Hardcore Intermittent Fasting

Let’s Get Serious

Bad to the Bone: 480 BC, Greek triremes in action at the Battle of Salamis. These lean warships were propelled by rows of trained oarsmen arranged in three tiers. Ori’s physical archetypes manned the oars.

Let’s get serious!

Ori Hofmekler and the Warrior Diet Mindset

Intermittent fasting has gotten a lot of deserved attention. I got onboard with intermittent fasting fifteen years ago when I struck up a friendship with Ori Hofmekler. For two years I cohosted a weekly radio show with Ori, the man who, in my world, did as much as anyone to push hardcore intermittent fasting into the strength world. Ori did not invent the human act of fasting; fasting is ancient. What Ori did was create and popularize the Warrior Diet, a harsh, modern, warrior-style version of intermittent fasting that paired delayed eating with intense training and food purity.

Ori is an artist / warrior, an ex-Israel Defense Force commando who went on to become one of the world’s leading satirical artists. Ori’s artwork was stunning and biting and appeared regularly in the New York Times, Time, Newsweek, US News & World Report, Daily Mail, Der Spiegel and the London Times, to name but a few. Ori had to quit art when he began to go blind in one eye, a story in and of itself. He then turned his full attention toward the construction of the perfect human. Ori’s ideal physical archetype was not athletic in the usual sense. It was military.

People think of Ori as the nutritional innovator, which he most certainly was. However, his nutrition was an outgrowth of, and meant to support, his unique and demanding approach toward physical training. The Warrior Diet was devised to complement and augment Ori’s approach to resistance and cardiovascular training.

Long Strength: Absolute, Explosive, and Sustained

Ori’s training sought what HeavyHands inventor, and my aerobic mentor, Dr. Len Schwartz, labeled Long Strength. Strength should be divided into three generalized categories:

• Absolute strength: maximum payloads pushed and pulled for short distances with no regard for velocity.
• Explosive strength: moderate payloads moved for low reps over long distances using maximum velocity.
• Sustained strength: strength endurance, light payloads moved for long durations using various velocities.

Ancient Warrior Archetypes

Ori had physical ideals and archetypes. He sought to replicate the capacities and physiques of Greek rowers and Roman foot soldiers. These men were whippet lean, compact, hard, and capable. In Ori’s telling, they were not gym-pumped. They were not cosmetic. They were built by necessity.

The soldiers lugged armor and weaponry with every step they took, on every forced march, with every charge, while locked in life-or-death hand-to-hand combat. They were weighted down, and their work did not stop when they got tired.

A Grecian rower pulled a heavy oar through the water in timed coordination with scores of other rowers. The trireme rower needed to be adept at both long-distance grinding and short-distance sprinting. The rowers used steady-state flow when rowing for distance, then pulled violently, burst-style, when engaged in sea combat with enemy ships.

The continual lugging and use of armor and weaponry, the continual leg drive, the arm and back pulling on oars, coupled with sparse, pre-industrial diets, sculpted these men. Super lean, super fit, super capable, on land or sea. These men were able to “put out” for extended durations and then put out even more, much harder and faster, when combat demanded explosive bursts and flurries.

Imagine a compact soldier completing a long forced march while carrying armor and weapons and then going directly into hand-to-hand combat with a larger enemy fighter swinging swords, clubs and axes. Life-or-death battles do not have time limits, time outs or injury substitutions. They might last all day. What type of physique was built doing this type of work, year after year?

Ancient Soldiers and Sailors Ate Sparingly and Worked Hard

Young Ori thought: how can modern man replicate the ancient warrior’s physique and performance? The Greek sailor and Roman soldier ate intermittently, depending on daily circumstance. Their food was not “organic” in the modern certification sense; rather, it was unprocessed by modern standards because industrial food did not exist. Because of the unique physical stresses and dietary stresses, these soldiers developed what Ori labeled super muscle, hybrid muscle fiber that enabled them to grind for extended periods yet also burst maximally during land combat or sea battles.

Greek trireme rowers were not starved and beaten slaves in Ori’s model. They were free men who had to earn their place. In combat situations, a trireme could ram enemy ships at speed with a metal-tipped prow. The sailors ate the food available to them, worked brutally hard, and developed the kind of body Ori wanted modern trainees to study: lean, rugged, enduring, and explosive.

Ori developed training protocols using modern tools and modes to replicate the stresses the ancient warriors encountered. He sought to trigger the growth of what he called hybrid muscle. I remember one Ori drill where he rode an exercise bike for 40 minutes while continually pumping 10-pound dumbbells, alternating overhead presses with curls and front raises, keeping the bells in motion the entire time. I told him I couldn’t match what he did, even trying to mimic his hand movements empty-handed.

Meal Frequency Was the Bomb Ori Threw

The Warrior Diet sought to emulate the rugged diet of ancient warriors. In addition to insisting on food purity, Ori zeroed in on something dietary experts had not given much thought: meal frequency. Everyone everywhere ate “three square meals,” breakfast, lunch and dinner. Bodybuilders ate smaller amounts more frequently. That was about the extent of meal-frequency thought.

Here came Ori going, hey, we eat way too much of the wrong type of food and we eat way too often — and by the way, breakfast is the worst meal of the day!

My first thought was: who is this bomb thrower?! I have always had a soft spot for radicals, assuming they can back up their radical contentions. Ori won me over with the logic of his strategy and my own experiences with his unique approach. He was reviled by all the smart people. His critics sputtered out the usual pablum used by those defending “smelly little orthodoxies,” to use George Orwell’s phrase. “Unhealthy.” “Potentially dangerous.” “Reckless and unscientific.” On and on went the criticism of intermittent fasting.

Time has shown that Ori was ahead of the curve on meal timing, but that does not make every harsh fasting protocol right for every person. The useful lesson is not to imitate Ori blindly. The useful lesson is to understand why he paired controlled fasting, strict food quality, and hard training.

Ori sought the same nutrient purity he believed the ancients had. As a species, he argued, we are poisoned by impure fuel: foods we were never designed to run on. Ori contended that modern humans are toxic, inflamed and doused in chemicals, preservatives and trans fats. Detoxification was a major goal of the Warrior Diet. In Ori’s model, during the controlled fasting portion of the Warrior Diet, several processes occur.

The Controlled Fasting Phase

• Digestive rest and cleanup: if digestion is not interrupted every few hours with a new influx of food, Ori argued that the body has time to fully digest, distribute nutrients and reset appetite signals. This should be understood as Ori’s model, not a medical claim that fasting alone “detoxifies” the body.
• Raw foods begin the Warrior Meal: the Warrior Meal always commences with raw food. Leafy greens, raw vegetables, seeds, or nuts bring fiber, bulk, texture, and micronutrients into the meal before the heavier foods arrive.
• Insulin control: long periods of non-eating reduce frequent food-driven insulin responses. Ori wanted sweets, alcohol, refined carbohydrates, and manmade high-sugar foods eliminated so the body was not bombarded all day.
• Glucagon and fat use: Ori emphasized glucagon as the metabolic counterpoint to insulin. The real-world takeaway is simple: control refined carbohydrates, stop grazing, and let the body spend more time away from constant feeding.
• Hormonal environment: Ori believed fasting, hard training and precision nutrition created conditions favorable to repair, leanness, and performance. Do not turn that into magic. The training, food quality, sleep, and total intake still matter.

The Over-Compensation Phase

• Metabolic demand: a body deprived of food for much of the day must now digest incoming raw vegetables, protein, and starch carbohydrates. The meal itself becomes work.
• Gut support: every Warrior Meal starts with raw food: salad greens, raw vegetables, seeds, or nuts. In Ori’s system, this raw-food opening is meant to support digestion and gut health before heavier foods are eaten.
• Replenishment: controlled fasting reduces incoming fuel; hard training increases the depletion. The Warrior Meal replenishes protein, carbohydrate, fluid, sodium, and calories.
• Heat and satiety: Warrior dieters often break out in a sweat as they work through the extended meal. Ori viewed this as an outward sign of metabolic demand and rising core temperature.
• Workout recovery: nothing supports a body battered by an effective hardcore workout like quality calories, adequate protein, carbohydrate as needed and 6 to 8 hours of deep sleep.

How to Approach the Warrior Diet Without Watering It Down

Ori suggests those interested in trying his approach start with a big “window,” a long period of time to consume food. Over time, shorten the window until you arrive at a lone, extended meal. While he is flexible on the duration of the food window, he is insistent that food be pure: jettison fast food, refined carbs, sweets, alcohol, and other fast-sugar food and drink. Fruit juice, for example, can deliver a large dose of sugar very quickly. Replace empty calories with nutrient-dense foods.

Once you nail down the food purity, the process commences. Over time, shorten your food window. And don’t forget: 3 to 5 days a week are dedicated to some type of intense training. Optimal Warrior Diet results, as Ori conceived them, are achieved only when hard training is combined with this Spartan famine-then-feast dietary regimen.

No cheat days on the Warrior Diet. This is a lifestyle that goes on seven days a week. Ori champions a replenishment “meal,” but do not expect him to recommend bacon, eggs, and waffles. Ori’s idea of a replenishment meal might be a 30-gram whey protein shake and a handful of seeds or nuts.

The Warrior Diet is harsh. That is one of the reasons they call it the Warrior Diet and not the soft pretend diet. If you decide to give it a try, do not dilute the harshness. Do not dilute the Spartan nature of this inherently tough approach. Do not turn Ori-style intermittent fasting, 30-year-old single-malt scotch, into the dietary version of Lite Beer. Do not soften its hard tenets. Do not round out Ori’s harsh edges in order to make it more user-friendly and “doable.” Tamper with the protocols and you eviscerate the results.

Equipment Notes for Warrior-Style Training

Ori’s system was never just a diet. It was nutrition designed to support a demanding training style: sustained strength, burst work, loaded movement, and hard conditioning.

For the cardio side of warrior-style training, readers and facilities can compare exercise bikes and treadmills. Specific conditioning tools such as the Throwdown HIIT Bike commercial air bike and the Spirit Fitness CTSBS900 commercial slat belt sled treadmill can support hard, repeatable conditioning when matched to the athlete and program.

For resistance training, readers can compare dumbbells, selectorized gym equipment, and plate-loaded leverage gym equipment. A simple free-weight tool such as IRON COMPANY urethane dumbbells can support the kind of loaded pressing, curling, raising, and carrying work Ori liked to blend with cardio.

The equipment does not create the Warrior Diet. The hard training, food purity, fasting discipline, recovery, and consistency create the result.

Safety Note for Intermittent Fasting and Hard Training

Intermittent fasting, delayed eating, one-meal-a-day eating, carbohydrate restriction and intense training while fasted are not appropriate for everyone. Children and teens, pregnant or breastfeeding women, people with type 1 diabetes, people using insulin or glucose-lowering medication, people with eating-disorder history, underweight individuals, and people with significant medical conditions should not copy a hardcore fasting protocol casually.

Stop or seek qualified guidance if fasting or fasted training causes faintness, dizziness, unusual anxiety, headaches, nausea, confusion, shakiness, binge-restrict cycles, obsessive food behavior, abnormal fatigue, sleep disruption, loss of training control, or symptoms that feel different from normal effort.

This article preserves Marty Gallagher’s RAW account of Ori Hofmekler and hardcore intermittent fasting. It is not individualized medical, nutrition, dietetic, mental-health, rehabilitation, or programming advice.

Related Nutrition Reading

For more Marty Gallagher nutrition context, read The Minefield of Nutrition and Meal Frequency and the Transformational Arsenal.

RAW with Marty Gallagher, J.P. Brice, and Jim Steel Podcast.

About the Author: Marty Gallagher

As an athlete Marty Gallagher is a national and world champion in Olympic lifting and powerlifting. He was a world champion team coach in 1991 and coached Black's Gym to five national team titles. He's also coached some of the strongest men on the planet including Kirk Karwoski when he completed his world record 1,003 lb. squat. Today he teaches the US Secret Service and Tier 1 Spec Ops on how to maximize their strength in minimal time. As a writer since 1978 he’s written for Powerlifting USA, Milo, Flex Magazine, Muscle & Fitness, Prime Fitness, Washington Post, Dragon Door and now IRON COMPANY. He’s also the author of multiple books including Purposeful Primitive, Strong Medicine, Ed Coan’s book Coan, The Man, the Myth, the Method and numerous others. Read the Marty Gallagher biography here.