Endika Montiel: “Fasting teaches not to depend on emotional hunger”

Endika Montiel was born in Llodio (Álava) 31 years ago and has been dedicated to sport since he was a child, as a result of a growth problem being detected at the age of 15. He has been a professional soccer player, a bodybuilding champion in the European Mr. Olympia contest, and currently works as a senior nutrition technician. During this interview, carried out on the occasion of the publication of his book conscious fasting (Editorial Planeta), Endika tells me that she came to fasting when she realized that her diet, “perfect” according to the current nutrition model, which meant eating every two hours, not eating any sugar and eating a “varied and balanced” was making him sick.

–How can one have a “good” diet and get sick?
–I always say that today I am who I am thanks to the mistakes I have been making in my life. The fact that I live from my body and that food has such a direct impact on aesthetics has led me most of my life to follow those nutritional models that I learned during my degree and that are currently disclosed as the correct paradigm of food, but I got sick and that made me look for answers that I couldn’t find, until I found fasting. This ancient practice helped me to wake up, to see food as it should be, and to no longer be a slave to this act, because now we are slaves to food. All the time we are thinking about what I am going to eat, when to eat… and we say that we enjoy ourselves, but it is not true, because immediately after eating we throw our hands up saying “I have gone too far”.

–What happens in our body when we decide not to eat anything from 6 pm until noon the next day, for example?
–Really fasting is not “not eating”, but “stopping eating”. That must be qualified, because people do not understand it very well. It is “to stop eating” to later eat again. There are two windows that open. When we are fasting, our body begins to recycle itself through metabolic enzymes that are activated and this process is called autophagy, a word that comes from the Greek, car (own) and phagein (act of eating). It is fully described by the scientific literature and literally means “eating oneself”, strange as it may sound. In 2016, the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine was awarded to the Japanese researcher Yoshinori Ohsuni for his findings on the mechanisms of autophagy, a process that implies that the body “eats” its own organic waste that we have been generating due to a poor diet, which is also usually loaded with toxins. It is actually a recycling of aberrant proteins, organelles and membranes that are causing cell aging, giving rise to inflammatory diseases such as intestinal dysbiosis, cardiovascular problems, diabetes, hypertension, cancer…

– Can fasting reduce these problems?
-Yeah. Fasting is the mechanism we have to avoid activating these problems. The approach that we currently take to eat every two hours, causes, as we said before, that we have more and more problems with diabetes, obesity… and that there are more and more cases in younger people. Logically, fasting helps us mitigate overexposure to processed products, which we have very close at hand, and a deep-rooted dependence on food. Many times we tend to blame sugar, the food industry… and it is partly to blame, it is true… but we are the ones who must decide what to eat and when.

–You note in your book that fasting contributes to healing the intestinal microbiota. How does he do it?
–The microbiota is the ecosystem formed by microorganisms, by bacteria, and conditions the functioning of the immune system. We now know that our immune system is broken. Everyone has a microbiota problem, but it is not known. It is very common to have gas, belching, heartburn, constipation, diarrhea…symptoms that we have normalized, but they are signs that our microbiota is not in good condition, with which our immune system is not either. These microorganisms are the soldiers that must protect us, but we have them more and more lazy and we have even lost diversity. So when a pathogen comes to attack us, our soldiers can’t deal with it and the pathogen invades us. Now a whole investigation has been carried out on the occasion of COVID and it has been seen how the microbiome, this ecosystem, is totally relevant in immune health.

Why do we have the microbiota so bad?
–Especially because of the stress that we have been giving to the digestive tract. We are eating all the time, snacking and there comes a time when the body cannot cope. And that causes our immune system to be negatively affected. Why does fasting help us? Because we give our digestive system a rest to be able to repair, regenerate and activate again. We only give it a break at night and there are people who don’t even get up to eat, so it happens that our immune engine never rests.

–Fasting also strengthens our brain…
–Sure, there is a direct connection between the intestine and the brain. Our intestine was called the second brain, but now it is known that it is the first. When you get bad news, you don’t suddenly have a headache, your stomach hurts, your stomach opens or closes; you feel in your stomach If you haven’t gone to the bathroom for a few days and you become inflamed, your mood is inflamed, you lose joy. We are increasingly unhappy and it is mainly because our digestive tract is inflamed. When intestinal inflammation goes down, a person feels happier, happier and enters another level, the level of mental clarity, and it is very nice, because people do not know what mental clarity is. You allocate all the energy to the digestive tract and food or go to alleviate intestinal inflammation. When that digestive tract is deflated, energy flows through your neurons and you enter a state of mental clarity, a state of creativity, of joy. There are people who tell you: “you are unrecognizable” and it is true.

Why has fasting become fashionable? There is continuous talk about intermittent fasting, conscious fasting…
– Fasting is nothing new. Notice that religions never agree except in fasting. They all include it for debugging. The problem today is that fasting is done more as a way to lose weight than as a practice of good health and self-awareness, and this is a mistake. When the person fasts only to lose fat, it is easy to do it wrong, for not understanding that the purpose is not his physique, it is not his aesthetics, but his health. There are many people who do it and lose weight, but the focus must be oriented towards sustainability, enjoyment, balance and health. On the other hand, fasting helps you reconcile with real hunger and differentiate it from psychological or emotional hunger.

–When is it more effective, in the morning or at night? When do you recommend it?
–Fasting has to be adapted to one, adapt to the schedules and requirements of the person. The most common is to do it by removing breakfast. We can wake up and go to work without having breakfast and at 13:00 or 14:00 have our first meal. It is the most common, but in reality, if we take into account circadian rhythms and good hormonal synchronization and biorhythms, it would be best to do it in the afternoon. We are designed to eat when there is light. With darkness, our body prepares to rest, but it is more difficult for people to fast in the evening, because many people make dinner their quietest meal after work and enjoy it more.

–What kind of fasting do you recommend to start?
–The proposal to have dinner around 8:00 p.m. and have breakfast at 8:00-9:00 in the morning is very positive. There we have opened a window of 12-13 hours, and we are already fasting. People are surprised when they are told that this is already fasting. The fact of moving dinner, separating it a little more from the hours of going to sleep, will help us to repair our immune system, since when we are resting, the energy should go to the immune system. In this society, energy goes to the liver, the kidney, the digestive tract… because we eat dinner and go to bed. This causes us to have a bad, destroyed immune system, with a bad response.

– How often is it good to do it?
–You can introduce it two days a week and start to generate that connection, start to get to know yourself and then your body will ask you for it. In general, then you will possibly extend it to the whole week.

–Can a vegan or vegetarian person suffer from a deficit when fasting?
–A vegan or vegetarian person already has a more controlled diet, even so, I recommend that before starting this practice on their own, in these cases they ask for advice so that essential micronutrients are not lacking. More than anything because a fast, even if it is something healthy, done poorly can also generate deficiencies.

–I suppose that there are cases in which this practice is discouraged or in which one must be careful…
–Yes, of course, in the case of pregnancy, for example, because the woman’s hormonal system at that time is different, since it depends on glucose, although a 12-hour fast can be done by any pregnant woman because, after all, out is to respect the night hours and nothing else. It is also not recommended for people with diabetes or eating disorders. On the other hand, fasting is also a tool to help women and men who have hypothyroidism, although as a sustained practice over time it can be counterproductive for the thyroid gland, because it can become stressed and the metabolism can tend to stop again.

–Does fasting help you to know yourself better?
-Yeah. It helps you interpret signals that you did not know how to describe internally before; it helps you to understand and realize if a food makes you feel bad, to know that if you are inflamed you don’t have to eat…it helps you to be more aware and when we are more aware we do things much better. This practice helps you to wake up, to say: “it’s okay not to eat every two hours, it’s okay not to have breakfast” and you start to feel better and you begin to see that you are possibly more designed to get up and go out to do exercise than to eat some cookies, some cereals or some croissants right from the start…

-During fasting do you have to eat everything?
–Fasting is to stop eating and learn to eat. During the fast there is the fasting window and the eating window. Eating is just as important as the other and here you have to take the amount of food and the nutritional density that you need, that amount of energy and substrates, both macro and micronutrients, that will help you have vitality and energy and you find that in “food”, not in “edible products”. Eat fruit, vegetables, legumes… and avoid ultra-processed foods.