*Gasp!* Yes, I know this subject is taboo... even though Christianity and other religions lists it as a discipline of faith, fasting is more likely to elicit rants of cautions as images of Karen Carpenter or Mary-Kate Olsen flash before their eyes. You'll be lucky not to be given a psych referral while you're still explaining that it's actually a healthy thing.
That's right, there are health benefits to fasting... not just spiritual, mental, political, but biological. Here's the bullet points-- because I love bullet points!!
Time restricted eating has been shown to:
- Result in a 70% decrease in body fat in mice (that alone entices me, but there's more!)
- Decrease inflammation
- Clear damaged white blood cells and increase their number
- Increase immunity
- Improved blood glucose levels
- Improved lipid (cholesterol) levels
- Improved sleep
- Increases BDNF (brain derived neurotropic factors--"miracle grow for the brain")
- Cause hematopoietic stem cells to increase and self-renew --hello MS patients!!
- Improved aging biomarkers like IGF-1 ...Hark! Did someone say "lean out"?
- Make cancer cells more vulnerable (while fasting) while protecting the patient's cells
- Be easy to implement (at least in the 11-12hour window)
Fasting is a major way that we autophagize or take out all of our cellular trash we make all day by just eating, drinking, and just being alive. In some studies, intermittent fasting was shown to improve cognitive function, brain structure, and neuroplasticity, which may help the brain to learn more easily. Other exciting studies on time restricted eating and fasting-mimicking diets help us (as listed above) make stem cells, new blood cells, replenish WBCs, positively effect systemic inflammation, lipid levels blood glucose levels, hemoglobin A1c levels, and in cancer patients, seemed to protect their cells while making the cancer cells more vulnerable to the chemotherapeutic agents. Further research in this area has been done in breast cancer research, where subjects ate within an 11-12 hour window and reported sleeping better, losing weight, and had a great level of compliance. As a nurse, I'm reading this and thinking about M.S. patients, diabetic patients, cardiac patients, neurological patients.... HECK, all the patients!!!
But wait, there's more!!! In Dr Satchin Panda's findings: in a mice study, restricting feeding times to 12 hours lead to reduced obesity and increased muscle mass as compared to unrestricted mice, despite the same diet of high fat and high sugar. Obesity was reduced by 70%. No lie, I had been trying these things all of last spring after listening to these researchers through Dr Rhonda Patrick's podcast called Found My Fitness (highly recommended). I ate in 11-12 hour window all while faithfully eating paleo and minding my calories like I always had, but still that darn scale would barely move! That's when I decided to do my own self-research. Considering that body builders for years have employed intermittent fasting (IF) as their go-to for leaning out while retaining their hard earned muscle mass, I wanted to try it. Unfortunately, we also know that in studies, females often didn't see the same results using IF as their male counterparts both in research and anecdotally, A good article from Mark's Daily Apple looks at multiple studies here, but I was determined to find a way.
Generally, IF for body builders have been larger gaps of fasting, followed by eating all of their day's calories in a small space of time... like playing catch up. There's good science for that since during fasting you're asking the cell to break-down things like WBCs, but it's in the re-feeding that you see the re-building of the cells, structures, etc. other methods encourage to fast alternate days, some do one large meal per day, others do 5 on, off etc. I'm not going to tell you one is better than the other, I'm just here to tell you what worked for me.
So once I took my vow of silence-- more for reasons of avoiding awkward conversations than for reaping my heavenly reward, here's how I proceeded. I follow a very low carb Paleo/primal diet all the time so, happily, it mimics the effects of fasting a bit already and my breakfast of eggs fried in bacon fat daily gets those ketones to rolling first thing in the morning...7 a.m. for me. The kicker is, I would not eat again until 4-5pm that night and when I did, I would eat within my lowest calorie restriction--around 1100 per day. This is the number I had been holding fast to for all of winter/spring with no real results, but here's what's more interesting: on the weekends I counted nothing. I didn't always go crazy, but I certainly cheated. Likely my calories were likely more than 1100 those days and I began to see the scale move! Every. Single. Week. I see more leanness now than in previous years where I'd exercise myself into tendonitis. AND I've reached my goal weight!! Woop-woop!!
I feel like it's a bit of a double-fast since nighttime is already a fasting state, I just reboot at 7am then nothing till evening. It's just a little tweak, but it works great!
Here's the take-away: find what works for you. Don't keep doing the same thing you've always done and try to get different results. Time restricted eating is one of the easiest ways to benefit your health. In the breast cancer study there were benefits to those who made no other change in their eating EXCEPT for the time restriction. So give it a try and let me know how it goes!!