Research shows that intermittent fasting is very, very healthy for the human body – in fact, all mammals. Intermittent fasting is all about shrinking your feeding windows and lengthening the overnight fast into longer periods of going without food (or drink with calories or nutrients in them—typically only water and black coffee are consumed, then).
There are several forms of intermittent fasting you can experiment with for maximum health effects. Sometimes, switching up dietary approaches is effective because when you consistently reduce caloric intake, for example, your metabolism simply slows down, meaning you cannot eat a healthy number of calories every day and still maintain that weight. This is why most dieters fail.
Intermittent fasting offers a way to eat and lose weight and to enjoy many health benefits, such as decreased risk of diabetes, enhanced insulin sensitivity, and fat loss, while still being able to eat a rich diet full of a variety of foods.
IF Methods
5:2 IF: Some people like the 5:2 method—which is about severe calorie restriction (500-600 kcal) 2 days a week or longer with 5 days eating normally.
Every other day fasting:
I know all kinds of people who swear by this method for fast weight loss. This approach is about one day normal eating and one day fasting, repeat. You could also do a 1:1 of calorie restriction and 1 day normal eating.
The Lean Gains Method
This complex approach was invented by Martin Berkhan, Swedish trainer and nutrition specialist.
With this method:
See the LeanGains website for more on this: click here
Glycogen Depletion: Carb Cycling
Carb cycling is the process of manipulating your carbohydrate intake for a given period of time to trigger desirable hormone responses to encourage recovery, performance and fat loss. No or low carb days are about depleting the glycogen stores in your body so you can trigger more fat loss. The idea behind why this works goes back to ancestral eating patterns. Not all days were high carb days for them either, we believe. This is probably why cycling carbs is proving to have so many health benefits. Some of them are enhance weight loss: study, reversing metabolic syndrome: study, and decreasing abdominal and intramuscular fat and enhancing insulin sensitivity: study.
Traditional IF
Traditional Intermittent Fasting is about shrinking your feeding window to 6 to 8 hours a day, consuming only non-caloric beverages the other 16 to 18 hours. One reason this helps with fat burning is you stop spiking insulin, just like you do at night when you sleep. By lengthening that window, you stay in fat burning mode longer and the going without food part acts that stressor to your system, like exercise or cold shock therapy, that sets off healing mechanisms in the body that are healthy in countless ways, anti-aging, disease prevention, and all things weight and fat loss.
As Mark Mattson notes, “There is considerable similarity between how cells respond to the stress of exercise and how cells respond to intermittent fasting.”
Who Should Not Do Intermittent Fasting?
Intermittent fasting is not for everyone. There are some people who may experience health difficulties if they start restricting food intake for too many hours at a time.
This may include:
If you are one of these kinds of people, you should talk to a doctor about IF before beginning any fasting-based diet.
Why Does IF Work?
How to Do Intermittent Fasting or Combine Different IF Approaches
To do this, you could have a diet week organized like this:
Monday: NE
Tuesday: Fast completely
Wednesday: NE IF
Thursday: IF
Friday: NE
Saturday: IF
Sunday: Fast completely
The Proven Evidence for Intermittent Fasting
Intermittent Fasting Can Help You Lose Weight and Belly Fat
All kinds of my clients today are using intermittent fasting to achieve wins in weight loss and fat burning, so I’ve seen this work up front. And I make use of intermittent fasting all the time myself, not just before competitions, but as a way to keep my weight in check every day.
But the real deal with intermittent fasting if you want to lose weight is that you have to watch your caloric intake when you are eating, not just when you are fasting, to achieve weight loss. You cannot take in too many daily total calories or you won’t create that calorie deficit you need to lose weight.
The research is very positive if you can do this (watch caloric intake overall). In one study, Mattson and other researchers explored the effects of intermittent and continuous energy restriction on weight loss and biomarkers for disease such as diabetes, cancer, and cardiovascular disease. They found intermittent restriction was as effective as continuous restriction for improving fat burning, weight loss, insulin sensitivity and preventing metabolic syndrome and other conditions caused by excessive eating and weight.
See study.
We also know that because IF lowers insulin for an extended period of time, you spike growth hormone levels and release increased amounts of norepinephrine which enhances fat burning, releasing fat from tissues so it can be used as energy. See study.
We also know that IF raises the metabolism, boosting metabolic rate by 3.6-14%, helping you burn even more calories. See study, study.
According to a 2014 study, IF also boosts can help individuals achieve as much as a total 3-8% weight loss over the course of 3-24 weeks (study). This is a lot of weight, btw. This means a 160-pound individual could lose approximately 5 to 12.8 pounds. This is quite a lot for a weight loss study. But these individuals also lost 4 to 7% of their waist circumference as well. That’s quite a lot of inches. Another great benefit of IF is that it helps preserve muscle while you lose weight, while continuous calorie restriction does cause muscle loss. See study.
Some of the most interesting and exciting studies being done into the benefits of intermittent fasting are in the realm of anti-aging and longevity.
Studies have proven that in rodents, IF promotes a longer lifespan. See (study, study). In one study, in fact, rats lived 83% longer who were made to fast intermittently.
Studies in rats have shown that intermittent fasting extends lifespan in a similar way as continuous calorie restriction. See study.
Intermittent fasting is also very anti-aging, making it great for the appearance and health. The way IF achieves this is by reducing oxidative stress in the cells, which curbs free radical production, meaning our body can devote more energy to healthful applications than to simply fighting off free radical damage. See study, study, study.
And it’s great when we find ANYthing that can reverse this startling upward trend we have with diabetes, insulin resistance, and metabolic syndrome, with the CDC projecting 1 in 3 will have diabetes by 2050, and possibly 1 in 2.
Type 2 diabetes has become incredibly common in recent decades.
IF has been shown to be remarkable effective at reversing IR and enhancing insulin sensitivity, which helps prevent diabetes, big time. See study.
In studies, IF reducing fasting glucose by 3 to 6% and fasting insulin as much as 31%. See study.
4.Intermittent Fasting May Help Prevent Cancer
Several studies have indicated that the healing cellular mechanisms that IF induces are effective at halting and preventing some cancers. In animal studies,
Cancer is a terrible disease, characterized by uncontrolled growth of cells.
Fasting has been shown to have several beneficial effects on metabolism that may lead to reduced risk of cancer. For example, in one study, mice pout on an alternate day feeding cycle reduced IGF-1 levels and decreased proliferation rates of epidermal, prostate, splenic T and liver cells See study.
Several other studies have demonstrated that IF is both cancer-preventative (see study, study, study, study).help prevent cancer and that it helps patients undergoing chemotherapy to recover more easily and fight cancer more effectively (see study).
5. Intermittent Fasting is Key to a Better, Healthier Brain
One of the things we know for certain is how good occasional fasting is for cognition and preventing neurodegeneration and neurodegenerative disease.
Because IF is so good for cellular health, it is good for the brain as well in all kinds of ways. It reduces inflammation and oxidative stress, as I discussed earlier, which is key in promoting a healthy brain, as the brain is just cells, water and fat tissue, mostly. See study.
It also enhances neuro-generation, which is the growth of new brain cells and neurons (study, study).
It also causes and increase in brain derived neurotrophic factor, which is a hormone which helps improve depression, improve cognitive function, and fight neurodegeneration. See study, study, , study.
It also protects stroke victims from brain damage, allowing them to go on and lead an enjoyable cognitive life (study).
It’s also cognitive enhancing in numerous ways. It protects the brain from the kind of cognitive decline that naturally happens during aging. (See study).
It also increases and protects against the loss of an important protein called debrin, which protects neurons during development and regulates neuron growth and birth. See study, study
IF also induces growth in the hippocampal region, which enhances cognition, cognitive performance, and improves mood and memory, since this area regulates both (see study).
Conclusion
Intermittent fasting is a proven way to increase your health in so many ways. It aids in weight loss, activates powerful hormones for antiaging and preserving and building muscle, helps us burn more fat, prevent neurodegenerative diseases, cognitive decline, and to become more insulin sensitive, preventing diabetes and the broad range of deadly diseases which follow it.
My friends tell me that IF is also powerful for enhancing creativity and has made them 10 times smarter than they felt before. It also enhances willpower. Gaining control over when and how much you eat makes you feel stronger and more able to motivate and improve yourself in all areas of life.
It also gives you beautiful skin as it enhances growth hormone production and helps repair muscles, as it helps promote collagen synthesis for that reason as well.
Be strong, be healthy, and try IF. You might just have found a key to health in multitudinous ways.
Thanks,
Jackson Litchfield