In recent months, I've written extensively about the benefits of intermittent fasting, which I've been doing for the past two years in my personal life. I also collaborate with a number of people who practice intermittent fasting.
Intermittent fasting is an eating pattern in which no calories are consumed for an extended period of time. In most cases, between 12 and 40 hours. For those who strictly adhere to the rules, the results can be astounding. This includes fully comprehending that fasting entails consuming only water, black coffee, or unsweetened tea. The key is to avoid anything that causes an insulin response because insulin aids in fat storage.
I ran into an old friend who had just returned from a vacation in a Mexican resort. He has lost 27 pounds of body fat over the past several months of intermittent fasting, and it shows, especially with his much slimmer waistline. He told me that he had previously been unable to walk the nearby mountainous paths at the resort, but that this time he breezed along and enjoyed it. Furthermore, he admitted that the intermittent fasting method is the simplest and most effective thing he has ever done to manage his weight.
So here's what you need to know about intermittent fasting and how you might benefit:
How does intermittent fasting impact the body?
Like many others, I was drawn to intermittent fasting not only for the weight loss benefits, but also for a number of other health benefits. It makes sense to me that if I consume food at regular intervals — breakfast, lunch, dinner, and evening snacks — I am sending a message to my body that digestion is a priority. Because digestion, particularly of dietary fat, takes several hours, the body is actively engaged in the digestion process from early morning breakfast through evening snacks and for many hours afterwards.
As a result, the body receives only a brief reprieve from digestion and fasts for only a few hours, at most, late in one's sleep cycle, which is brief because breakfast will soon arrive.
You may also be interested in: Why combining intermittent fasting and exercise will have the greatest impact on your health.
This is an important consideration because the gut contributes to health in a variety of ways, particularly when it comes to boosting the immune system during fasting. Autophagy, the body's way of cleaning out damaged cells in order to regenerate newer, healthier cells, goes hand in hand with increased immune cell production. Taking out the trash or cleaning up debris is a good analogy for autophagy. In this case, the debris consists of damaged body cell parts that must be removed in order for new cells to form.
Fasting also promotes the production of human growth hormone, which helps you shed body fat and hold on to muscle, increasingly more important to health as we age.
How do I do intermittent fasting?
There are several approaches to intermittent fasting. My strategy is to fast every day and consume food only during a two to four-hour window. I gradually worked up to this, starting with a larger window and gradually reducing it. The benefits described above begin to kick in around the 18-hour mark of fasting.
In a previous column, I described my typical daily approach to intermittent fasting: I imagine what I would have eaten for breakfast and lunch, as well as snacks (power bars, nuts, etc.), and eat these "after" my first meal of the day at 6 p.m. I drink black coffee at regular intervals throughout the day, which keeps me satisfied until dinner.
And, let me add, if I feel like cheating late at night with a hot-fudge sundae, I don't think twice.
Furthermore, despite fasting for many hours before working out, my workouts are great, with no loss of energy.
How does intermittent fasting differ from other crash diets?
A reader recently inquired about intermittent fasting. "I have read your books on nutrition, healthy dieting, and exercise, and you rail against crash diets because a lack of nutrients leads to muscle mass loss," he wrote. Now, I've read about your use of intermittent fasting, which reduces caloric intake to zero for extended periods of time, and I'm curious how this differs from a crash diet's caloric restriction."
A thought-provoking question worth investigating.
First, on a crash diet, you drastically reduce your caloric intake from 2,000 calories per day to less than half that amount and enter a semi-starvation state. When you drastically reduce your caloric intake, your body struggles to maintain optimal levels of blood sugar, also known as glucose. Blood sugar is important because the brain relies on glucose as its primary source of fuel, and the brain is, of course, the body's top priority.
The liver stores glucose as glycogen. When you eat "normally," if your blood sugar levels drop, the liver releases glucose to bring them back up. However, because the body is in a semi-starvation mode when on a crash diet, the supply of liver glycogen is depleted. As a result, when blood sugar levels drop, the body becomes concerned that the liver will not be able to respond appropriately.
As a result, the body goes into emergency mode. Cortisol is released, which breaks down muscle into proteins, which are then broken down further into amino acids. Selective amino acids are transported to the liver and converted into glucose, which raises blood sugar levels. In other words, the body destroys muscle to produce glucose, a process known as gluconeogenesis.
Are there benefits to crash diets over intermittent fasting?
Crash diets always fail because losing muscle mass is counterproductive, and even if you lose a lot of weight, the fact that you're losing muscle mass means you don't look any better. This is disappointing because when you start a crash diet with the goal of losing 30 pounds or more, you envision yourself returning to a body with 30 pounds less fat on it. Your "new" crash diet body does not resemble what you expected.
Plus, you're usually miserable and all you can think about is food.
When you fast intermittently, you do not cut calories or go into a semi-starvation mode. On the contrary, despite losing weight, I now eat more than I did before starting intermittent fasting because I don't want to lose any more. As a result, I am easily replenishing my liver glycogen stores on a daily basis and maintaining my blood glucose at optimal levels, preserving my muscle mass.
All that is required is a firm commitment to eating at predetermined times and sticking to it.
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