Intermittent Fasting – Better Health?

Adopt good habits and ditch the scale.

Some Common Themes

I love to read books on health and fitness. So many of those books keep coming back to similar themes. Many times I’ve read discussions on glycemic index, the role of insulin, the benefits of resistance training, running, walking, avoiding bad carbohydrates, mitochondria, meditation, and fasting. Over time, I intend to write about most of them. I hope to introduce these subjects so that you will know where to start reading. Intermittent fasting is a very good way to address some health concerns.

Isolating one healthy act from others is both a little impossible and somewhat childish. There is no silver bullet when it comes to health. However, interconnected themes start to build in a common direction. Increasingly, some scientists and health professionals are recognizing the health benefits of fasting. We evolved through feast and famine, and our bodies are exceedingly adapted to cope with both. In times of feast, which is always for most of us, our bodies put away fat stores. In times of famine, it burns fat. Pretty simple, except we don’t get too much famine in our daily lives.

An Aside

I just completed a book called The Obesity Code: Unlocking the Secrets of Weight Loss by Jason Fung, M.D. Although, this article is about intermittent fasting, I’m going to take a few sentences to rave about this book. Dr. Fung starts at the beginning. He doesn’t cite studies on animals…only human studies. He covers the whole topic. By the end of the book, you will have some very gnarly arrows in your quiver in your fight against obesity.

In his book, he spends a fair amount of time talking about metabolism and why calorie-counting doesn’t work. Spoiler alert: your body adapts by dropping metabolism. He also discusses why fasting does work. Without going deeply, myself, into topics like mitochondrial density and ketosis, suffice to say, your body adapts to fasting. This is a very good thing.

Why Fasting?

Your body uses glycogen (sugar) and fat as primary fuel sources. Your body stores enough glycogen for about a day’s activity. It stores, on average, enough fat for a month’s activity!  Your body is very well adapted to live off of grains and sugars, but those foods also trigger insulin to command your body to store fat. It isn’t that simple, but close enough for now.

When you stop eating sugars and grains for a day, your body uses up the stored glycogen. What now? Well, your body switches over to burning fat reserves. This is called ketosis. Ketosis has been hyped by all kinds of snake-oil salesmen these days. Don’t mess with pills and fad supplements. Just work with what mother nature gives you. Dance with who brung you.

If you fast for more than a day, your body will start burning fat. This will actually cause an increase in mitochondrial density as the little buggers work to keep you alive. Through a combination of fasting and eating good fats, you can retrain your body. You can teach it to switch quickly between sugar and fat as a fuel source.

Fasting has been shown again and again to have a strong correlation with longevity. This isn’t a scientific paper, so I’m not going to provide all of those citations. Just do a quick Google search on “fasting and longevity” .

Why Intermittent Fasting?

Now we get to the point. When you sleep, your body burns glycogen at first then gradually switches to fat-burning. If you eat an early dinner and avoid bedtime snacks, this happens sooner after sleep. If you delay breakfast (gasp!) until you are actually hungry, you prolong the fat burning. This is intermittent fasting, using 16 to 24 hour periods to train your body. Unlike starving your body by calorie-counting, this does not down-regulate your metabolism.

Your body is naturally switching from sugar-based fuel to fat-based fuel while you sleep and until you eat your next starchy meal. If you break your fast by eating a veggie omelet or salmon salad, your body keeps using fat as its primary source. It is the carbohydrates in sugars and grains that most quickly kick you back into the sugar-based cycle. It is also those foods that tell your body to start adding fat again, to defend against starvation.

Another Perspective

The best thing about intermittent fasting is it is very easy. Sugar and grain trigger insulin release and results in a greater appetite. The more sugar and refined grains or starchy foods you eat, the quicker your hunger pangs return. It is truly a downward spiral.

On the other hand, when your body is burning fat, appetite is more natural. Your body tells you when it is hungry, and so that is a good time to eat. Go ahead and eat! You shouldn’t ignore hunger pangs. You will notice the urge to eat is different though. It isn’t the panicky, shaky feeling you get between a starchy breakfast and lunchtime. It is just a simple and growing hunger that can be addressed when you have a moment to eat. You can easily ignore it for hours or days if you wish, but then you are moving to multi-day fasting.

Redux

I am not telling you not to eat starchy carbohydrates! I will however say that a diet based in large measure on those foods is likely to result in some pretty bad things. You might break your intermittent fast with a vegetable, meat, and/or egg-based meal around brunch or lunchtime. Go ahead and eat a “normal” dinner with lots of vegetables, some protein, and a starch. Then bag it for the day. Stop eating around 6:00 pm. If you eat again at 10:00 am, you just fasted for 16 hours! It won’t hurt, once your body becomes adapted, I promise!

By the way, Dr. Fung notes a study that showed that people who insist on eating breakfast every day, on average eat 530 calories more than those who do not! Most important meal of the day? Did humans evolve by eating Cheerios or Eggos, or anything, every morning? No, they had to go GET something to eat!  If you are eating lots of veggies, a little fruit, some protein, and a decent amount of good fats in the two meals of the day, you won’t get very hungry. Now, calorie counting goes out the window. Just eat until you are sated.

As I said, there is no silver bullet for your health. Intermittent fasting is just one armament in your arsenal to fight fat, ramp up your metabolism, and live a longer, more active life. Ketosis then becomes a natural part of your arsenal as well. I’d caution against extreme induced-ketosis-all-the-time. Your body can naturally move in and out of ketosis without you taking supplements and over-stressing it. Just remember that our bodies evolved to deal with seasons of feast and famine, just as with daily feast/famine cycles. Just as with bread-and-sugar-at-every-meal, eating nothing but fat and protein every day for years also isn’t natural. Use your head! Consider intermittent fasting as a way to work with your body, instead of overloading it with long periods of feast.