85 replies to this topic

[alternativista]

I'm interested in this because it supposedly can produce the same benefits as calorie restriction. Calorie restriction has been proven to promote longevity by improving all kinds of health conditions that affect your longevity. So I would like to work out something that works easily for me.

One method of intermittent fasting is to do all your eating within an 8 hour period, then you fast for 16 hours. This is why a lot of people believe in skipping breakfast and not breaking the nightly fast until noon.

Which I could never, ever do. Morning through lunch is when I am hungry. I could skip dinner, easy. Since I usually eat breakfast around 7am, I'd just have to fast from 3pm onward.

Also, in fasting you don't have to completely eat nothing. It could just be minimal calories. I often eat only a small amount of low calorie food at dinnertime. So what happens if I eat only like 200 calories around 6pm and nothing for the next 13 hours? What benefit am I getting?

Another method is to alternate days of eating normally with days of eating only like 20% of your normal calorie intake. That seems much less appealing to me.

Here's two articles from the Marksdailyapple.com blog on methods and benefits for intermittent fasting:

The Myriad Benefits of Intermittent Fasting
http://www.marksdail...ittent-fasting/

Who Should and shouldn't:
http://www.marksdail...ing/#more-19814 (Actually, that article is of little use to most of us.)

Anyone know of other methods, advantages, etc?

Edited by alternativista, 12 September 2011 - 03:34 PM.

[Drizzler]

Intermittent fasting (IF) has been a very useful tool for me in my health and fitness journey. It is beneficial both to the body and the mind, in so many ways.

This was the first article I ever read about IF, from Dr. Michael Eades, author of Protein Power (an awesome book I recommend everyone reads).

"Like caloric restriction, intermittent fasting reduces oxidative stress, makes the animals more resistant to acute stress in general, reduces blood pressure, reduces blood sugar, improves insulin sensitivity, reduces the incidence of cancer, diabetes, and heart disease, and improves cognitive ability."

An interesting thing he mentions is that while both caloric restriction (CR) and IF provide numerous health benefits and potentially increase lifespan, CR animals in lab settings exhibit depression and irritability, even hostility and violence. IFing shows no such behavior.

Beyond the tangible physiologic benefits of IF, there is the idea that IF sort of re-primes your innate hunger mechanisms, can resensitize appetite hormones such as leptin and ghrelin, and just generally change/improve/reset your relationship to food. Which is obviously important in this culture of binge eating, food cravings and the like.

[Drizzler]

There are several different approaches or strategies to IF; there are a few already established plans or "diets" that various people advocate (commercially).

1. Alternate-Day Fasting - You basically eat for 24 hours, then fast for 24 hours, repeated indefinitely. For this to be successful, you need to be eating a lot of calories on your eating days (so not necessarily running a large weekly caloric deficit)*. A variation of this is Brad Pilon's "Eat Stop Eat" where you skip meals to create 24 hour fasting periods, but don't necessarily go an entire day without eating.

2. Condensed Feeding Windows- In any given 24 hour period, you only eat during 4-8 hours. For example you would fast til noon, and then eat anywhere from 1-4 meals between noon and 8pm, then fast til noon again the next day. The Warrior Diet is an extreme version of this, where you consume the bulk of your calories in 4 hours at the end of every day.

3. One Day/Week Fasting - Pretty simple, you just don't eat for one day per week. You could expand this to say, 3 times per month or whatever.

I like to use a more combined, instinctual approach; this appears to be Mark Sisson's general approach too- you just kind of make it up as you go along- "I'm not so hungry tonight, I'll skip dinner". Or you might plan to skip breakfast the next morning, hit the gym hard and have an awesome lunch.


*Very important!! You must consider weekly caloric intakes as well as daily. This is a huge factor in binge behavior. If you don't eat enough 1-2 days, then by the third day, even though you ate good, substantial meals, you are still ravenously hungry.

Edited by Drizzler, 25 February 2011 - 12:04 PM.

[Drizzler]

Another fascinating viewpoint from Dr. Kurt Harris from PaNu.

"We are told to eat frequent snacks because the standard american diet with 55% carbs has you metabolically and emotionally tethered to frequent boluses of glucose."

Advantages of Infrequent Meals:
1. Enhanced metabolic training in the direction of fat metabolism
2. Lower insulin levels and fewer insulin related diseases (Metabolic syndrome, degenerative diseases, Alzheimer's, common cancers)
3. Greater tolerance for fasting makes it easier to tolerate not eating - this give you "metabolic headroom" -it makes you more functional and resilient - You are a Porsche with a 40 gallon gas tank instead of a truck running on lead acid batteries.
4. If you exercise while fasting, the lack of insulin in the fasting state improves the fat-mobilizing and insulin-sensitizing benefits of the exercise.

And for the encore: "Let's say involuntary periods of hunger were something that we are so adapted to that we metabolically depend on them to avoid some dieseases. Maybe we are less likely to get cancer if these periods happen to us with some regularity not found in a modern food-abundant environment. Because intermittent fasting might enhance our modern health, do we then say this was a "good" part of paleolithic life, even though the experience might have been uncomfortable and terrifying for paleo man or may have killed weaker members of his kin when it happened?"

[joris]

Not drink? Why?

[alternativista]

QUOTE (Drizzler @ Feb 25 2011, 01:16 PM)
And for the encore: [i]"Let's say involuntary periods of hunger were something that we are so adapted to that we metabolically depend on them to avoid some dieseases.


Yeah, I'm sure having plenty to eat all the time is just not good for us. And many of us are genetically adapted to survive famine, making all this food really, really bad for them. This is why African Americans, Hispanics and I don't know who all else are so prone to developing diabetes.

Study finding Intermittent Fasting lowers dLDL cholesterol More effectively than statin drugs inhibit an enzyme used to produce cholesterol, which the body makes to repair damage caused by high blood pressure, high blood sugar, oxidation, etc. And that enzyme does other important things, like produce CoQ10 which is important for energy production. http://www.ncbi.nlm....pubmed/20880415

Also, it reduces LDL cholesterol molecule size, which is a factor in vascular disease. Size matters.

Edited by alternativista, 04 February 2012 - 04:37 PM.

[alternativista]

I like to use a more combined, instinctual approach; this appears to be Mark Sisson's general approach too- you just kind of make it up as you go along- "I'm not so hungry tonight, I'll skip dinner". Or you might plan to skip breakfast the next morning, hit the gym hard and have an awesome lunch.

Yes, I think I will just stick with what I already do. Skip dinner or have a low calorie food early, (as I frequently do anyway), when I feel like it and/or whenever it's convenient to do so like when there's no other people to worry about. So I would be having zero calories for like 13 hours, but very minimal calories for 16 or so hours.

And not have anything until after walking/playing with the dog. And maybe occasionally get some weight training done on those mornings. Because working out on an empty stomach also enhances the body's ability to breakdown old tissues and recycle the nutrients.

Edited by alternativista, 13 September 2011 - 12:52 PM.

[alternativista]

2. Condensed Feeding Windows- In any given 24 hour period, you only eat during 4-8 hours. For example you would fast til noon, and then eat anywhere from 1-4 meals between noon and 8pm, then fast til noon again the next day. The Warrior Diet is an extreme version of this, where you consume the bulk of your calories in 4 hours at the end of every day.

There's the Leangainers who eat within an 8-hour window, which leaves you with a 16 hour fast:
http://www.leangains.com/ Which is pretty much what I plan to do once in a while, and most days, while i won't have no calories for those 16 hours, I'll have very little by having most calories from breakfast, lunch and afternoon snack, and a very light early dinner.

[alternativista]

Word of the Day:

Autophagy

Fasting turns on autophagy --the process by which cells recycle waste material, eliminate or downregulate wasteful processes, and repair themselves.

• Required to maintain muscle mass, and inhibiting it induces atrophy of adult skeletal muscle.
• Reduces the negative effects of aging and reduces the incidence and progression of aging-related diseases.
• Increases neuronal autophagy, which aids in maintaining mental health and function.

Autophagy is the main anti-aging mechanism of fasting.

Sudy: The role of autophagy in aging: its essential part in the anti-aging mechanism of caloric restriction. http://www.ncbi.nlm....pubmed/17934054

The role of macroautophagy in the ageing process, anti-ageing intervention and age-associated diseases. http://www.ncbi.nlm....pubmed/15325580

Abstract: Macroautophagy is a degradation/recycling system ubiquitous in eukariotic cells, which generates nutrients during fasting under the control of amino acids and hormones, and contributes to the turnover and rejuvenation of cellular components (long-lived proteins, cytomembranes and organelles). Tight coupling between these two functions may be the weak point in cell housekeeping. Ageing denotes a post-maturational deterioration of tissues and organs with the passage of time, due to the progressive accumulation of the misfunctioning cell components because of oxidative damage and an age-dependent decline of turnover rate and housekeeping. Caloric restriction (CR) and lower insulin levels may slow down many age-dependent processes and extend lifespan. Recent evidence is reviewed showing that autophagy is involved in ageing and in the anti-ageing action of anti-ageing calorie restriction: function of autophagy declines during adulthood and is almost negligible at older age; CR prevents the age-dependent decline of autophagic proteolysis and improves the sensitivity of liver cells to stimulation of lysosomal degradation; protection of autophagic proteolysis from the age-related decline co-varies with the duration and level of anti-ageing food restriction like the effects of CR extending lifespan; the pharmacological stimulation of macroautophagy has anti-ageing effects. Besides the involvement in ageing, macroautophagy may have an essential role in the pathogenesis of many age-associated diseases. Higher protein turnover may not fully account for the anti-ageing effects of macroautophagy, and effects of macroautophagy on housekeeping of the cell organelles, antioxidant machinery of cell membranes and transmembrane cell signaling should also be considered.

Edited by alternativista, 04 February 2012 - 04:39 PM.

[GreenEyes33]

Well my family's Irish so if anyone is genetically hardwired for famine it's us haha.

I started 'skipping' breakfast, rather waiting until 10-11 am to eat it. Other than the health and disease benefits, does this help with acne?

[alternativista]

Well my family's Irish so if anyone is genetically hardwired for famine it's us haha.

I started 'skipping' breakfast, rather waiting until 10-11 am to eat it. Other than the health and disease benefits, does this help with acne?

Anything that helps blood sugar metabolism helps acne and so affects how strict your diet needs to be.

Most of the studies seem to be about 16 hour fasting or alternate day fasting. So I don't know if anyone has looked into the effects of 15, 14, 13 hour fasting. Or most calories within 8 hours and a small amount during the 16, like a bowl of veggie soup for dinner? How reduced are the benefits, etc.

Edited by alternativista, 12 June 2011 - 12:40 PM.

[GreenEyes33]

Interesting. I suppose even 12-15 hrs is better than at most 8 hour fasting like a lot of people (including me at one point). I would say right now I'm doing 14-15 hr fasting. But I do drink water and green tea in the morning so it probably is less effective. Did you see anywhere the effects of water and or green tea?

[alternativista]

Did you see anywhere the effects of water and or green tea?

No. It's about calories and digestion.

[Lima]

Oh wow haha what a coincidence!! This thread has been inactive for months and I just posted my own new topic on intermittent fasting after witnessing first hand how amazing it is.

Sorry for the double post alternate!!

EDIT:
I've edited my thread to include a link to this thread

I just named mine something else because I thought people would see the word "Fasting" in the title and run for the hills hahaha

Edited by Lima, 09 June 2011 - 10:53 PM.

[alternativista]

Bump

[alternativista]

After your fast, do some physical activity.
- benefits of working out on an empty stomach http://fitness.merco...-breakfast.aspx on fat burning and insulin sensitivity. Note: avoid all types of sugary drinks, including sports drinks, for up to two hours after your workout because fructose obliterates the growth hormone response.

One of the explanations for how exercising on an empty stomach can prevent weight gain and insulin resistance despite overindulgence is that your body's fat burning processes are controlled by your sympathetic nervous system (SNS), and your SNS is activated by exercise and lack of food.
The combination of fasting and exercising maximizes the impact of cellular factors and catalysts (cyclic AMP and AMP Kinases), which force the breakdown of fat and glycogen for energy.
This is why training on an empty stomach will effectively force your body to burn fat.
It's also important to realize that eating a full meal, particularly carbohydrates, will inhibit your sympathetic nervous system and reducethe fat burning effect of your exercise. Instead, eating lots of carbs activates your parasympathetic nervous system, (which promotes energy storage—the complete opposite of what you're aiming for.

About the Right Kinds of Exercise: http://www.acne.org/...se-t275783.html

Edited by alternativista, 04 October 2011 - 01:25 PM.

[TheMaleRN]

A very helpful topic for those seeking to lose some weight...

God bless...

[alternativista]

A very helpful topic for those seeking to lose some weight...

Or improve glucose metabolism, reduce oxidative stress, lower blood pressure, retard aging, and any of the other benefits already mentioned in earlier posts. And it looks like it will even reduce the hyperproliferation/hyperkeratinization that leads to acne. In studies on cancer, calorie restriction and intermittent fasting slow cell proliferation.

Edited by alternativista, 04 February 2012 - 04:41 PM.