Effects of Intermittent Fasting on Health, Aging, and Disease [pdf]
gwern.net
gwern.net
I'm surprised a narrow IF feeding window gives the carb benefits, but sounds worth a try for sustainability long term.
After cutting all that out my energy levels were much more even. It was like night & day. I also dropped several pounds over the course of the first month. I'll occasionally treat myself to bread/carbs but nowhere near to the degree I used to.
Counter-example: I was on Keto for 2 years and my blood levels became prediabetic (105 and 100 in 2 blood tests over the course of 2 annual doctor visits).
As soon as I reintroduced carbs to normal levels (I bought a glucosometer) my blood sugars went back down to optimal (85). My most recent blood work was at 90.
Your mileage may vary and everyone's GI responds differently to different foods.
If I can make a suggestion...if possible continue the fast into the workout. If you find you don't have the energy to get through the workout or performance suffers try replacing the meal with a sugarfree pre-workout to get through, then eat the carbs with some protein post workout.
The general idea is the sugar/carbs you eat at 4 will not truly be available to burn at 7, but you will have probably spiked insulin so your body is trying to store energy while you are in the gym trying to access the energy. Whereas if you can make the workout fasted, you will be in ketosis burning fat and have naturally spiked you HGH from the fast, then after the workout while you are catabolic you will eat carbs/protein to trigger anabolism (recovery/repair) of the muscles while filing up your depleted glucose/glycogen aided by the carbs/insulin.
Do you see the irony is calling fasting a fad diet when it has been part of human culture across the globe for thousands of years, and instead you point to "3 healthy balanced meals a day" which essentially was a fad diet in the 18th century.
>I can't imagine our ancient ancestors worrying about fasting or being keto.
Again all the Worlds major religions have codified fasting into their religious texts and traditions (they must have thought it was pretty important to pass down together with sacred religious texts).
As far as Keto...the original Keto diet was developed and codified because is prevented epileptic seizures, but that wasn't a wild guess in the dark, its been known for thousands of years fasting would prevent seizures (it just wasn't codified that fasting puts someone in a state of ketosis which can be mimicked with a high fat diet).
You really have an odd bone to pick with fasting...so how about the ancient Greeks? They didn't practice the Abrahamic religions and the Greeks serve as the foundation of Western thought and logic. In fact lets take Plato and Artistotle who both fasted purely for the physical and mental benefits not for the Gods, as was common, for example:
"Everyone has a physician inside him or her; we just have to help it in its work. The natural healing force within each one of us is the greatest force in getting well. Our food should be our medicine. Our medicine should be our food. But to eat when you are sick is to feed your sickness." -Hippocrates
"Instead of using medicine, rather, fast a day." - Plutarch
>It was used as a way to reduce epileptic seizures, not because it was thought of as the optimal way for humans to eat.
It was already known fasting prevent seizures. Keto was developed as a way to mimic those benefits of fasting without having to abstain from food/fast.
>It's what our bodies have evolved to do.
Well from an evolutionary perspective, the human brain more efficiently runs off of ketones than glucose. Biologically humans need insulin to clear glucose from the blood and biologically humans become resistant to insulin over time (so its not much of an evolutionary argument). Not to mention the recent Nobel Prize for discovering Autophagy which is the process of cell recycling triggered by...fasting.
Of course our ancient ancestors didn't have to "worry" about fasting or being keto, just like they didn't have to "worry" about getting enough cardio and exercise. Yet we do, because otherwise our modern conveniences will keep killing us and making us sick. Fasting and Keto are two answers to the question of "How do we better replicate the way ancient Humans lived?"
Congrats. I hope you continue to be inspired and inspire others on your journey.
In other words, without a control group that switched from high carb to low carb without intermittent fasting it's hard to know if the benefits you've seen are from intermittent fasting or just from eating better generally.
You and I are about the same age and I've been the same weight the past 30 years. I know what you mean about non-sweet things tasting sweeter - I gave up obvious refined sugar about 6 years ago and the bag of plain raw vegetables I eat every day for a snack tastes amazing.
Like you, I started off with a wider eating window, of about 4 hours, and I started without really caring what I ate. But I slowly reduced the window to about 1-2 hours and a strange thing happened. Avoiding unhealthy food became a very easy act of will. Maybe it was just the realization that the only thing I was putting in my body for the entire day, the only thing that it would use to repair and refuel itself, was what I was eating at that very moment.
I've never really had New Year's resolutions, but this December I've been slowly weaning myself off my morning coffee, anticipating an early January start to my new IF schedule! I'm also really excited to continue this experiment to see where it goes!
Honestly, what most likely will reverse your prediabetes is that you are now working out more, eating less, and dropped 10 pounds. The IF was simply a compliance tactic to help you achieve that goal. Just something to keep in mind... it's okay if you eventually stop doing IF, what's more important is you maintain the healthy eating and active lifestyle.
[0] even this is debatable
I was reading about how back in the day original coffee houses were a meeting place for socialites and thinkers alike to share ideas. I’d love to see that sense of community nowadays,I feel like it’s missing in the US and would be celebrated, but maybe it’s just my nerdy idealization.
Some still are in Europe at least. But they're closing down here as victims of modern lifestyles. We had (until the 80s) 4-5 cafes here where everybody who was everybody in culture frequented -- including different generations (20+ to 70+ year old people).
Some problems:
1) real estate prices in city center makes it impossible to keep renting for such a purpose or (if the cafe owner also owns the building) more profitable to sell the place and have it be made into a clothes shop or similar.
2) rising rents or (in other cases) deterioration of city centers, means that many intellectuals, playwrights, musicians, writers, academics, etc chose to move in other neighbours, which makes it more difficult (especially with added traffic) to frequent the same city center cafe anymore.
3) some owners just die and their kids are either clueless and turn the place into some "trendy" BS losing the clientele, or want to sell it and move on, or they simply don't have kids to pass it on, and nobody gets the legacy they've created (though sometimes new people step it who respect the original vision -- sometimes even after a few years of the shop being closed).
A "restaurant for fasters" is called "buffet": fasters need to eat a lot in between their fasts (assuming that fasts are frequent).
I think I just saw an ad for an app on YouTube that is supposed to help you with fasting. You could market zero-calorie electrolyte tablets, or break-fast bars / tubes / whatever to give you the optimal recovery to "non-fast" mode. You could market protein or vitamin supplements to counter the fact that you're getting 2/3 or 1/3 of the nutrients, but probably still requiring the same amount of some nutrients.
I think there's lots of opportunity for the creative to make money from this fad. :-)
You can probably also up sell your products if you detect your customer is not playing his A-game. A hungry mind will typically explore less options and be more prone to risky behavior. It's probably something inherited from thousands of years of evolution, when you are hungry and there is a potential reward you take more chances, you don't think and you go get it.
I’m already seeing ads on Instagram for an app that’ll tell me exactly when to fast.
Also I use an app that allows restaurants to offer me discounts for eating at unusual times, and it’s big in the city I live in.
I like OP's point, this diet works and it can't be sold to people en-mass which causes confusion when different retailers put their own little spin on things. Most fad diets are confusing, hard to follow, and sold to you. IF is none of those things.
I think the Abrahamic religions figured it out already...you create holy days like Yom Kippur, Lent, Ramadan and make fasting a mainstay of the traditions. Boom, not only can you make money on not eating, but you can simultaneously take credit for all the actual benefits of the fast itself.
Martin Berkhan created a very lucrative coaching platform with Intermittent Fasting: https://leangains.com/
Many books have been written on IF for profit:
https://www.amazon.com/Complete-Guide-Fasting-Intermittent-A...
https://www.amazon.com/Eat-Stop-Brad-Pilon/dp/177511080X/ref...
And countless others.
Taking your example, Lean Gains is a niche application for men trying to improve their physique, and it includes exercise and motivational components. This is pretty different to the Atkins diet for example, where the book is the diet, and they don’t really exist independently.
I tried intermittent fasting for 11 months with very, very little to show for it. I did the 18 hours off and 6 hours of eating plan. I have also tried a strict vegetarian diet for 6 months with no real changes in blood work. My Cholesterol didn't move to the dismay of my PCP and myself quite frankly.
Biology: I am a professional Firefighter that ran 1000 miles and bicycled 250 miles during this time frame. My sleep isn't always consistent which may have played a role due to my profession. I also drink two beers (Karmeliet, Chimay are stocked in my house) with dinner when I am off. So I drink roughly 8 - 10 beers a week. I probably could do better with calorie counting, but frankly it seems futile so long as I like the way I look naked, lol.
* may.
A) We don’t actually know this, because clinical trials extensive enough to prove it have never been done. B) There’s a lot of variation in humans. Betting that all people will respond the same to any intervention is a bad bet. Case in point: some people survive gunshot wounds to the head.
Same with blood pressure, for example. You might just have it. or a medicine or stress might be to blame. And with things like vitamin D - you might not ever make enough to be healthy.
Fasting might put you in the hospital! I know a relatively young dude that tried it for religious reasons and wound up hospitalized. He's in his early 30's now, but that was years ago. Some folks cannot tolerate going such periods without eating (diabetics, for instance): They aren't really seeing benefits in blood work.
These aren't really outliers either, but more a reminder that there is variation in humans and we can't make such blanket statements for things like diet. At least not with our current information, doubly so when we consider how much of our research has been tainted by food lobbying and other interests in the last 100 years.
nothing else - fasting, diet, exercise etc helps before sleep.
btw alcohol and caffeine screws the quality of sleep.
[1] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/05/100505091632.h...
The upshot of all this work can be summarized as follows: short sleep (of the type that many adults in first-world countries commonly and routinely report) will increase hunger and appetite, compromise impulse control within the brain, increase food consumption (especially of high-calorie foods), decrease feelings of food satisfaction after eating, and prevent effective weight loss when dieting.
I had periods in the past when I sleep less 3 hours for 5 days and end up "recovering" with a 9h sleep during the weekend. I was not at my best though.
I never noticed any particular patterns between my weight and my sleep.
In the last month though lack of sleep and more carbs seem to start generating joint pains (hopefully it is just temporary).
Doing that once a week or so is pretty effective. There's a whole host of benefits to longer fasts as well. Helps so much with appetite control, resets your hormones, plus autophagy, etc.
> Intermittent fasting seems to confer health benefits to a greater extent than can be attributed just to a reduction in caloric intake.
For those of us who are already lean + good diet + high activity levels, I'm not convinced that IF really brings much to the table. I'm still doing 16:8, but only because I was eating breakfast in the morning out of habit, rather than hunger.
When I lose weight, I actually switch back to a regular (5/day) meal plan and reincorporate breakfast. That's the best way I've found to lose fat while maintaining muscle and energy levels. My biggest problem with losing weight on IF is that I have a tendency to binge during the eating window. Eating something small every 3 hours is the easiest way I've found to keep this urge in check.
The other benefits are more dependent on the individual. Like you, I tend to binge. But I also weigh myself every morning. If my weight is drifting up I find that it is easier to cutback on calories when I am only interacting with food for a limited time during the day. So yeah, it is a bit of a hack, but I think calling it a psychological shortcut sells it short. A typical modern western meal can easily be more than 1000 calories. And in a time when most folks work sedentary jobs, there is really no reason they should be eating 3 square meals a day plus snacks. From a diet perspective, intermittent fasting is basically just getting people to skip one of those meals a day. Maybe a good alternate name would be the '2 square meals diet'.
My doctor has always said I was overweight but in the last couple years I added an extra 30lbs due lack of routine exercise. This summer I started doing intermittent fasting from 9pm-noon and quickly lost the extra 30lbs of weight but I seemed to have plateaued and haven't lost anymore. I'm 6'5" and my ideal weight is 190lbs, I have always hovered around 200.
I'm a last year med student who eats plant-based himself and my physician was very pleased with my very low cholesterol levels.
Blood cholesterol is not 100% necessary to provide your cells with colesterol as they can produce their own. In fact blood cholesterol medication exploits the fact that cells produce a good chunk of the cholesterol they need themselves. PSCK9-inhibitors prolong the half-life of LDL-receptors in the cell membrane and thereby increase the endocystosis of LDL particles which in change leads to SREBP1-mediated reduction of the cell's own cholesterol production. If virtually all blood cholesterol was taken up you would have very low levels of blood LDL but that would not translate to a deficiency at a celular level.
Here's a NEJM published study where blood LDL was reduced to a median of < 30 mg/dl and in some indiviudals even to < 10mg/dl with a positive outcome, way beyond current targets: https://www.nejm.org/doi/10.1056/NEJMoa1615664
Here is another study by the same author concluding that starting lipid medication at levels as low as 63 mg/dl might have positive outcomes: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/30073316/
On a side note, from what I've read I thought nuts did not lead to a higher cholesterol but if anyone has a study proving me wrong I'd be glad to read it as I haven't spend much time researching the effect of nuts.
I didn't call him back to inquire further, and it wasn't mentioned in any subsequent physicals. I don't have a medical background and wasn't aware low cholesterol was even potentially an issue. Until your comment it didn't even occur to me that it served a purpose in the body, I just assumed it wasn't supposed to be there.
Unfortunately the voicemail has long since autodeleted itself.
This was also around 2008 if that matters.
my doctor recommended "nuts, beer, wine, and hard liquor" as a way to boost my LDL
Only animal products have cholesterol.
There seems to be research indicating hard liquor and wine positively impact cholesterol levels: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00219...
If you're calling bullshit then call bullshit, but I'm not qualified to answer technical questions about cholesterol and don't feel like being cross examined so that you can feel smug.
So, I guess you won the internet?
Beer can be high in sugar, especially Belgian/Abbey beers that often include glucose syrup in their ingredients. Something I discovered with horror as they are some of my favorites :/
EDIT: clarification, don't want to imply that IF without carb restriction is bad, just probably not as effective.
Interesting.
Were you a junk food vegetarian? Were the carbohydrates high glycemic? Or did you eat a ton of dairy?
I tried intermittent fasting as an alternative to relatively fastidious calorie counting and ended up slowly gaining weight due to snackier food choices which I equalized with biweekly all day fasts. I'm sure I can make it work but I prefer meal prep and having regular energy levels throughout the day which gives me much more flexibility in terms of other fitness goals, i.e. I had a much narrow window of performance at gym under IF and I stopped mostly because my it got in the way of gym scheduling.
I don't know the size and strength of the beer you are drinking, but maybe you could try cutting that out.
Also vegetarian diets are often carb-heavy and a major health benefit of fasting is the absence of carbs.
I am more of a multi day fasting person tbh. Fasting for two days and three nights surely is successful with me.
cheese and eggs which are full of cholesterol
I also highly recommend the zero fasting app for tracking. Super simple and really clean app that makes tracking fasts simple.
Start small and see how it goes. I find the 16/8 routine tends to work best for me personally with 36 hour fasts sprinkled in every couple weeks.
Edit: Thanks all! This’ll help me progress from 16/8 to consistent longer fasts.
I time it so I start the fast towards the evening and then it ends mid-morning - so you're only really pushing through one full day without food.
I'll have coffee/tea for caffeine and electrolytes seem to help depending on your situation.
Start with several smaller fasts before going full 36 and if you need to eat before the full 36 hours are up, don't kill yourself.
The biggest realization is just coming to terms with how much what a lot of people think of as "hunger" is often just boredom or cravings and not actual hunger. That was eye-opening.
Anyway, if you like, try avoiding sugar leading up to avoiding fasting.
Modern food intake also trains the digestive tract (most notably stomach) to never be empty, and we end up confusing signals of hunger with an empty stomach.
I heard that Japanese (or was it China? Korea?) people have this rule of thumb of eating only up to ~80% of stomach volume; no idea if it’s factually true but having this rule of thumb of not filling myself to the brim as we seem to culturally do currently seems to be extremely positive I’m my experience.
Letting go the social baggage of “bon vivant” and “oh my god I’m so full this was soooo good” seems to be just as hard as not smoking when many around are smoking.
“one should eat to live, and not live to eat” says Molière, but even being acutely aware of that, I struggle to fight the deeply ingrained social pressure, as even most foodies/fasters I know seem to subscribe to this “all you can eat” way of life (although with healthy food)
Goddamit when I was feeling great, all sporty and fit (athletic even, dare I say) everyone was saying I was too thin, and now that I feel like shit having some 10+kg excessive weight to shed, everyone around says there’s no need to, and worry a lot when I don’t take a second or third serving.
Fasting helps to change our relationship with food. It's about proactive control and not succoming to the minor inconvenience of feeling a bit hungry.
The traditional Buddhist notion is that one should eat to the point where one more mouthfull would fully satisfy oneself.
Personally, I’ve gone more than 14 days several times, I usually start when not feeling very well (and lacking appetite) which makes even the first couple of days trivial.
If you do want to go farther than 36 (at your own risk of course - I am not a medical professional and this is not medical advice) make sure you are well vitamined, well hydrated, and well electrolyted (e.g. with snake juice) - very often, need for some essential vitamin/mineral masquerades as hunger or appetite.
Isn't that how anorexics end up unable to eat at all, though? They go so long without eating that the "good" bacteria that permits digestion disappear so they're no longer able to process food.
Good bacteria can likely be reinstated by the body itself (the appendix is a cache for them), from food, or if all else fails - by FMT. I’m not an expert on this, and may be wrong, but from a lot of reading - any anorexia symptoms and processes seem to be entirely absent from mindful fasting.
Even small fasts seem to sap my concentration and critical thinking. Once I eat again I feel like I think better.
However I have no problems on keto, or even just a consistently low-GI low-carb diet. If anything, fasting seems to improve my discipline and "depth-first" thinking.
Absolutely.
> Even small fasts seem to sap my concentration and critical thinking. Once I eat again I feel like I think better.
That's kind of normal when you start with (intermittent) fasting, may take at least some days until it gets better. Especially if are on a high carb diet and already developed some degree of insulin resistance your body is unable to fully switch into fat burning mode while the glucose stores are already depleted. This results in low energy and food carvings. Once that is regulated well your mental abilities likely won't suffer.
I'm only speaking of IF, but yes. Multi-day fasts may be different, but I actually think best right after my workout during my IF window.
The effects are so pronounced I'm considering just eating a single meal each day right before bed.
It's key to not refeed carbs at all during fasting (no juices, honey, etc).
I also occasionally do keto between the fasts which might have helped my metabolism switching to ketosis more quickly.
Ketosis is - in brief - a metabolic state where the body primarily used fats to burn for energy. Our bodies are perfectly suited to operate on ketosis. But this is only reached if glycogens are completely burned which means to u need to avoid refeeding carbs entirely.
Basically it is simpler to eat nothing at all, than to eat at a caloric deficit.
Think of it this way: our bodies have evolutionarily adapted to be able to live off our fat reserves (when overweight).
I recommend reading material or watching videos of Dr. Jason Fung, a Canadian nephrologist who makes compelling well-sourced arguments and explanations.
That said, I have gone through fasts and said f-it at hour-mark 34 because I was on a deadline.
It's not a religion, so do what works for you - but I would at least try it.
On a carbs based diet, it feels like there's an animal inside me craving for food all the time. Then I feel drowsy and sleepy if I don't eat anything for even a few hours. As a developer, that's terrible. I feel really bad.
On a fat-based diet (e.g less than 40g of carbs/day), I feel absolutely great, and I don't feel hunger. When lunch comes, I feel just empty, but no craving at all, no hunger. Then the fasting becomes easy.
The caveat: switching from carbs to fat is not pleasant, takes a few days and isn't any fun. If you break it with a piece of cake, then you'll have to make the switch all over again and it won't be pleasant again.
That timeline as "fasting" is funny to me up because that is basically how people used to eat in 20th century USA, pre-obesity. You'd eat three meals a day, all reasonably sized (or even small by todays standards), and at specific times. No you can't have a snack, that would ruin your appetite!
But now people are addicted to food and abuse it rampantly as is evidenced by the majorities waistlines and health care expenditure, it's terrible for us all but it's not only the most culturally acceptable form of substance abuse, it's widely encouraged and even celebrated. Strange times.
I am not overweight, but I see that IF can increase growth hormone and testosterone, and increase insulin sensitivity, which are of interest to me. I would like to know if I am better doing a couple of longer fasts peer week, or if skipping breakfast would be enough. (Longer fasts feel like they have more benefit, but are more effort, especially when I am trying NOT to loose weight).
Does anyone know of anywhere good to compare the benefits of different IF protocols?
What works for you may not work for someone else.
This is SO important in nutritional research because in every single one these threads there is always someone who will say X worked for me and someone else who says X didn't work for me. And BOTH are right.
Example:
I've done IF for years as a competitive bodybuilder and powerlifter. I've gained and lost weight on IF. IF should (until more research is done) simply be viewed as a compliance tactic. In other words, if it helps you eat healthier and maintain a healthy weight: great! If not, don't assume you're missing out on some magical panacea of health and vitality.
Recently I stopped doing IF and eating more frequently for performance reasons so I can reach the national circuit in powerlifting. My blood work is still fine. My weight is still fine. Again, YMMV.
It takes a bit to get used to and should be adapted to over time, but I very much love the feeling of fasting for short periods and the freedom I'm granted to be able to easily skip meals, most commonly breakfast and lunch. I often only eat one meal a day, which saves me time, energy, and money, but I also enjoy the meal more, as I can include large portions of a lot of food groups in my single meal.
That this has many potential health benefits makes this style of eating appear even more appealing. Caloric restriction, although not quite the same as intermittent fasting, does appear to be one of the more promising methods we already have to help promote human longevity.
I started with 36 hours once a week because I made money based on the appearance of my body. It works tremendously well in the short-term, but it’s deceptive. The tissue loss is mostly fat, which looks great, but there is definitely some muscle loss, which is an order of magnitude harder to gain back, so the long-term effect is muscle wasting and fat rebound as caloric demands drop. It’s easy to see in my photos. Later I did OMAD several times for stretches of about a year with roughly similar short and long-term effects. Recently I completed a 100-hour fast.
There are a few basic issues. First, with IF you’re not really fasting as long as you think you are. Small intestines take about 6 hours, and the colon turns fIber into MCTs for days. Second, the insulin surge becomes preferential to fatty acid storage over muscle glycogen. Third, you lose the ghrelin-induced GH that releases fatty acids throughout the day to feed the muscles. There may be autophagy benefits, but that may be as true for satellite cells as it is for cancer, and maybe more so because cancer usually originates in fatty tissues with lots of energy nearby.
At this point, by experience and by science, I don’t think IF is the best diet protocol if you have the discipline for a more continuous protocol. I don’t, so I can’t say I’ve tried that, and I hate the fat on my body, so I’m not sure where to go from here. I’m not 100% convinced either way, but I wanted to give a balancing perspective.
However, for the first seven months of 2019 I tried to do 48-72 hour fasts three times every week, but I just couldn't adapt to that. It's nice with the euphoria effect, but in the long run I found it depressing going to sleep without eating and it had a very negative effect on my life quality.
Now I'm back at eating a single meal every day and feel great.
When traveling or over the holidays I realize I'm eating over longer periods I really notice how much less I like it now. I only do it because of basic, maladapted pleasure seeking behavior.
A good time and place to plug results of the IF experiment I did a few years back. FWIW, I have been on a no-breakfast, no-lunch protocol, on weekdays since then and I absolutely love it because it keeps me sharp through the day (no post-glucose “dullness”).
I would actually like to try to fast for 24 hours, starting after an evening meal.
My problem is I do a lot of cycling. If I don’t eat, I bonk hard and lose energy. So, I would need to time this after a day of resting after a ride.
(like you, he eats carbs when riding long distances--even with the aim of staying in ketosis)
I eat a lot of carbs ( mostly clean, veges and fruits ) and cook most of my food at home. I’ve been maintaining weight but haven’t really lost much fat.
I know my diet is the reason, so the answer is probably to reduce carbs and increase the proteins. Perhaps try for a longer intermittent fast.
Could someone who knows about this comment or post links to info: is black coffee during fasting periods OK?
https://www.foundmyfitness.com/episodes/coffee-and-amino-aci...
It also helps to have really high-quality espresso-style (extracted for <30 seconds) coffee when trying to ditch milk. You can also transition witu honey.
* “System-wide Benefits of Intermeal Fasting by Autophagy“: https://www.cell.com/cell-metabolism/pdf/S1550-4131(17)30608...
> We established an isocaloric twice-a-day (ITAD) feeding model wherein ITAD-fed mice consume the same food amount as ad libitum controls but at two short windows early and late in the diurnal cycle. We hypothesized that ITAD feeding will provide two intervals of intermeal fasting per circadian period and induce autophagy. We show that ITAD feeding modifies circadian autophagy and glucose/lipid metabolism that correlate with feeding-driven changes in circulating insulin. ITAD feeding decreases adiposity and, unlike CR, enhances muscle mass. ITAD feeding drives energy expenditure, lowers lipid levels, suppresses gluconeogenesis, and prevents age/obesity-associated metabolic defects. Using liver-, adipose-, myogenic-, and proopiomelanocortin neuron-specific autophagy-null mice, we mapped the contribution of tissue-specific autophagy to system-wide benefits of ITAD feeding. Our studies suggest that consuming two meals a day without CR could prevent the metabolic syndrome.
* “Short-term fasting induces profound neuronal autophagy“: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3106288/
> We first validate the approach by showing that it allows the identification and characterization of autophagosomes in the livers of food-restricted mice. We use the method to identify constitutive autophagosomes in cortical neurons and Purkinje cells, and we show that short-term fasting leads to a dramatic upregulation in neuronal autophagy.
> …
> Our data lead us to speculate that sporadic fasting might represent a simple, safe and inexpensive means to promote this potentially therapeutic neuronal response.
I’m interested in intermittent fasting but I’d like to objectively track the effects beyond fat/weight loss. For example: ketone body blood concentration, respiratory exchange ratio, heart rate variability, etc.
I couldn’t find anything here but maybe I’m not looking in the right place: https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/results?term=intermittent+fas...
Would be great to have some new therapies for these terrible diseases.
By starting slowly, and by eating plenty of food during the eating periods, it is fairly easy to maintain energy during fasting.
This is only true for people who have something they want to change. In practice that basically means weight or a biomarker that’s practical to measure, like fasting blood glucose. For people with normal weight and insulin response, the possible IF benefits seen in mice are difficult or impossible to measure. For example, identifying autophagy in a standard CBC with diff is experimental at best (https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/08a3/bf79055d69da0fe7305255...).
From that SSC article ..
> We, the authors, conclude that the evidence as it stands weakly supports the conclusion that CR modestly extends human life
18h regularly, 24h maybe weekly, 36h occasionally. Nothing planned in advance. It's really not that complicated - remember the last time you delayed eating because it wasn't convenient? I just do that with less tolerance for what constititues "inconvenience" and greater tolerance of hunger.
Breakfast by eating to satiation, same as any other meal.
For me, skipping breakfast ended up meaning less calories overall. I did lose some weight, but in a good way. My lifting/cycling/jiu-jitsu training were all positively impacted mainly because I was leaner.
I used to be a person who woke up hungry and would immediately eat breakfast. Now hunger isn't really something I notice. Sometimes it will be early afternoon before I think about eating.
I learned a lot about my personal nutrition. If I eat poorly the day before, I notice more hunger the next day during IF. Experiencing this feedback loop helps to re-enforce to not eat poorly even during an eating window.
So, I hit my two initial goals and will continue to use IF for the ongoing health benefits (anti-inflammation). My weight stabilized ~10 pounds less from where I started, but I did not lose much if any muscle.
> It remains to be determined whether people can maintain intermittent fasting for years and potentially accrue the benefits seen in animal models. Furthermore, clinical studies have focused mainly on overweight young and middle-age adults, and we cannot generalize to other age groups the benefits and safety of intermittent fasting that have been observed in these studies.
Conclusion is always a good type of abstract.
FWIW I used to do the 12 hour thing. Breakfast at 7. Dinner at 7. Lunch in between. Ditched that and went down to 6-8 hour instead. I've found I can actually do 4 hour eating window but that's irritating for reasons other than hunger/satiety.
I am not affiliated with it, but check out idmcommunity.idmprogram.com/
Also, Dr. Jason Fung is an authority on IF, if you want to check out his videos on YouTube.
Just not many people in the US...
But what about the many other people who eat snacks and for whom "skipping breakfast" could mean only 10, 12 hours of fasting?
If you need a term for all people to mean exactly what you want to mean, a term that is correct only for "many" people is not enough.
Aside, IF also includes 24 or 36 hour fasting.
On the contrary, we need to be reminded of what we've forgotten; and the proof is in the word itself: "break fast" literally means to break your overnight fast. Our forebears understood the concept of "fasting until your first meal" very well.
The fact is that it's almost certain that for the vast majority of people, until the 20th century, "intermittent fasting" was just called "life". Our hunter-gatherer ancestors couldn't count on three solid meals a day, and even the best-fed would almost certainly have gone into periods of "fasting" several times a week just because of the way life was. A few hundred years ago, many people might have their first meal at 10am (after a few hours of work), and their last meal at 4pm.
And that's exactly why it's actually quite healthy. Your body is designed to fast (i.e., run out of glycogen and have to rely on ketosis), the same way it's designed to exercise; and going through life without any fasting turns out to be as harmful as going through life without any exercise.
But the good news is you don't need to do 36-hour fasts to get at least a bit of health benefits, just like you don't need to go running to get health benefits from exercise. A good brisk walk is way better than no exercise at all; and a 16/8 fasting schedule is better than eating constantly from the time you wake up until the time you go to bed.