Moving on with questions about the deep life, our first one comes from Loves Deep Work. Good name. This question is, "What are your thoughts on fasting and deep work?" Well, I will say I do this accidentally quite a bit, as my wife will tell you and complain about. Sometimes when I'm really locked in on a deadline, I will just work all day and not eat.

And I'll be honest, it doesn't seem to affect my work though. It does make me a real annoying person to be around afterwards. That's why she does not like that. My producer, Jesse, though, knows more about fasting. Jesse, do I have this right? You don't eat, what, lunch or you don't eat breakfast?

You have some fasting thing going on. You probably know more about this. I eat basically just dinner every day. But I started, I discovered it through Tim Ferriss' podcast when he was interviewing Terry Crews. Terry, I saw a picture of him, he looked jacked anyway. And he's like, yeah, Ferriss asked him if he could do one thing.

You know, he's 50-something at the time. What would he do? He goes, "I would have fasted earlier." And I was like, immediately started doing that. But I started an eight-hour period. I did that for like a year. Then I just narrowed it even more. So now I just eat dinner.

So what do you get out of that? What was Terry Crews pitching? If you do it, you get cut. Oh, interesting. Like, because you're, it all comes down to calories in and calories out. So, I mean, I wanted to get more cut and I work out a lot anyway.

And it was amazing. It was like, I immediately, well, not immediately, but over time, like, I got a lot more cut, more cut than I've ever been. And I've been doing this now for like four or five years. So, by the way, those are all phrases you would never hear at a computer science faculty meeting.

I wanted to get more cut. I mean, I'm working out a lot anyways. These are all, these are all phrases you want to hear. But what about your concentration ability? Do you get hungry? Do you get, do you find that you're not able to think as clearly? Do you get the opposite?

When it comes to this question about deep work, what do you think the impact would be? I think you actually think more clearly. Are you hungry? Do you get hungry? Yeah, I definitely get hungry, but every day is kind of like a battle. So like every day you kind of just get through it and eventually you get to the evening and you can eat and it's, you know, and the other thing about it too, is you can't really gorge at night either.

You still got to eat healthy if you, especially as you get older and stuff. So that's one thing I realized. And, but the healthy food, just the nature of that food also probably just regulates what you can eat, right? Because if you're eating vegetables or whatever, there's only so much you can eat.

Whereas if it was like a bag of tortilla chips, you could probably crush three of those. Yeah, you can't eat any processed foods for the most part, unless you're cheating. I was just reading, I just revisited Tom Brady's TB12 like book where he has like a nutrition chapter in there.

And it's, it's simple stuff. He doesn't do anything that crazy. He just eats healthy foods and you, you have to do that most of the time. But in terms of thinking and doing work, I think it really helps. And plus it doesn't, it limits the cognitive strain of having to buy a lot of stuff and think about getting food all the time and stuff like that.

All right. So it sounds like maybe if this listener wants to experiment, experiment, start with the eight hour. So skip breakfast or something. Yeah. I've had a lot of buddies cause I've been doing it for a while and some of them do like eight and eight and a half hours, which I did for a year.

And then I, I was like, I think I can crank this up even more because sometimes, you know, in the evenings and stuff, I'll, you know, I want to still be able to like have beer and stuff every once in a while. So like I wanted to have more flexibility.

So then I was just like, let me experiment with narrowing the number. And then it just became basically like an hour and a half to two hour, pretty narrow window. All right. So I think we now have a bestseller here. Here's the diet, only beer for eight hours. And then you go to food for the four hours that, that remains.

The one thing I have heard, I've tried this before informally. I might try this more. I do know a couple buddies who swear by, they do like Laird Hamilton's coffee creamer or something like this, like a coconut oil, like a healthy fat in their coffee for breakfast and no other food.

And they swear by that really giving them mental clarity, you know, so it's like the caffeine, I guess there's a couple things that goes on. One, the, the, the fats they use in these sort of high fat creamers, um, slows down potentially the spread of the caffeine. So it spreads it out.

And I don't know if there's a ketone situation or just an energy situation, but I do know people who swear by that, that they, um, do one of these. I don't know what you call them. Clean fat coffee creamers. And the one I've tried is Laird Hamilton's. Yeah. I've tried that too.

I like it. Yeah. Most of the time I try to drink my coffee black, but three times a week, I give myself the flexibility to have some cream. Yeah. So that's something you could try. Um, maybe the, what's his name? Dave Asprey has something to the Bulletproof guy. They have some other, but it's all the same thing.

It's like coconut fat style MCT oil. Um, you know, you give that a try and then just wait till at least lunch. Um, the only thing I know for sure is true is that high carb or processed food crashes, you're thinking. Yeah. A hundred percent. I mean, the food marketing industry is like, does one of the best marketing campaigns of all time, convincing us that we need to eat, go to any grocery store and you can see aisles and aisles stuff that you should just avoid.

Yeah. So, I mean, if you're, if you're eating, you know, a burger and fries for lunch, you're not, you're not deep thinking that afternoon.