless you're

00:02:57.600 | cheating.

00:02:58.200 | I was just reading, I just revisited Tom Brady's TB12 like book where he

00:03:02.800 | has like a nutrition chapter in there.

00:03:05.600 | And it's, it's simple stuff.

00:03:07.600 | He doesn't do anything that crazy.

00:03:08.700 | He just eats healthy foods and you, you have to do that most of the time.

00:03:13.900 | But in terms of thinking and doing work, I think it really helps.

00:03:18.600 | And plus it doesn't, it limits the cognitive strain of having to buy a lot

00:03:26.200 | of stuff and think about getting food all the time and stuff like that.

00:03:29.200 | All right.

00:03:29.600 | So it sounds like maybe if this listener wants to experiment, experiment,

00:03:33.400 | start with the eight hour.

00:03:34.300 | So skip breakfast or something.

00:03:36.400 | Yeah.

00:03:36.700 | I've had a lot of buddies cause I've been doing it for a while and some of

00:03:39.400 | them do like eight and eight and a half hours, which I did for a year.

00:03:42.100 | And then I, I was like, I think I can crank this up even more because

00:03:46.300 | sometimes, you know, in the evenings and stuff, I'll, you know, I want to

00:03:50.400 | still be able to like have beer and stuff every once in a while.

00:03:52.600 | So like I wanted to have more flexibility.

00:03:54.500 | So then I was just like, let me experiment with narrowing the number.

00:03:57.600 | And then it just became basically like an hour and a half to two hour,

00:04:02.400 | pretty narrow window.

00:04:04.100 | All right.

00:04:04.400 | So I think we now have a bestseller here.

00:04:06.500 | Here's the diet, only beer for eight hours.

00:04:10.400 | And then you go to food for the four hours that, that remains.

00:04:15.000 | The one thing I have heard, I've tried this before informally.

00:04:18.100 | I might try this more.

00:04:19.100 | I do know a couple buddies who swear by, they do like Laird Hamilton's

00:04:28.200 | coffee creamer or something like this, like a coconut oil, like a healthy

00:04:31.100 | fat in their coffee for breakfast and no other food.

00:04:35.100 | And they swear by that really giving them mental clarity, you know, so

00:04:41.900 | it's like the caffeine, I guess there's a couple things that goes on.

00:04:44.800 | One, the, the, the fats they use in these sort of high fat creamers,

00:04:48.500 | um, slows down potentially the spread of the caffeine.

00:04:52.800 | So it spreads it out.

00:04:53.800 | And I don't know if there's a ketone situation or just an energy situation,

00:04:57.400 | but I do know people who swear by that, that they, um, do one of these.

00:05:02.300 | I don't know what you call them.

00:05:03.800 | Clean fat coffee creamers.

00:05:06.100 | And the one I've tried is Laird Hamilton's.

00:05:07.700 | Yeah.

00:05:08.300 | I've tried that too.

00:05:09.100 | I like it.

00:05:09.800 | Yeah.

00:05:10.200 | Most of the time I try to drink my coffee black, but three times a week,

00:05:13.900 | I give myself the flexibility to have some cream.

00:05:16.900 | Yeah.

00:05:17.100 | So that's something you could try.

00:05:18.300 | Um, maybe the, what's his name?

00:05:21.300 | Dave Asprey has something to the Bulletproof guy.

00:05:23.800 | They have some other, but it's all the same thing.

00:05:25.300 | It's like coconut fat style MCT oil.

00:05:29.000 | Um, you know, you give that a try and then just wait till at least lunch.

00:05:33.000 | Um, the only thing I know for sure is true is that high carb or processed

00:05:37.300 | food crashes, you're thinking.

00:05:39.100 | Yeah.

00:05:40.200 | A hundred percent.

00:05:40.900 | I mean, the food marketing industry is like, does one of the best marketing

00:05:45.700 | campaigns of all time, convincing us that we need to eat, go to any grocery

00:05:48.500 | store and you can see aisles and aisles stuff that you should just avoid.

00:05:52.000 | Yeah.

00:05:52.400 | So, I mean, if you're, if you're eating, you know, a burger and fries

00:05:55.900 | for lunch, you're not, you're not deep thinking that afternoon.

00:05:59.200 | [Music]

Does Fasting Help with Deep Work?

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