The Good and The Bad of Intermittent Fasting: 2 Years of Experiments. Adopting a philosophy of self- experimentation can make a tremendous difference in your life. Choosing to experiment with new ideas can help you start a successful business. Can intermittent fasting exhibit beneficial effects including weight loss, improved cardiovascular health, decreased cancer risk and increased life span? Michael Mosley has since co-authored a book, The Fast Diet: The Secret of Intermittent Fasting, with Mimi Spencer. Many people now call this form of fasting the. Growth hormone builds muscle and burns fat. It's a potent combo for fat loss. Here's how you can naturally increase your own levels for better results. One of the more esoteric but much beloved tools in the paleo dieter. What is intermittent fasting? IF is the practice of. Choosing to experiment with sharing your work can launch your career as a writer or an artist. And choosing to experiment with different diets and workouts can help you discover a fitness and health strategy that works for you. Of course, self- experimentation is exactly the opposite of how most of us want to approach things. We would prefer that someone hand us a one- page sheet with the answers to our problems and say, . But in the case of intermittent fasting, which I. We take a closer look at the 16-8 Intermittent Fasting method, often just called 16-8 IF, or the 8 hour diet. Have questions about intermittent fasting? Here are some useful answers to common questions that people have to who try intermittent fasting. ![]() It's a quick 5 page PDF you can save and reference later as you try this yourself. Click here to get the guide, free. Intermittent Fasting: What It Is and How I Do It. Here's a simple definition of intermittent fasting: you eat your normal amount of food in a smaller time frame. It's not a diet, it's just a pattern of eating that reduces your eating window each day to about 8 hours. For example, I usually eat my first meal around 1. I can continue eating until my final meal at 8pm. After that, I fast until the next day at 1. That breaks out to about 1. I do this almost every day. I have previously written a 3,0. If you have questions about how it works and the science behind it, read those articles. And if you want even more information, I was also interviewed on the Fat Burning Man podcast (here) and the Jimmy Moore. The biggest benefit of intermittent fasting is simplicity. In an interview with Vanity Fair, President Obama described an interesting strategy he uses to make his life simpler. Because I have too many other decisions to make. I explained the science of decision fatigue in this article. For the President, simplifying his clothing choices is a way to make life simpler and improve his decision making abilities. For me, intermittent fasting provides the same benefit. Eliminating breakfast and not thinking about food until 1. I make in the morning, thus reducing decision fatigue and increasing the willpower I have for the rest of the day. That means I have more energy to put toward doing work that is important to me. One of the best ways to find happiness and success in life is to strip away the unnecessary things and focus only on what is needed. With intermittent fasting, I have been able to increase strength, reduce body fat, and maintain good health while spending less time eating each day. If you can get the same results by making life simpler and only eating twice per day, why would you make life more complex by eating three, four, or five times per day? Intermittent fasting is an excellent travel strategy. I used to be annoyed by the lack of healthy food options in airports. This is especially true in my case because I. Finding a sizable amount of healthy food is a tall task in most airports. The solution? Treat your travel days as a fasting day and then eat twice as much good food the following day. As an example, last year when I was flying back from Thanksgiving with my family, I didn. It ended up being about 3. So far, intermittent fasting has not hurt my long- term health. I'm not interested in doing intermittent fasting if it sacrifices my long- term health for short- term improvements. And for that reason, I've kept a close eye on how I feel, how my body is responding, and whether my overall health is improving or declining. Thankfully, I. And remember, this is after two years of intermittent fasting. I know that, in some cases, women believe that intermittent fasting has thrown their hormones off balance. I don't have any data on this and so all I can offer is my own experience. As with most things in life, your mileage may vary. Intermittent fasting isn. It seemed like all of the experts were saying that if I changed what time I ate, then I would lose fat and gain muscle easily. That sounded good to me. The reality, of course, is much different. I only started seeing the results I wanted when I combined intermittent fasting with a healthy diet of real, whole foods and consistent weightlifting. Intermittent fasting is just another tool in your toolbox. Just as eating a healthy diet of real, whole foods is another tool. And exercising regularly is another tool. And meditating or doing yoga to reduce stress is another tool. And sleeping at least 8 hours per night is another tool. You can. But I still think intermittent fasting is worthwhile because, as I said above, if you could get the same results while eating fewer meals and making life simpler, why would you add more meals and make life complex? On a related note, if you're looking for a simple way to eat healthier foods check out my “outer ring” strategy in this article. I have no idea if intermittent fasting will work for you. I can. All I know is that, as one piece of my overall strategy, it has worked for me. It works because it fits my lifestyle. It works because it is simple enough for me to not spend much energy thinking about it. And it works because it aligns well with my diet, which is mostly Paleo, and my training style, which is mostly Olympic weightlifting and other compound movements. If you're eating poorly or if you're training for an Iron Man or if your job doesn't give you the flexibility to eat your meals in an 8- hour window, then intermittent fasting might not be for you. You can experiment with other ways to achieve your goals. Where to Go From Here and What Actually Matters. No one will have the same experience as you . As someone who often cites academic research in their articles, I have the utmost respect for science. But you can't let a research study make choices for you. They can inform you, sure. But the only way to make progress and change your life is to make new choices, take action, and make adjustments based on the results. Whether it's intermittent fasting or something entirely different, I hope you'll choose to run your own experiments and see what works for you. Free Bonus: I created an Intermittent Fasting Quick Start Guide with a summary of the benefits of intermittent fasting and 3 fasting schedules you can use depending on your goals. It's a quick 5 page PDF you can save and reference later as you try this yourself. Click here to get the guide, free. Shattering the Myth of Fasting for Women: A Review of Female- Specific Responses to Fasting in the Literature. One of the more esoteric but much beloved tools in the paleo dieter’s tool- kit is intermittent fasting. What is intermittent fasting? IF is the practice of maintaining overall caloric intake while consuming those calories in fewer meals or in reduced time windows throughout the day. The goal is to create conditions of fasting in the body, but not for extreme lengths of time. Some examples of intermittent fast strategies include 1. The evolutionary premise — the argument that proponents of intermittent fasting make — is that humans evolved to optimize their health under less- than- optimal conditions. Fasting, they say, is a natural and perhaps even necessary part of being human. Amazingly enough, this happens without any of the psychological crippling side effects of cravings and food obsession that practictioners of. It is wholly understandable that fasting is all the rage these days. Sort of. I have a specific interest in intermittent fasting because of what I have witnessed both in myself and in working with literally thousands of women in the Pf. W community. Many women report to me (read more about that in this awesome book) that intermittent fasting causes sleeplessness, anxiety, and irregular periods, among many other symptoms hormone imbalance, such as cystic acne. I have also personally experienced metabolic distress as a result of fasting, which is evidenced by my interest in hypocretin neurons. Hypocretin neurons are one way in which intermittent fasting may dysregulate a woman’s normal hormonal function. After my own bad experience with IF, I decided to investigate intermittent fasting. I looked into both a) the fasting literature that paleo fasting advocates refer to, and b) the literature that exists out in the metabolic and reproductive research archives. Intermittent fasting and women: problems in paleo. What I found is that the research articles cited by Mark’s Daily Apple. This startled me because the article MDA cited was for me one of the strongest proponents of sex- specific differences in response to fasting. Sex differences were relevant. Still, the mere fact of being more sensitive to fasting simply by being a woman is, I would assert, pretty important for a woman who is contemplating or already practicing IF. This goes nearly unmentioned in the blogosphere. Intermittent fasting and women: problems in the literature. Beyond reporting biases in the blogosphere, there remains an even greater problem of a significant testing bias in the fasting literature. Searching “men” + “intermittent fasting” in a Harvard article database yields 7. Searching “women” yields 1. The animal studies are more equitable, but also a bit less applicable to human studies. There is an infertility condition – called hypothalamic amenorrhea – that millions of women suffer from due to being overly restrictive. But what of fasting? Intermittent fasting and women: should women fast? The few studies that exist point towards no. It is not definitive, since the literature is so sparse, and it necessarily differs for women who are overweight versus normal weight (and who have different genetic makeups), but when it comes to hormones, women of reproductive age may do well to err on the side of caution with fasting. What follows first is a brief review of what can be gleaned in sex- specific responses to fasting in animal studies. Afterwards I talk about what has been concluded by the few relevant human studies.——————————————————————- Mice and Rats. First up is a study that demonstrates the. Comparatively, the males’ genetic response was less specific, suggesting that the males respond to a general stressor but they seem to lack the ability to discriminate between a high energy and low energy stressor.”Moreover, “IF down- regulated many gene pathways in males including those involved in protein degradation and apoptosis, but up- regulated many gene pathways in females including those involved in cellular energy metabolism (glycolysis, gluconeogenesis, pentose phosphate pathway, electron transport and PGC1- . Female reproductivity down- regulates. In the researchers’ own words: “our data show that at the level of gonadal gene responses, the male rats on the IF regime adapt to their environment in a manner that is expected to increase the probability of eventual fertilization of females that the males predict are likely to be sub- fertile due to their perception of a food deficient environment.”——————————————————- In the final relevant IF rat study I could find, researchers subjected rats to the same diets– to 2. Calorie- Restricted (CR) diets, as well as to alternate- day fasting diets, and monitored them over the long term for hormonal responses. To elucidate the physiological basis of sex differences in responses to energy intake, we maintained groups of male and female rats for 6 months on diets with usual, reduced . In response to 4. CR, females became emaciated, ceased cycling, underwent endocrine masculinization, exhibited a heightened stress response, increased their spontaneous activity, improved their learning and memory, and maintained elevated levels of circulating brain- derived neurotrophic factor. Additionally, there was no significant change in the cognitive ability of the males on the 4. CR diet. Males and females exhibited similar responses of circulating lipids (cholesterols/triglycerides) and energy- regulating hormones (insulin, leptin, adiponectin, ghrelin) to energy restriction, with the changes being quantitatively greater in males. The high- fat/high- glucose diet had no significant effects on most variables measured but adversely affected the reproductive cycle in females. Heightened cognition and motor activity, combined with reproductive shutdown, in females may maximize the probability of their survival during periods of energy scarcity and may be an evolutionary basis for the vulnerability of women to anorexia nervosa. They also found this: The weight of the adrenal gland was similar in rats on all diets; however, when normalized to body weight CR and IF diets caused a relative increase in adrenal size, the magnitude of which was greater in females, compared with males. In contrast, both CR diets and the IF diet caused a decrease in the size of the ovaries. And this, bearing in mind that “daytime” for nocturnal rats is “nighttime” for humans: The daytime activity of females was doubled in response to IF, whereas the IF diet did not affect the activity level of males. Nighttime activity levels of males and females were unaffected by dietary energy restriction. And this. Women experienced no significant change. After 3 weeks of ADF, women but not men had an increase in the area under the glucose curve. This unfavorable effect on glucose tolerance in women, accompanied by an apparent lack of an effect on insulin sensitivity, suggests that short- term ADF may be more beneficial in men than in women in reducing type 2 diabetes risk. Feelings of fullness were significantly (P. That’s all that exists! Women don’t have much to go on. There are a few rodent studies. They found that when alternate- day fasting,female rats and found significant negative hormonal changes occurring in the females. There are even fewer human studies. Human studies on alternate day fasting have not been conducted on women of reproductive age at all, nor have any studies analyzed reproductive responses to fasting. Another important distinction to make is between different body weights. Overweight and obese patients appear to experience significant improvements with IF regimes, but normal weight patients do not show the same across- the- board benefits. For women this may be a particularly sensitive issue. Overweight women may experience metabolic benefits, whereas normal weight women do not. I suspect that that may roughly be the case, but who knows. Honestly, no one at this point. The practical solution, then, I believe, is to look at options, to be honest about priorities, and to listen to one’s body with awareness and love. Is fasting worth trying if a woman is overweight and trying to improve her metabolic markers, and so far hasn’t had much success? But the literature is so sparse in this area that we cannot make any real statements or predictions about the effects of fasting, other than that we just don’t know, and that we should continue to. There are boatloads of others. If you’re interested in reading about the collective set of them and learning how to optimize female skin, weight loss, and hormone balance, for a few examples, you could do worse than my best- selling! What do you think?- -- -- -- -So, just as a heads up - some links above may be my affiliate links, which means I get a small commission if you click on it and make a purchase. Doing so is no additional cost to you, but helps me tremendously. Your support is SO greatly appreciated, so thank you in advance if you choose to do so. Check out my entire disclosure to know exactly how things work. Intermittent fasting, cortisol and blood sugari. Stock. com/magann. There’s been a lot of discussion about the benefits of intermittent fasting (IF) in the paleo community lately. Paul Jaminet mentions it’s role in boosting the immune system in his book, The Perfect Health Diet, and IF can also be helpful for those trying to lose weight and tune their metabolism. From an evolutionary perspective, intermittent fasting was probably the normal state of affairs. There were no grocery stores, restaurants or convenience stores, and food was not nearly as readily available or easy to come by as it is today. Nor were there watches, schedules, lunch breaks or the kind of structure and routine we have in the modern world. This means it’s likely that our paleo ancestors often did go 1. So, while I agree that IF is part of our heritage, and that it can be helpful in certain situations, I don’t believe it’s an appropriate strategy for everyone. Why? Because fasting can elevate cortisol levels. One of cortisol’s effects is that it raises blood sugar. So, in someone with blood sugar regulation issues, fasting can actually make them worse. I’ve seen this time and time again with my patients. Almost all of my patients have blood sugar imbalances. And it’s usually not as simple as “high blood sugar” or “low blood sugar”. They often have a combination of both (reactive hypoglycemia), or strange blood sugar patterns that, on the surface, don’t make much sense. These folks aren’t eating a Standard American Diet. Most of them are already on a paleo- type or low- carb diet. Yet they still have blood sugar issues. In these cases, cortisol dysregulation is almost always the culprit. When these patients try intermittent fasting, their blood sugar control gets worse. I will see fasting blood sugar readings in the 9. That’s why I don’t recommend intermittent fasting for people with blood sugar regulation problems. Instead, I suggest that they eat every 2- 3 hours. This helps to maintain stable blood sugar throughout the day and prevents cortisol and other stress hormones like epinephrine and norepinephrine from getting involved. When my patients that have been fasting and experiencing high blood sugar readings switch to eating this way, their blood sugar numbers almost always normalize. I don’t think eating every 2- 3 hours is “normal” from an evolutionary perspective. But neither is driving in traffic, worrying about your 4. Facebook. The paleo template is there to guide us, but it’s not a set of rules to be followed blindly. This should also be a reminder that there’s no “one size fits all” approach when it comes to healthcare. Successful treatment depends on identifying the underlying mechanisms for each individual and addressing them accordingly. Like what you’ve read? Sign up for FREE updates delivered to your inbox. I hate spam too. Your email is safe with me.
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