Joe Rogan - Henry Rollins on Diet and Intermittent Fasting

I don't eat as much as I used to. I just feel so much better when I just skip the middle meal and like whose idea was it three meals a day anyway? You don't need that. Right. And I found that I can live very comfortably. I'm not into like torturing myself. It's like I'm gonna starve and nail myself to this chair. But you know if I'm too just too distracted to work as I'm hungry I need to address that. But what I found is if I just kind of don't eat a lot after a couple of days I'm like a jet in the high air where you're burning no fuel because you're just in the thin air. Where I walk by food going like that I've had like two meals in the last two and a half meals like in the last three days. And I feel fine actually I feel like really bouncy. Yeah. Like I don't need the post workout seven minute power nap. I'm feeling really good. Do you do intermittent fasting at all? Yes. The woman I work with you know Heidi. She does that sometimes and I'll just follow her lead. So she'll go hey I'm doing this I'll try that because I just don't know this stuff and she knows a lot more about it than I do. So I just do what she does. And so a few years ago I got into like one meal a day I was just trying it out. No one told me to. I was in India of all places and I was out all day taking photos and sweating and I would eat dinner and that would be it. And I would like sleep through breakfast and go back out and with my camera. So dinner became my meal and the first three days of that was a little tough. And then it was like I never wanted I kind of felt bad when I went back to the Western. Yeah boy I'm eating a lot of food. You buddy adapts. Yeah. Yeah. Oh we can adapt. You can live on pizza for the rest of your life very happily. All you know whatever. But your body really does adapt to that intermittent that time. Well no I'm saying it'll adapt to anything. It'll adapt to too much food. It'll adapt to like a fraction of what you used to eat. Right. Here but just here's what I have found. When I start limiting the food I'm more alert. My sleep is more restorative and I bounce out of bed like I'm just flying out of bed. I don't have that afternoon drowsiness. I just stay with it. And I just feel way more buoyant and present. Yeah. Type faster. Just concentrate more. And when I'm on tour it's usually I do one point something meals a day. Like I'm about to leave on tour. It'll be it's an evening meal post-show. I put myself into an eight hour feeding window and 16 hour fasting window every day. And I've been pretty consistent with that over the last like four or five months. And it has a big impact man. When I eat dinner you know say if I'm done at eight o'clock I just time it out. 16 hours later is when my first meal comes. I can have a coffee in between now and then but nothing with like any real significant calories. I'm just having some liquid or something like that and that's it. And then it just by doing that man I just like I wake up in the morning I'm not craving breakfast. I'm not I'm not even hungry. My body's just totally adapted to it. Yeah. Just gives your body a chance to digest. I think we're always in the state of feeding and your body just never has really a chance to digest all that food. It's like juggling. You know the body is like as it's processing it's incoming like really another order. It never gets to realize digestion. Yeah. We're done. It's always you're like a cow. Yeah. They're always processing nutrition. Yeah. And I wonder if that's a Western model. Yeah. Because in other parts of the world people live very differently than we do. I guess it is what it is. And a meal is it's almost just a thing that happens now and then. It's not like it's dinner time and we're gonna talk about report cards and it's not a gathering. It's like the whole family works all over the city and they're gonna eat I think at some point where everything even sleep you go to like parts like Vietnam and people are just like sleeping behind the counter of the store they work at because they've been there for a day and a half. Right. Because mom can't come in so they're running the store and they sleep is this thing that you get now and then and I think food is like that in a lot of parts of the world. Like a meal? The next time I eat will be the next time I eat. When you go to these places and I know you travel pretty much all over the world. Yeah. Do you go out of your way to try to sample in as wide a variety as the local cuisine as you can? No. No. Depends on where I go and I'm not that guy who just brings it all from home and I never leave home when I'm abroad but I can't afford to eat a bad meal and be bedridden for the next day when I should be out hitting the streets looking at stuff and so I've had you know as you do you run into the bad meal where you're like hugging a tree watching the ark of vomit like wow Linda Blair and I've done that from here to Myanmar and Russia wherever I've had some bad meals and so when the food looks dodgy like in the interior of Africa when you point at the meat object and go what is that and the guy will say I think it's goat. Cliff bar just because I just can't and so what I've learned to do and it's hard on your back because it's a lot of weight I take say I'm gonna be out in Africa for two weeks I bring about two meals worth of chow with me that's a lot of nuts a lot of cliff bars a lot of like peanut butter you know things that just don't go bad in heat where I can just look at the food and go no not tonight it's gonna be a handful of almonds and this and water also in parts of the world where water is dodgy you find a store you buy the box of water rip it open to make sure it hasn't been tampered with buy the whole box put in your backpack and lug 40 pounds of water for the next five days it sucks but you you can't be somewhere and go like I I'm thirsty and I don't know about that water because you thought about bringing that you know they have these portable backpack filters and stereo pens and things that a lot of backpack hikers they use they're very small now they're very small and lightweight and you can get some like if you're staying in a place you think it has dodgy water you can get a gravity filter when you put water like you could literally get rainwater from outside in the puddle and I know a lot of people do that and they take it and they put it in this large gravity filter and it'll drip down almost like it looks like someone's peeing at the bottom of this huge bag a 60 liter bag of water but it filters it all and it allows you to drink basically puddle water