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When it comes to nutrition and diet, we’re all looking for shortcuts. Too many of them lead to yo-yo dieting, no-earnings plans, and lots of expensive workout equipment or memberships, unused. So where does intermittent fasting, one of the burgeoning eating trends, now fit into this world? It is not a fad. The science is promising, it has a long history, and when approached with patience and thought, it can truly burn fat, promote weight loss, and improve overall health. Of course, there will be sacrifices. Here’s how to fight intermittent fasting and what to expect.
The benefits of intermittent fasting
A study published in the New England Journal of Medicine last December summarized decades of research into the practice that found intermittent fasting leads to weight loss and improves blood pressure, cholesterol, asthma symptoms and disease risk cardiometabolic. Less definitive evidence, for example, clinical trials, suggests that fasting may improve insulin resistance in patients with type 2 diabetes, improve surgical outcomes by reducing tissue damage, delay the onset of Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease, alleviate the symptoms of multiple sclerosis and impair tumor growth. Animal studies have shown that intermittent fasting improves the body’s response to stress, reduces tumor growth, reduces symptoms of multiple sclerosis and alleviates cognitive symptoms after brain injury.
So how does it work? When we eat regularly, the body depends on glucose, a simple sugar found in carbohydrates, for energy. When we fast, our glucose stores are depleted, forcing the body to turn to triglycerides, a type of fat, for energy. “Every time you eat, you are replenishing the glucose stores in the liver.»Says Dr Mark Mattson, Professor of Neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University and author of the NEJM study. It takes about 10 to 12 hours without eating to make this change. Every hour after that, the fat is broken down into ketones, which provide energy to the brain. This metabolic switch has a number of beneficial effects for our health.
Mattson says that most cancer cells depend on glucose, so making the body dependent on ketones could deprive cancer cells of energy and inhibit tumor growth. Clinical trials are currently underway on intermittent fasting in patients breast, ovarian, prostate, endometrial, brain and colorectal cancers. And animal studies have shown that fasting can reduce tumor growth and improving the body’s response to stress, which Mattson says gives reason to believe it might improve the side effects of chemotherapy and radiation therapy, both of which are extremely stressful on the body.
In Mattson’s research on rats, fasting activated the parasympathetic nervous system, in contrast to the fight-or-flight response. This explains the positive effects of intermittent fasting on blood pressure, cholesterol, and the risk of heart disease. The parasympathetic nervous system slows the heart rate and lowers blood pressure, much like aerobic exercise, Mattson says. Intermittent fasting also appeared to protect rats’ neurons (specialized cells that transmit information in the brain) from aging, which reduced their risk of Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and stroke.
In the future, intermittent fasting could even be used to treat some forms of diabetes. New evidence suggests that it helps regulate insulin, the hormone that controls the amount of glucose in the blood. When the body is sensitive to insulin, it can quickly process food and remove sugar from the blood, says Dr. Felicia Stager, dietitian and postdoctoral researcher at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. When desensitized to insulin, blood sugar levels remain high, which can cause eye and kidney problems and lead to type 2 diabetes. study men with prediabetes consuming the same number of calories as usual but limiting meals to a six-hour window early in the day increased insulin sensitivity and decreased blood pressure and oxidative stress – a kind of inflammation caused by an imbalance between free radicals and antioxidants which can lead to diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease and cancer.
Why would earlier meals be helpful? Stager says it all depends on the circadian rhythm or the sleep-wake cycle. In the morning, we are more sensitive to insulin, which helps control blood sugar. She describes the circadian rhythm as a system of anticipation. Your body anticipates light, increases its insulin sensitivity in the morning to prepare for the day, and lowers it at night in anticipation of sleep. “Eating in tune with these daylight hours really aligns the brain clock with the body clock, ”says Stager.
How to implement intermittent fasting
The fasting periods in the second study were severe – participants ate all of their meals within a six-hour window, finishing dinner before 3 p.m. But Stager says it doesn’t have to be so dramatic. “In general, we know that reducing a person’s normal eating habits, so if someone eats normally over a 12 hour period, reducing that to a 10 hour period is probably going to offer some benefit. I think more than the length of the fast is the timing of the fast, ”Stager says. For starters, she recommends just moving dinner a little earlier.
After a few weeks of eating meals like this, participants in the Early Restricted Eating Study lost their appetite at night, so it’s likely that after getting over that initial 2-4 week bump, fasting intermittent could be relatively easy to maintain. But for those who find it difficult to go long hours without eating, exercise can help speed up the time it will take for this metabolic change to occur. “[Exercise] will accelerate the depletion of the liver’s energy stores and the shift to fat, ”says Mattson. While many people find it easier to stick to a short meal window by skipping breakfast, Stager says it won’t be as beneficial to wait all day to eat and then binge on dinner. because you will likely eat differently from what you would have eaten earlier. the day.
If you’re looking for intermittent fasting to help you lose weight without changing what you eat, know that it is not that simple. The NEJM study indicates that intermittent fasting is as effective a weight loss method as diet, citing a literature review of six short-term studies. These studies were based on a two-day intermittent fast, in which participants went a few days a week eating only a few hundred calories. It makes sense that cutting off entire days of food would lead to weight loss. But the researchers noted that these types of eating habits were “not well tolerated.”
Early restricted eating, the type of intermittent fasting that was the focus of the second study, in which subjects ate all of their meals over a six-hour period each day, did not lead to weight loss, even if it was by design. Participants said eating all of their regular meals in such a short period of time was more difficult than not eating at night, so this type of behavior might not be replicated outside of a lab. Either way, the study results indicate that “It’s really not a weight loss method,” Steger says, noting that people who lose weight with IF reach a maximum of 1 to 2 percent of their body weight. “I kind of refer to this as a safeguard for people who are really struggling to make other changes to their diet,” Stager says.
Like other healthy but hard-to-maintain habits, the effects of intermittent fasting only work as long as you do. While the benefits can be seen in as little as 2-4 weeks, they reverse just as quickly once you stop fasting. “IIt’s sort of a diminishing returns thing, ”Mattson says, comparing it to exercise. While you have benefited from any length of intermittent fasting, the benefits will not be lasting when you return to a normal diet. If you lose weight, you’ll gain it back the same way you would after you quit another diet, Stager says. So IIf you use fasting to lose a few pounds and then stop, the weight loss will be no more sustainable than going on a crash diet and going back to your normal eating habits.
More, the effects of intermittent fasting are pale compared to those one would see with significant weight loss. And nor can it replace healthy eating habits. “If someone is eating really badly, they should probably target the what rather than the when ”. Stager said. Children, the elderly, pregnant women, and anyone who has had problems with biting and bleeding should avoid intermittent fasting. In general, limiting your meals to a shorter amount of time seems to have some advantages over grazing all day. But nothing can replace a balanced and diverse diet.
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