Weight loss slow? Need to change things? Likely NO!So, you have been clean fasting a few weeks, even a few months. Perhaps weight loss has been slow or even non existent! Maybe it all started with a hiss and a roar but now....nothing? First up, let me say, there are absolutely quicker ways to loose weight. You probably know this as you have probably experienced this yourself in the past. Restrict those calories, swap meals for shakes, cut out entire food groups and chances are you have seen dramatic changes and quickly. But, if those things worked long term, were sustainable and provided life long weight loss, chances are you wouldn’t be here!
Now before we talk about possible changes to your fasting schedule or foods, let’s make mention of those who may very well experience low or very slow weight loss with IF. The first group is people who have been overweight or obese for a long time. Because of this, it’s likely your body has some form of insulin resistance, pre diabetes or even diabetes. When your body is insulin resistant, it automatically releases more insulin and of course with more insulin, even when fasting, it will take longer to lower those insulin levels and allow access to the stored fats to use as fuel. This can result in a period of no weight loss, or very slow weight loss. Don’t give up! The next group is those who have come to IF after living a low carb or keto lifestyle and have reintroduced carbs. This is because there is an increase in water retention with carbs and also explains rapid weight loss when severely restricting carbs. Hang in there, this will balance out over time! The third group who may experience slow or no weight loss to start are those who have been on a very low calorie diet. When restricting calories, your metabolism slows down to sustain life. If your body uses 2000 calories a day to function and you restrict calories to 1000, over time you will run out of energy stores and die. The body wants to survive and so to ensure survival, it will slow metabolism to 1000 to ensure survival. Because your metabolism is much slower now due to a restricted calorie diet, it can take much longer to have success with IF but, many people do have success so stick it out! Now assuming you have ruled out the above and yet here you are experiencing the all too familiar dreaded plateau. Is it time to panic? Are you worried this may be yet another failed weight loss “plan” and about to throw it all in? Now you start looking for restrictions, do you cut all sugar? Stop Carbs? Go vegan, dairy and wheat free? Should you do extended fasts or alternate day fasts? In short, NO! Firstly, are you absolutely sure you are in a plateau? If you are weighing, make sure you weigh daily then average your weekly weights. Weight goes up and down daily, if you weigh every week on a Friday you are not getting accurate picture of true weight loss. Thursday’s weight might have been lower than Friday! So add together your daily weights and divide by 7 then monitor those. Maybe the weekly weights are stable, the same or very slow, is this a plateau? Possibly NO! Have you taken measurements? Is there absolutely no change? You can have amazing body re-composition meaning you are loosing inches and dropping dress sizes while your weight remains the same. Take pictures, compare them to your start pictures and have a check on those pants that were too tight to start or that dress you couldn’t quite fit in to. Still nothing? Do you now start changing things around? Possibly NO! How long has this plateau been? If it is less than 8-12 weeks, carry on clean fasting and revisit this in 8-12 weeks. Right, so now we have a few that are still here. Same weight, same size, no inches lost, still cannot get into those goal pants and are 100% clean fasting every day. (If you are having cream in your coffee, flavoured tea, chewing gum, broth or any other fast breakers, please re-read my blog on clean fasting and realise this is likely the cause of your plateau). So, now do we start tweaking things? Guess what? Still maybe no! I don’t encourage calorie counting at all with IF but are you listening to your body? Are you stopping when satiated? Or do you eat beyond satiety or snack throughout your entire window? If the answer is yes, you may need to work on this first. You can absolutely eat too much in your window! My next tip would be to check your fast vs window. It might be time for you to tighten your window a bit. Maybe a 2-5hr window will be better for you. I don’t like to encourage severe food restrictions or cutting out entire food groups unless it is medically necessary. The reason being that having a full and healthy balanced diet is good for us. Carbs, often vilified, are great for the gut and microbiome (especially those high in fibre and starch) so I don’t encourage an entire boycott! I also don’t send people straight to longer fasts, alternate day fasting or other restrictions. You see IF is a lifestyle that is fantastic for health (que autophagy) and it is sustainable long term. Starting to add restrictions like calorie counting, cutting out food groups or fasting for 48hrs twice a week can be very difficult to maintain long term and can quickly send people on a slide right away from Intermittent fasting altogether! Having said that, if you find you are really stuck, it’s been many weeks or months with no changes and you still have a lot of weight to release, you might consider delaying some things for a few weeks or months to see if they help you get closer to your goal. My first suggestion is alcohol, if this is something you have fairly regularly, it might be worth a few weeks off to see if that helps. My next would be sugar, reducing sugar intake or delaying might help speed things up. Reducing the highly processed foods would be my other suggestion, start by adding a few more healthy options to your day. Now what if you are doing everything right. You clean fast, you eat to satiety and good healthy foods and you are on a 2-5hr window? Well, what other option do you have than to give it TIME? IF is so good for us for so many reasons, the process of Autophagy helps reduce the risk of cancer, diabetes, reduces blood pressure, reduces risk of dementia and so many other benefits that these alone are worth sticking around for! So please be patient, give it time and remember, it is the health plan with a side effect of weight loss! This Picture on the left is November 2018, I am exactly the same weight as the picture on the left, July 2019. I’ve essentially stopped weighing as it doesn’t change but I’m still experiencing huge changes in body re-composition, inches lost, and dress sizes. Ignore the scales, they don’t tell the whole story!
To talk or not to talk about Fasting?So you have been fasting for a little while, a few weeks or perhaps a few months. Have you told anyone what you are doing? Have you had sideways looks, perhaps been told you are crazy, it can’t be good for you or that you will ruin your metabolism?! Or just simply “oh, I couldn’t do that, I can’t go without breakfast”! Of course many of us might have responded the same before we saw the light!
Now for most of us we have read a bit about fasting to know none of this is true but it can be difficult when faced with this sort of response to know exactly what to say. We have had 40 years of being told we need to eat less and move more to loose weight and told we need to eat regularly to “preserve our metabolism”. That is an entire generation, or two or three that believe these statements and so we have a difficult job ahead trying to re-educate when that has been the advice of a lifetime. Early on I didn’t tell anyone I was fasting. It was new to me, I was still reading and learning, and....I felt I needed some results to say “see, it works!” Now of course, I tell anyone who will listen! My start point is always the science, “there have been a lot of new studies around weight loss over the last 5 or so years that show weight gain is hormonal.” I then explain insulin and it’s job as a fat storage hormone. “By reducing insulin, we correct the balance and enable our body to do what it was designed to do and use stored fats for fuel.” There will be doubters no matter how you present the information but I simply plant the seed and move on. I have found that by starting with the studies and then explaining insulin and how it works, people are actually very open to fasting. If you simply say “I fast, I don’t eat for 20hrs” people think you are mad....starving yourself, ruining your metabolism, going to gain all the weight as soon as you eat etc etc. For those who may doubt there are a ton of studies, books and amazing inspiring stories to prove them wrong. I always suggest Delay don’t Deny by Gin Stephens first, followed by The obesity code by Dr Jason Fung. Then of course for the specific metabolism question, I talk to them about this study in particular (as it’s from a well known TV show): https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27136388. This is the biggest looser study which shows persistent metabolic adaptation 6 years after their restricted calorie and increased exercise regime. In other words, the participants experienced a reduction of around 500 calories per day after their restricted calorie diets than would be required for someone of the same weight/size. They would need to eat 500 fewer calories to maintain their weight loss long term, which is why of course it’s so difficult to maintain weight loss with restricted calorie diets and why people very often gain more weight back than when they first started restricting calories. With Intermittent fasting, you fast clean (nothing to spike your insulin) so you can finally access all the stored energy right there on your body and therefore your body doesn’t get the signal that you are in calorie deficit which means NO detrimental effect on your metabolism. So, to tell or not to tell? That is entirely up to you. If you would rather not share for now, simply say “I’ll eat later” or “I’ve just eaten” next time you need to avoid something during your fast! Should we have a goal weight?For many of us, we are lead to believe weight is the best measure of health. A healthy BMI is drummed into us and we strive for a particular weight that we feel once we are there, life will be good. The trouble with using weight as a goal is, it’s not an accurate measure of health. Would you actually care what you weigh if you had the body of a supermodel or an elite sports person? Not likely. Yet so many rely heavily on the scales as a measure of progress and let it dictate how the day will go depending on what it tells us each morning!
As Bert Herring discusses in his book - AC: The power of appetite correction “weight is not a great goal as a lot of things influence your weight aside from fat in your body. Your body is 70% water”. As we know, the balance of fluids can vary greatly from day to day depending on foods we eat, the amount or perspiration, the loss from our breath or urination. “The fluctuations caused by changes in the water content of your body can shift your weight up and down by more than a pound every day” - Bert Herring. As I have discussed previously, IF increases bone density and muscle mass so while fat loss might be going well, it may not show on the scales. So if we should ditch weight as a goal to work toward, then what? As you know by now I encourage taking photos, good clear shots, front on face shots that are easy to replicate, full body front and side shots. Have some goal clothes, they need to be firm fitting. Stretch leggings with an elastic waist don’t make good goal clothes! Think jeans, a dress or suit that you would like to get back into. It might be a size. Perhaps a size you haven’t been since high school or university. It might be a size you last felt your best at. Use that as your goal. Think about where you want to be physically, regardless of weight. It might be you want to partake in a sport, keep up with the kids, or be able to walk a flight of stairs easily. If you feel you need a goal weight, that is ok too, just don’t let it dictate your progress. Have it along side your goal body, your goal size and your physical aspirations. Measure it but don’t compare to yesterday’s weight, track it and then..ignore it! Check those clothes, check those photos and measurements and continue to FAST! When I started, I had a goal weight. I kind of still do I guess, but it doesn’t matter any more. Probably 70% of the clothes I now wear are my goal size so I got to my goal size before my goal weight. In fact, the last time I was this size, I was at least 6kgs lighter than I am now! So set yourself a goal size, a goal body and a physical goal, and watch the progress of those much closer than you watch the scale! Fasting and ExerciseExercise and Diet has long been promoted as the most effective way to loose weight. Ask anyone and they will likely produce one, the other or a combination of both as the “best” way to reduce weight.
Yes, it’s true! Exercise is good for you, it’s got amazing benefits such as improved energy, mental clarity, improved circulation and it’s great for your mental health. One thing that is not guaranteed, is weight loss. The woman’s health study (the biggest most comprehensive diet study ever done), shows when the 39,876 participants were divided into three groups, high, medium and low levels of weekly exercise. The intense exercise group lost no extra weight over 10 years. (Buring et al. Physical activity and weight gain prevention, Woman’s Health study).
So why don’t we loose weight when we increase our exercise or perhaps more directly, why is weight loss so much lower than expected when we set out on a weight reduction exercise programme? Dr Jason Fung advises it is due to compensation. It is due to an increase in caloric intake following exercise. Remember, our body likes the status quo. If it is pushed to use 2500 calories a day due to increased exercise, but it only gets the usual 2000 calories, eventually the body won’t survive long term, so it panics and increases hunger or reduces metabolism to cope with the difference. This is known as homeostasis. Studies show that reducing calories in, reduces calories out (slowed metabolism) and the opposite is also true. Increasing calories out, increases calories in - Dr Jason Fung, The Obesity code. It’s called “working up an appetite”, our grandparents were right on so many levels! So should we exercise? Absolutely, as I already mentioned, it has many benefits and is great for you! But should we lug ourselves out the door at 5am to go through a gym routine we despise? NO! Find something you enjoy, something you actually want to do and do it for you, not the scales. What about exercise while in a fasted state? No problem. Remember, we don’t need to supply our body energy to get through a workout. There is plenty of energy stored within that the liver supplied via gluconeogenisis (the formation of glucose from within the body). If you have a medical condition, including diabetes, you may need to be careful as fasting while exercising may produce low blood sugar levels, always check in with your GP if you are concerned. Do I exercise? Yes! I do a Pilates class every week and have done since my 2nd tiny human was 4months old. It is one of my most favourite exercises and I hate to miss a class (so very rarely do). I also ride once a week, I like to swim and I see more stand up paddle boarding in my future too! And while it’s not exercise, I LOVE my Shakti mat. It is a form of acupressure and is amazing for blood flow, relaxation and stress reduction, I use it several times a week. I’ll pop a link to the website on my links tab in case anyone is interested. Fasting and all the changes on the insideWhile many people will start Intermittent fasting for the weight loss, they tend to stay for the all the other benefits that come with Fasting. In the early days it can be hard to move beyond the diet mentality as it was likely one of the biggest factors in starting but hopefully you stick around long enough to be convinced of those benefits for life! I promote IF as a lifestyle because having the mentality that it is something you will do until you get to the size you want is somewhat flawed. When you reach that “perfect” size or weight, what next? Do you assume you will go back to your old ways but magically maintain that weight loss and the other health benefits you gained? The reality is, diet mentality is of no use to anyone! We needed a way of life that is flexible, fits with our life, gives us health benefits and weight loss and that we can adapt to suit any lifestyle we live. Guess what? We found it! So while we wait for some of those benefits to kick in for ourselves, let’s talk about them here to keep you motivated! I have touched a little bit on what happens during a clean fast such as the process of Autophagy and the lowering of insulin but deep down, what other benefits can we expect to see while living an Intermittent Fasting lifestyle? You can see my post below regarding Autophagy and all the benefits that come with it and I’ll pop a link here to some information if you wanted a refresher: http://www.cavemandoctor.com/2012/04/06/autophagy-turning-stress-into-health/ As you can see in that study, the process of Autophagy reduces cancer, insulin resistance, infections, ageing, heart disease, neurodegenerative diseases and inflammation. That is big stuff right? Dr Valter Longo, a human ageing expert found that IF had a significant impact on the risk of breast cancer recurrence. He believes Fasting has the potential to delay ageing and prevent the onset of diseases such as cancer and heart disease. According to Dr Mosley, intermittent fasting is good for gut health. In a recent interview he states “a big study shows intermittent fasting encourages the growth of anti-inflammatory gut microbes”. So what does this all mean for us? According to Dr. E.M. Quigley in his study on gut bacteria in the journal of Gastroenterology and Hepatology “having a wide variety of these good bacteria in your gut can enhance your immune system function, improve symptoms of depression, help combat obesity, and provide numerous other benefits”. It is now widely accepted that fasting is the most efficient way to decrease insulin levels. Does that effect you? Absolutely! We know high levels of insulin are associated with weight gain and obesity. As Dr J. Fung discusses in his book The Obesity code, insulin causes weight gain. It has been proven for many many years in numerous studies, done mainly on diabetic patients, the higher the levels of insulin the body secretes, the more obesity we see. So let’s reduce our insulin to help with weight loss and remember, it will also help reduce your risk of developing type 2 diabetes. “Fasting is great for your body metabolically” - Gin Stephens. It’s true, unlike the old calories in vs calories out approach which will crash your metabolism, IF is proven to increase your metabolism! Of course with a healthy metabolism your entire system will benefit. “Fasting increases human growth hormone” - Dr Jason Fung. This is important for increasing your energy, your muscle mass and your bone density. It’s also a reason I’m a fan of ignoring the scales! See below, I haven’t lost one single kg of weight on the scales between the photos. The first pictures are September 2018 (almost 6 months into my IF lifestyle) and the comparison photos from Dec 18 and Jan 2019. Not one kg lost but I’m down inches, down another dress size, and the changes are significant! We may not see all the effects of fasting but we can see here there are things going on in the background that the scales don’t tell us about! So while you start on your IF journey, keep in mind the change in mindset from “diet” to lifestyle. Remember there is so much more going on than weight loss. At times in your journey there may not be weight loss, but that is ok because the body has a lot of work to do behind the scenes! Has your blood pressure come down? What’s your resting pulse like now? Clearer skin? More energy? Reduced inflammation? heart burn gone? It’s a journey that is worth sticking with! What to eatI have spent a bit of time now talking about the fast and keeping it squeaky clean to avoid any insulin spikes. If you are a member of my Facebook group you will know this is not negotiable! But what about when it is time to eat?
Up until now, any diet you have likely embarked on has involved restriction, counting calories, journals, recipes, special foods or removal of foods. The stress when you are invited out for dinner while you wonder if there will be anything you “can” eat on your diet or how you will get by avoiding dessert while everyone else at the table indulges! Well I can tell you now, you can forget all that! I’m not here to give you a meal plan. There is no calorie restriction or cutting out entire food groups with IF. You are an adult and I have every confidence that by now you know what foods provide great nutrients and what foods don’t even really count as foods! “We should no longer fear carbs or fats or even protein. Or grains. Or beans. Or dairy. Or meat. Don’t fear any real foods that humans have been eating for generations. The key is real foods” - Gin Stephens, Feast without Fear For those new to Intermittent fasting, it may be a case of a “see food and eat it” during your window to start. It can be difficult to adapt at first particularly if you have had years of restrictions. But over time your body will start to crave healthier, more nutrient dense foods. The smaller my eating window has become, the more important it is to me to eat good wholesome and super tasty food! Not just any old meal will do. In fact I’m a complete food snob now! Chocolate? Absolutely, but a nice dark or rich milk chocolate, m&m’s? No thanks! - once a fave they just don’t taste good to me anymore! I eat full fat foods, butter, bacon, avocado, Camembert cheese, full fat mayo, and milk. Fresh vegetables and in season fruits, good cuts of meat. If it’s only one meal and a snack, it has to be worth it! I never drink diet Soda now, if I’m going to indulge it’s the proper stuff, I taste chemicals now if I drink the diet stuff, ugh. So what I’m trying to tell you, is relax. Eat good, wholesome foods, eat what your body craves. You will get better at listening to your body over time as well as learning what foods help you feel good. Gin has a 2nd book “Feast without Fear”. Again, there is no meal plan or dietary restrictions, rather she looks at what those populations who have good health and longevity eat. She discusses whole foods and real foods and how to include those into your If lifestyle. For those who have read her book “Delay don’t deny” they will see that it’s ok to have pizza, she loves Doritos and I know she has bread, real butter and a glass of wine every night for dinner! 80+lbs down and maintained for 2+ years, IF really is the best “meal plan”! I have never restricted or denied myself anything over the last 10months. Ive gone from a size 16 to a 10, around 17kgs and counting. I do delay, I have been known to make a chocolate self saucing pudding at 8pm because I was craving it but because my window was long closed, I packed it to have after lunch the next day! The advantages of Intermittent FastingOne of the most difficult things about a new diet plan is that they are very difficult to follow and/or stick with long term. Be it low calorie (que hunger, low mood, low energy and a constant preoccupation with food), sugar free, paleo, keto, low carbohydrate etc. Inevitably these effect the way you live your life and over time, almost always, those things you cut out, make their way back in...either slowly over time, or in one GIANT slice of chocolate mud cake!
Living an Intermittent Fasting (IF) lifestyle is a long term change that is not only flexible, but very easy to maintain. There are so many proven health benefits and advantages to this lifestyle. “Fasting lowers your blood pressure, blood glucose and your risk of cancer” - Dr Jason Fung - The complete guide to fasting. “It also improves mental clarity and concentration, induces weight and body fat loss, improves insulin sensitivity, increases energy, lowers blood sugar levels and cholesterol, prevents Alzheimer’s disease and reverses the aging process.” (https://www.dietdoctor.com/intermittent-fasting) “The summary benefits of a successful fasting schedule maintained over a month or more include appetite correction, loss of surplus fat, decreased inflammation (measured in symptom severity or C-reactive protein CRP), decreased blood sugars in diabetics (measured by blood glucose or HbA1c) and decreased blood pressure in hypertensive people” - Dr Bert Herring Pretty impressive stuff right? That process of Autophagy I’ve talked about in previous posts really does change the path you are on for the better. So how is IF easier and more advantageous than other diets? To start off, aside from being free it’s straightforward. There are no food lists, restricted foods, no weighing, measuring (except your waist!), no counting. You simply fast, then feast then repeat. As covered above, it is incredibly beneficial for your health. “The quickest most effective way to lower insulin and insulin resistance is fasting.” -Dr Jason Fung It is flexible and convenient. You don’t need specific meals, home cooked with or without an entire list of ingredients 6 times a day. You can fast when you travel, while you camp, at work, at home, at school, you can fast on night shift, day shift or no shifts. It doesn’t matter what else you are doing, fasting fits. In fact there are other benefits too. Airplane food is disgusting at the best of times, no worries, fly fasted! It also works with almost any other diet. Vegetarian, perfect. Keto, absolutely, paleo, sugar free, low carb, go for it. But perhaps my most favourite part about this way of life? You can eat what you like! There is no restriction, cake? Yes! Wine? why not. It is easy enough to cut things out for periods of time....6 months sugar free, fine. But for life? Keto is fantastic for weight loss, many studies show it’s safe and effective with some of the benefits we see with fasting but keto for life? No cake ever again? This is why IF is so successful where so many others fail. It is 100% maintainable and liveable! Having lived like this for 10months now I can honestly say not once have I considered going back to my old 3+ meals a day. I have seen many of the benefits listed above, more energy, lower blood pressure, lower resting pulse rate, less bloating, mental clarity, appetite correction and of course the weight loss and all while enjoying the freedom IF allows to live my life. All about the fastSo by now you have a bit of an idea about what happens in our body when we eat (release of insulin to break down food into glucogen which will be used as energy or stored as fat). You also know that after a period of time without food, our body’s insulin levels are low which means we can access the stored glucogen from our liver and fat stores. So with this in mind you will understand that if your insulin is spiked at all during a fast, you are not only no longer accessing those fat stores, you are also stopping the amazing process of Autophagy! By sabotaging your fast, you won’t see the long term health benefits and weight loss that fasting can provide (even if in the interim you get some good results to start with).
So what can you safely have during your fast that won’t interfere with the very processes we are wanting to promote? In a nutshell, water, unflavoured sparkling water, black coffee, black or green tea. There are a few grey areas, which I’ll get into shortly. Essentially anything else, will spike your insulin and will sabotage your efforts. Even no calorie foods and drinks will spike your insulin. Studies show a sweet taste spikes insulin. Gin Stephens lists a study in her book that shows this process, you can check it out here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/17510492/ Dr Jason Fung allows a few extra things during the fast when he talks of fasting. Bone broth -home made only and only a cup a day, heavy cream (1-2 teaspoons once a day) or a little coconut oil. Personally, I don’t want to risk undoing any of the awesome processes going on in my body during a fast so I AVOID all these things entirely. Having read through the research and experienced this for almost a year now myself, I believe the clean fast is the most important thing and so therefore to me it is sacred and not to be messed with! Save it for the window! Now on the grey area. There are a few things that may spike your insulin...or may not! Because of this, I always recommend if you MuST try this in your window, wait until you have been entirely clean fasting for at least 2 months before you add these grey zone items! Knowing how your body copes with and responds to a squeaky clean fast, you will be able to add these and figure out if they do spike YOUR insulin. Check out the image below for these maybe items. Again for me, I personally don’t bother. There isn’t anything in that list I feel would help or enhance my fast so I stick with water (Did I mention I don’t drink tea and coffee?!). |
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Eat less, move more or Intermittent Fasting?
The last 50+ years we have all been taught the calories in vs calories out (CICO) approach to weight loss. We have believed for most if not all of our lives that the only way to successfully loose weight is to eat fewer calories than our body needs to function each day or to increase exercise to burn off those calories (eat less, move more).
16yrs ago, a diet fad swept through the world and Im sure you have all heard of it, The Atkins diet. This low carbohydrate approach to weight loss saw some great success for its followers but it also blew the CICO theory out of the water too. You see by following the Atkins diet, people were eating high fat/high protein and high calorie diets and loosing weight. So the idea that you HAD to restrict calories to loose weight was wrong. We can see it is wrong, the world is more obese than ever despite the CICO approach being widely known and used.
“The underlying cause of obesity turns out to be hormonal rather than caloric imbalance. Insulin is a fat-storage hormone. ” - Dr Jason Fung
When we eat our body releases insulin (even a sweet no calorie flavor in the mouth causes an insulin spike). Insulin helps the body use the food (glucogen) we eat as fuel. When we eat throughout the day (you know that old advice, 3 meals, plus snacks a day), our insulin is constantly circulating and, it will help our body store any excess as fat. This is a survival mechanism, we need those stores for times of scarcity. The problem is, living in this modern world, scarcity doesn’t happen. There are supermarkets and restaurants open 24/7, fast food and coffee shops on every corner and of course all that advice that we must eat regularly to “fuel” our metabolism.
When we dont eat for a while our glucogen gets low (hunger pains) and so does our insulin. If we dont eat, our body's have an amazing ability to do just fine! The low insulin means our body can access the stored fat in our liver for energy. Ever been super hungry but couldn’t eat right away and found the hunger then passed? That’s thanks to our livers for holding the energy for quick access!
If we continue to go without spiking insulin with periods of fasting, eventually our liver runs out and our body calls up our fat stores. Now fasting isn’t new, in fact our ancestors have been doing it all along. There have been well documented periods of time in our not so distant past that food was scarce. Think wartime, crop failures, population imbalances and supply chain issues to name a few. It’s here we realise just how well our body is designed to have periods of fasting, and do quite well!
16yrs ago, a diet fad swept through the world and Im sure you have all heard of it, The Atkins diet. This low carbohydrate approach to weight loss saw some great success for its followers but it also blew the CICO theory out of the water too. You see by following the Atkins diet, people were eating high fat/high protein and high calorie diets and loosing weight. So the idea that you HAD to restrict calories to loose weight was wrong. We can see it is wrong, the world is more obese than ever despite the CICO approach being widely known and used.
“The underlying cause of obesity turns out to be hormonal rather than caloric imbalance. Insulin is a fat-storage hormone. ” - Dr Jason Fung
When we eat our body releases insulin (even a sweet no calorie flavor in the mouth causes an insulin spike). Insulin helps the body use the food (glucogen) we eat as fuel. When we eat throughout the day (you know that old advice, 3 meals, plus snacks a day), our insulin is constantly circulating and, it will help our body store any excess as fat. This is a survival mechanism, we need those stores for times of scarcity. The problem is, living in this modern world, scarcity doesn’t happen. There are supermarkets and restaurants open 24/7, fast food and coffee shops on every corner and of course all that advice that we must eat regularly to “fuel” our metabolism.
When we dont eat for a while our glucogen gets low (hunger pains) and so does our insulin. If we dont eat, our body's have an amazing ability to do just fine! The low insulin means our body can access the stored fat in our liver for energy. Ever been super hungry but couldn’t eat right away and found the hunger then passed? That’s thanks to our livers for holding the energy for quick access!
If we continue to go without spiking insulin with periods of fasting, eventually our liver runs out and our body calls up our fat stores. Now fasting isn’t new, in fact our ancestors have been doing it all along. There have been well documented periods of time in our not so distant past that food was scarce. Think wartime, crop failures, population imbalances and supply chain issues to name a few. It’s here we realise just how well our body is designed to have periods of fasting, and do quite well!
Autophagy and Intermittent Fasting
In 2016 a man by the name of Yoshinori Ohsumi won the Nobel prize in Physiology and Medicine for his discoveries of mechanisms for Autophagy. What is Autophagy you ask? It is the body's process of breaking down and getting rid of old, damaged and broken cells. This process is critical in maintaining health as well as countering the negative consequences of aging.
"Disrupted autophagy has been linked to Parkinson's disease, Type 2 diabetes and other disorders that appear in the elderly. Mutations in autophagy genes can cause genetic disease. Disturbances in the autophagic machinery have also been linked to cancer" -https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/2016/press-release/?fbclid=IwAR3ErCgzxQrhZy3Gfbx118Ll4gOaRvO-eshNexyNPNT-873aNlCyJ88ZRtw
So what does this all have to do with Intermittent fasting? "Fasting (raises glucagon) provides the greatest known boost to autophagy" - Dr Jason Fung (you can check out his article here: https://www.dietdoctor.com/renew-body-fasting-autophagy?fbclid=IwAR00PmbZ5bB7jniW2mGOoMfHJL0IItR9kScOTc3UjvhD5ZbQVHCY3rkQ4I8)
You know what turns off Autophagy? Eating or rather, Insulin does. So fasting is the only way we can increase our body's cellular repair, a calorie restricted diet will still increase insulin so no Autophagy there!
You can of course over do autophagy. This is why the fasting we do is intermittent, followed by a feast where we feed and grow the cells which replace those autophagy got rid of!
"Disrupted autophagy has been linked to Parkinson's disease, Type 2 diabetes and other disorders that appear in the elderly. Mutations in autophagy genes can cause genetic disease. Disturbances in the autophagic machinery have also been linked to cancer" -https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/2016/press-release/?fbclid=IwAR3ErCgzxQrhZy3Gfbx118Ll4gOaRvO-eshNexyNPNT-873aNlCyJ88ZRtw
So what does this all have to do with Intermittent fasting? "Fasting (raises glucagon) provides the greatest known boost to autophagy" - Dr Jason Fung (you can check out his article here: https://www.dietdoctor.com/renew-body-fasting-autophagy?fbclid=IwAR00PmbZ5bB7jniW2mGOoMfHJL0IItR9kScOTc3UjvhD5ZbQVHCY3rkQ4I8)
You know what turns off Autophagy? Eating or rather, Insulin does. So fasting is the only way we can increase our body's cellular repair, a calorie restricted diet will still increase insulin so no Autophagy there!
You can of course over do autophagy. This is why the fasting we do is intermittent, followed by a feast where we feed and grow the cells which replace those autophagy got rid of!