I was diagnosed with pre-diabetes. I have been on the intermittent fasting thing for about 6 months. I started with 14 hours then 16 hours and now 18-20 hour fast. I dropped 10 pounds. I have a history of diabetes in my family. I took the 28andME DNA test and it said i have a predisposition to diabetes. The doc said to me. You have pre-diabetes just continue to workout and watch what you eat and your insurance does not cover a dietician and then that was it. It was VERY HARD to not eat in morning (black coffee) and after 1 month i got used to , it was very hard to skip lunch and after a few weeks i got used to that. Now now my feeding window is 4pm-8pm. I was pigging out at 4pm but have learned to control that. I workout in a fasted stated 12-1pm ( body weight , pullups. push-ups. 1 mile sprint HIIT and planks) I still get hunger pangs around 3pm its as if my body is getting ready to feed / knows food is coming around 4pm. Another thing that has happened is water tastes "sweeter" very unusual to actually taste water. The result for me is EVERYTHING has improved. I am 48 years old. No more carb fog. No more headaches. I think, i don't know buy i have this clarity i think my eye site has improved too. I mean Im still experimenting but i just feel fantastic. I will be getting blood work done again soon. It's working for me , i don't know if it will work for others. I tell everyone about it. Good LUCKY! :-)
Glad it's working out for you! I tried IF a couple years ago, for a 4 month period. After an adjustment period of about 2 weeks, which included short periods of intense hunger and mild head aches, I felt great! I wasn't in bad shape before the IF, so I only lost about 6lbs/3kg, but my energy levels where much more consistent throughout the day, focus was easier to achieve and maintain, and I just had a joie de vivre.
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!
How was your diet before you started intermittent fasting? When I read anecdotal accounts like this, I often wonder if your previous diet was so poor that doing anything to change it would've made it better.
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.
I was a long distance runner from like 25-36. I ate whatever i wanted. You know what they tell you, Carb loading etc… Then i went through a vegetarian phase. A paleo phase , An atkins phase etc... Then i went through broke phase at 39. I really didn't get the pre-diabetes diagnosis until after 46. I stopped the long distance running and shifted to a more of a calisthenics workout. Pull ups and HIIT training more functional muscle type stuff , ( 2 mile run consisting of sprinting then pull ups / push ups / dips. After the DNA test and the pre-disposition to diabetes after 45 i went to the doctor got blood work and thats when the doctor said my AC1 is high and Im pre-diabetic. I ate a LOT of choc-chip cookies in youth ( lol) and LOVED me a good brownie a la mode with a LOT of fudge . Now after this IF diet and the predisposition to diabetes and had to give up all that. This IF diet is working great for me now. Hopefully i can stay with it. I have dropped weight but do not want to be below 165. I think the ideal weight for me is around 170 lbs. I suggest everyone at LEAST give it a shot and get a 23andME test as you get older to find out if you have a pre-disposition. Then take some action or you will be on meds. Doctor never prescribed IF to me they don’t have time for it. Doctor never prescribed cross fit either. They just prescribe meds.
So did you reverse your pre-diabetes? It's hard to tell from this message. You mention that you feel better and that it's "working for me" but how can you know unless you get that blood work done? You may subjectively feel better but it may not be making a dent in your health.
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.
I Definitely "FEEL" better. Getting the blood work done next month. They use some A1C test, this is for type 2. I did loose weight and doc did say this status "can" be updated if you loose weight. Let's see. wish my luck! :-)
I don't calorie count. 4pm meal can be a cheese burger, Chinese food or paki food ( like chicken Karahi) I do an evening workout around 7pm with kettle bell swings to burn the sugar. Then i have a snack after. But Its very odd I am NOT hungry just like "used" to eating as if it's a memory. I am still getting used to this. I can't explain it clearly. I guess you just have to try it. My whole family has diabetes even my little brother who is 10 years younger than me. Could be the bad south Asian genes ( Pakistani) , I don't know. lol. I try to stay away from carbs such as white bread ,no ice cream / sugar etc... or i limit the amount of naan breads i have to like 1 when eating with a curry dish but i do love a chicken bryani once in a while but the portion size is less , i just can't eat like i used too before i started the IF diet.
>4pm meal can be a cheese burger, Chinese food or paki food (like chicken Karahi) I do an evening workout around 7pm with kettle bell swings to burn the sugar.
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.
YES. So i workout 12-1pm in the afternoon in a fasted state. The eve workout 12 min , is to burn any extra sugar i may have in my blood stream from eating at 4pm. I am with you. My pre-diabetes status is now gone. I think i may have to make IF a life long diet. I have NEVER felt better. I am 170 5' 10" solid I "was" 184 when i had the pre-diabetes diagnosis.
Jeez, or just eat 3 healthy balanced meals a day and stop obsessing over gimicks and fad diets. I can't imagine our ancient ancestors worrying about fasting or being keto.
>Jeez, or just eat 3 healthy balanced meals a day and stop obsessing over gimmicks and fad diets.
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).
Fasting is done by religious people (not renowned for their rational thought) to appease a god, not because they think it's supposedly healthy. And sure, replace my "three meals a day" with "regular eating throughout the day" if it makes you feel better. My point is, our ancient ancestors were foragers and would have grazed on plants throughout the day. It's what our bodies have evolved to do. As for keto, you said it yourself. It was used as a way to reduce epileptic seizures, not because it was thought of as the optimal way for humans to eat.
>Fasting is done by religious people (not renowned for their rational thought) to appease a god, not because they think it's supposedly healthy.
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.
I think you have it backwards. The reason people are fasting and doing keto is because it seems to be much closer to how our ancient ancestors lived. Fasting is a natural state many animals, including humans, are well equipped to enter. Not only are we equipped to enter fasting, but it seems to have some very good effects on us when we do it
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?"
You can get some of these benefits on keto, including steady energy levels, reduced brain fog, and no morning carb hangover headaches. The good news is you can eat what you want, the bad news is basically no carbs ever which makes eating out difficult.
I'm surprised a narrow IF feeding window gives the carb benefits, but sounds worth a try for sustainability long term.
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.
This was my experience when I jumped on the Paleo bandwagon about 10 years ago. Prior to that carbs were a substantial part of my diet. English muffins, bagels, toast and cereal in the morning, sandwiches for lunch and bread as part of every dinner, along with more cereal as a nighttime snack.
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.
Intermittent fasting has a nice advantage - nobody can make any money off of it. This gives it an inherent legitimacy. Contrast all other fad diets, and essentially every supplement ever sold.
I was brainstorming with a friend about creating an alternative social environment to replace restaurants for fasters, but couldn't come up with any good ideas.
I’d love to see a cafe (in my area at least) with a very social “hacker” vibe. Used books on all walls, electronic parts to build with, chess sets, events and meetups. A place a kid could come with $15 bucks and find a good tutor maybe (corkboard for community postings, jobs, clubs)
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.
>I was reading about how back in the day original coffee houses were a meeting place for socialites and thinkers alike to share ideas.
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).
Yeah that makes perfect sense, it is a bit sad to hear that even Europe is losing this part of the culture. We change with the times, of course... I do agree with your point about influencers moving out of city centers and towards more affluent suburbs, it would be interesting to see if there is a market for this after all closer to these areas. Nowadays as you said though, it’s not likely the ROI would surpass that of a retail location or well established franchise sadly.
Are there any study cafes/coworking places where you live? Those usually charge for time. That’d be the primary competition, as well as possible reference business model.
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. :-)
>Intermittent fasting has a nice advantage - nobody can make any money off of it.
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.
I would disagree here. You're assuming that Abrahamic religion solely integrated fasting for credit purposes. Whatever you think of religion, you can at least give them a point on that.
I think there is a distinction to be made. You can explain IF to someone in 5 minutes and they can do it tomorrow. That’s how I heard about it. Nobody owns the idea.
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.
Are you sure ? Targeting fasting people with ads at the right time of day is probably very lucrative. You can probably be sure that once algorithms pick-up that if some fasting people are more prone to click on ads they will push more people to try intermittent fasting regardless of the effects on health.
It's just leveraging the information you have on the user. That's what marketing companies do all day long. Bidding for ad spots in the marketplace and putting the right product at the right time in front of your eyes. Putting the ad of a local restaurant in front of a hungry man will result in more clicks than if the man is not as hungry, and more clicks than putting a pair of shoes.
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 don’t think it’s that different from other diets. The money is in books and consulting. People also need to know what to eat when they aren’t fasting so there is an opportunity there.
IF is actually very binary, you just don't eat when you're fasting and eat whatever you want when you're not. (But try to keep it under 600 calories if you're a man, 500 if you're a women. And of course the healthier the food the better, think fish, greens, etc.) It's that simple.
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 you are underestimating the capabilities of marketers to create products and then selling them. I also don’t think IF will be healthy if people eat whatever they want during non fasting time.
Fasting is not a diet .. it's whatever diet limited to time .. and yes there are tons of 'diets' that say they work better with fasting and sell crappy books about it ..
Eating proper food that isn't processed, putting the effort in to cook my own meals, eating lots of vegetables, fruit, nuts, legumes etc, also has a nice advantage to it. Fasting is another fad for people who don't want to put the effort in to eat well.
How can I make a fasting cookbook? The fasting gets results. What I like about fasting is that a person can't get into an argument on the Internet with a troll about what foods a person can eat and which are not apart of the diet. Are potatoes Paleo or not?
So they don't sell supplements but they will peddle you books, lecture tours, and even special foods at massive cost. It's like any other diet industry past the first glance.
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.
Have you also tried going a whole day without eating, say 8pm as your last meal and then no eating until 2 days later at 8am, basically 36 hours.
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.
How do you keep productive doing this? When I fast for more than 16h, my ability to focus decreases a lot. I don't have this luxury as a software developer. Sure I can fast in the weekend, but holy sh*t, my weekends aren't for suffering. It's the time I spend with my family.
Totally this. Of course Anecdata etc etc. I lost almost 40 lbs this year with 5-2 and exercise 3-4 times a week and have been able to maintain my goal weight doing 6-1. I don't eat anything crazy when I am eating. Just less carbs and more protein. I am also vegetarian.
I'm curious how you feel when you skip the usual meal time. When I start feeling ~hungry and willingly avoid eating, I naturally feel "stressed" but I can sometimes channel the void into another activity. It's as if going full head on this other topic 'feeds' my brain chemically.
in my experience, sleep is the first problem to be solved. If a person can't get good quality and quantity of sleep nothing else helps. First sleep then meditation to tame the chronic stress response.
nothing else - fasting, diet, exercise etc helps before sleep.
btw alcohol and caffeine screws the quality of sleep.
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.
Interesting. I alternate periods of good diet to periods of less healthy diet. I have been sleeping less than 6h a day fir for most of my adult life. 6h of sleep for me are ideal. But when I do regular relaxations (20 min) I can easily sleep 4.5h with no problems.
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).
Interestingly, I cut out sugar really strictly a few months back, including no fruit. A side effect is that I didn't nee caffeine to kick start me at work in the mornings.
I was vegetarian for about a decade and during that time my cholesterol was too low such that my doctor recommended "nuts, beer, wine, and hard liquor" as a way to boost my LDL. I saved the voicemail he left and it was a running joke that I had a prescription for the bar. The moment I started eating meat again my levels went back up.
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.
Might I ask what reason your doctor gave? To my current knowledge there's no blood LDL too low / blood LDL is not an adequate tool to judge any deficiencies.
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 went in for an annual physical and had blood taken. He gave me a call a few days later and it went to voicemail. He left a message saying the results were online and the only thing he saw as problematic was that my LDL was really low. He said being that I was vegetarian, nuts, beer, wine, and hard liquor were probably the best sources.
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.
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.
Did you still drink beer when doing IF? I think it may be worth trying IF again then without he beer consumption. Beer contains carbs and will thus increase your insulin levels and the alcohol will delay processing of carbs in your liver thus delaying the onset of fasting.
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.
Yeah... there are no nutritional absolute truths unfortunately. Some people have high LDL that is relatively resistant to lifestyle intervention, probably due to genetics. At least there is the option to take a cholesterol lowering drug.
I don't know the size and strength of the beer you are drinking, but maybe you could try cutting that out.
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 feel like going on IF without some kind of carbohydrate restriction (ideally, ketogenic diet) is a bit like alternating between stepping on the brakes and on the accelerator, i.e. not as healthy or effective.
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.
Problem with vegetarian diet is it allows for eating cheese and eggs which are full of cholesterol. I've been vegan for a while and my blood work has improved dramatically. Also, just being vegan/vegetarian doesn't mean anything unless you also eat well; lots of vegetables, fruit, nuts, legumes and whole grains. I'm guessing 8-10 beers a week didn't help, full of sugar.
The benefits of this diet seem to come from lowered blood sugar and a capacity to produce ketones that affect cellular signaling in various ways. The fact that you were doing so much aerobic activity tells me you probably had low enough blood sugar and high enough ketone synthesis rates that the dieting was redundant. Most people don't work out aerobically like that.
Assuming this is accurate, your lifestyle is not typical. Others trying intermittent fasting and/or vegetarian diet will surely see benefits in blood work.
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.
Sometimes, things are just things. Folks can have high cholesterol with a healthy diet, for example. This is because diet is only part of the picture and a partial method of getting cholesterol. You might just be someone that produces too much (or too little).
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.
As someone who still practises IF, I have been wondering if many of the immediate benefits (weight loss, low cholesterol, reduced inflammation markers, etc) are mostly apparent in sedentary, obese people. IF might work brilliantly for them because it's a psychologically "easy" shortcut to fixing a terrible diet.
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.
I think the anti-inflammatory benefits are very real. Digestion is a taxing process, especially so with our modern western diets that are high in protein, sugar, and fat. There are anti-inflammatory diets that might work with similar results, but I imagine fasting is a much more fool-proof way to get the benefits.
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'.
When I do IF it lowers my blood pressure (the only thing I can easily measure). I am pretty healthy, I cycle reasonably hard for 20 minutes twice a day (to work and back) and often more. I eat fairly well and am not overweight. Without IF my blood pressure hovers around the borderline for hypertension (my family has a history). With IF it drops to healthy levels.
> I find the 16/8 routine tends to work best for me personally
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.
Mental clarity is a challenge when fasting on an otherwise stereotypical American diet... those blood glucose swings are no joke.
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.
Interesting. I did an "animal-product only" diet for about six months, and I began to feel sorry for everyone else and their inability to think deeply. I was in an almost constant state of enlightenment. Then my buds convinced me to go on a 2000 mile road trip, and after the first stop at Wendy's I lost it, and haven't had the will to go back. It's been like 4 years now.
> Do you find that you're able to do cognitively demanding tasks while fasting?
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 do multi day fasts (water Ott broth fasts, so no carbs) and once I am in ketosis I actually feel like I can concentrate as well as when I eat.
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.
You could switch your metabolism to ketosis, then your energy level won't depend on blood sugar and will be more consistent through the day. I do my most cognitively demanding work without food.
There is a hump for me around 12-14 hours where I do feel distracted by the urge to eat. Once I make it past that I find that I have more mental clarity than before the fast.
I've done intermittent fasting both on a fat-based diet and on a carbs based-diet.
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.
I want to know the relative benefits of the different protocols (I asked on the fasting subreddit, but didn't get much response).
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?
I am relatively adapted to it at this point, so it doesn't bother me as much.
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.
While I haven't done 36, 24 is relatively easy. The idea that your body needs constant food intake is a modern myth. It's mostly your mind that's been programmed to want to eat that often. Also, once you eat the insulin spike triggers the next wave of craving, and so on. Fasting is not the same because you're well, um, fasting.
Also, if you avoid sugar for a week before fasting that helps a lot, or rather, I should say that it helps me. Eating sugar messes up my ability to know if I am really hungry or if it is just too many Candida bacteria in my system messing with my brain chemistry.
Anyway, if you like, try avoiding sugar leading up to avoiding fasting.
> The idea that your body needs constant food intake is a modern myth.
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.
>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.
The traditional Buddhist notion is that one should eat to the point where one more mouthfull would fully satisfy oneself.
In the West we've turned food into a source of pleasure. We no longer see it as a source of nourishment, and the foundation of our health, but as an entitlement to tongue orgasms.
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.
I have been on IF for almost three years and started recently on 36 hours once every three weeks. If you can do 24, 36 is not too much of a problem. My last 12 hours of the 36 hours is sleeping, so I don't think about food or feel hungry when I am sleeping. Also, I ended up doing it for 38-40 even though my intention was to do it for 36 hours because of my sleep.
Build up to it from shorter fasts. Pay close attention to caloric intake, it's easy to undereat when fasting. Eventually you will be unable to not maintain energy levels though the fast.
I have done a couple 36 hour fasts. What broke me was hunger, not low energy. Didn't feel any less energized than usual, really. But resisting the urge to eat after you've been hungry all day and someone puts a meal in front of you is hard.
in many people’s experience (mine included) there’s phase change sometime in the 48-72 hour mark in which hunger/appetite essentially disappears (some describe it is gone, some as easily ignored background noise)
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.
To underline this. People have died starting eating after a long fast. While the risks are probably manageable, and other people have successfully been fasting a full year, do educate yourself on Refeeding syndrome before doing any extended fasts.
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.
I am not familiar with the process anorexics go through, but it is likely very different - thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands, do fasting of 2-7 days on a regular basis with no ill effect (on the contrary - often with good effect).
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.
Please understand that everyone's body is different.
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.
I've been engaging in intermittent fasting to various extents for almost a decade now and am a huge fan of it.
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 didn't write OP, I just host it. And that particular page is also just some random notes I've taken on IF over the years, and not particularly comprehensive or high-quality.
From my personal experience over the past 2 years, intermittent fasting is great. It doesn't help me lose weight, but I am able to keep off about 80% of the weight I lose when I do a keto diet every few months.
I’ve been doing some form of intermittent fasting for a large part of the last 15 years.
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.
I have been intermittent fasting for about 23 hours a day in the last decade and this works very well for me, I couldn't imagine to eat more often than that.
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.
Once I realized that I was simply addicted to food, and that hunger was simply a withdrawal signal, it made it a lot easier to accept that signal as simply useful information instead of something that was necessarily uncomfortable (to be fair, I consider being cold and other such signals in a similar light). Now I rather enjoy being hungry, knowing there will be a brief hump to traverse before my body replies with a number of favorable responses.
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”).
This is a good experiment although you haven’t mentioned how you eat when breaking the fast. It seems a lot of advantages of IF will be suppressed if you continue consuming refined carbs during eating window. I am interested in IF setting where you consume same calories during eating window but only through ketogenic diet.
Thanks! Yes, I can imagine that that hypothesis would hold true and probably contributed to a higher fat loss. But, like I mentioned, I was keen to isolate <i>only</i> the fasting effect, without controlling for the diet.
I’ve been doing small fasts: typically in the morning, I don’t eat anything until after I work out. So, these usually end up being twelve to 16 hour fasts.
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.
How long are your rides? For rides around an hour to an hour and a half I can ride while fasting, even at the end of an 18 hour fast. The trick is to just work up to it.
This was a very interesting read. I’ve never gotten this in depth with my nutrition before. I’m beginning to think I might want to look more into a keto style diet.
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.
Listen to the latest Peter Attia podcast. Short answer for weight loss is to stay in zone 2, eat small amounts of carbs only during zone 2+ exercise, only enough for non-insulin-dependent GLUT4 transport. You can roughly double your fatty acid metabolism in a few months like this.
Apparently fasted training can help teach your body to stretch the glycogen stores. You won't set any PR's doing so, but it could help you down the road.
Same problem here. I'm also confused because some sources say coffee (black) is OK during fasting, but I've also heard that even black coffee "wakes up" the metabolism enough to lose the benefits.
Could someone who knows about this comment or post links to info: is black coffee during fasting periods OK?
There needs to be something with calories to metabolize to end a fasting period, coffee has low/no calories, you can have up to a fifty calories before the fasting is broken. Caffeine is metabolized, but has no caloric value so I don't think it would count.
Good discussion here. It sounds like some IF studies have had positive effects even if the participants are taking black coffee, however, the caveat is that they don't know whether not having black coffee would be more beneficial.
Try butter in your coffee. You get the creaminess without the lactose sugars.
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.
Plenty of ideas on milk alternatives, but I'd suggest you start fasting and initially keep the milk in your coffee. Once you've built the habit, you can figure out the milk situation.
If you just want the caffeine for awakeness in the morning, try caffeine pills. They are ridiculously cheap at like 5 cents a pill off of amazon and super easy to take. They are especially nice too if you are tired in bed in the morning as I just take a pill from my nightstand, swallow it, lay back in bed for 15 minutes and then I'm usually ready to get up.
> 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.
> 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.
Are there any active studies on intermittent fasting in healthy young adults? (NY area)
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.
> Epidemiologic data suggest that excessive energy intake, particularly in midlife, increases the risks of stroke, Alzheimer’s disease, and Parkinson’s
disease.
Would be great to have some new therapies for these terrible diseases.
I agree with the advice here to start slowly. I am not fasting right now because I am on the Dr. Fuhrman Eat to Live anti inflammatory diet, but usually I try to eat all my food on a given day in 8 to 9 hours, which leaves 16 to 15 hours a day fasting. Every few weeks, I like to get a one day fast in, but I am not always consistent with that.
By starting slowly, and by eating plenty of food during the eating periods, it is fairly easy to maintain energy during fasting.
> whether intermittent fasting will work for you is really easy to test
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...).
If anyone has done this without trying or wanting to lose weight (ie, for some other purpose), could you share more? What was your goal? Did you reach it? For 24+ hour fasts, did you deliberately compensate by eating more before and after?
I started IF with the plan of simply trying to be healthier. I'm big into fitness and read that even at the same calorie levels, there was a study where people who IF got leaner while staying around the same weight. So with those two items in mind I decided to give it a try a couple of years ago.
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.
I do - partially for experimental treatment of autoimmune conditions, but mostly just a way of life (no goal).
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.
>Animal
models show that intermittent fasting improves
health throughout the life span, whereas clinical
studies have mainly involved relatively short-
term interventions, over a period of months.
> 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.
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.
> This is just called skipping breakfast. But I guess there was a need for a new fancy term for an old thing.
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.
I really wish there was a movement to eliminate snacking. In my view that’s the real killer. Eat two or three times day and leave it at that. Whenever I start snacking on stuff between I start putting on weight.
For many people there's no snacking or eating outside regular meals (breakfast, lunch, dinner).
In this case 16/8 IF would be skipping breakfast which is exactly my case for many years now.
Has there been any research into the effects of nightly 6-8 hour fasts? I know this is just an N=1 anecdote but I’ve been on this plan for 35+ years and have nothing but positive things to say about it.
