An Anti Jet Lag Diet Experience

After hearing other people talking about fasting before international travel to help alleviate jet lag and seeing posts about it, such as this Boing Boing post, I decided to give the Argonne National Labratory’s Anti-Jet-Lag Diet a try for the trip I’m currently on. The commercial Anti-Jet-Lag Diet site has quite a bit of information how you implement the diet, but the short summary is that you fast through most of your travel day, then break the fast at breakfast time at your destination. This trick helps reset your hunger cycle which then helps everything else transition more easily.

For this particular trip, I lightly fasted on Tuesday—restricting my intake to about half my normal calories. Then feasted on Wednesday. I didn’t totally pig out, but I did follow the suggestions of having a protein-dominated breakfast and lunch with a high-carb dinner of pasta. Thursday was my travel day. I was up in the early AM, but skipped breakfast and had a super light lunch. Then, on the SFO-FRA leg of my journey, I put an eye-mask on and went to sleep right after take-off from SFO.

It took a lot of willpower to sleep through dinner on this flight. I’d upgraded to business class with miles and everything smelled yummy indeed. But, luckily the seat was also super comfy so I was able to power nap through dinner and then for almost 7 hours. It wasn’t solid sleep by any means. I was up a few times to drink water and use the restroom and such, but otherwise kept an eye mask on to force myself back to snooze mode. Finally, at 6AM CEDT and still a bit west of the UK, I let myself free of the eye mask and had myself a 20g protein bar followed by a ham and cheese omelette that was served as breakfast. I then goofed on my laptop until we landed in Frankfurt. Exactly the opposite cycle of eat then try to sleep that is the norm on long flights.

The result has been very nice indeed. I hung out all day with my good friend (and host for these first few days of my European trip) Patrick Lenz. Around mid-afternoon, I got a little slow. There was a bit of an urge for a nap. But it wasn't that head-spinny I'm a zombie and have absolutely no idea which way is up kind of thing. Not at all. It was just like wanting a nap on a lazy day. I didn’t give into it and was up and fine till 10PM local time.

This morning—the day after arrival—I woke up at exactly 6AM local time hungry for breakfast. Better yet, it felt like morning instead of some other time of day. Perfect. The rest of the day has gone pretty well. I’ve had a few spells of feeling like I stayed up really late last night. I certainly haven’t been 100% all day. I’ve had a few moments where I actively had to engage my brain to focus on a task at hand. I even did let myself nap briefly in the afternoon. But, I have to say that this is the easiest time zone transition I think I’ve pulled off in recent memory. Compared to previous trips, my second day in time zone has felt more like the fourth or maybe fifth day of previous trips.

As I write this, it’s 11PM in Germany. 10PM in the UK where I’ll be working this next week. And it feels like bedtime. I don’t have that bizarre it’s dark outside yet my body knows that it’s 2PM in the afternoon back home feeling that is so typical of jet lag. Paint me happy indeed. Of course this is only one barely-competently implemented experience with the diet. The real proof can only be found in repeated experiences and will probably vary from time to time and person to person. But, it does seem that it’s worth a spin if jet-lag kicks your ass as bad as it’s kicked mine in the past.