When it comes to nutrition and diet, we all look for shortcuts. Many of them lead to yo-yo diets, no-win plans and many expensive training equipment or subscriptions that are not used. So, where does intermittent fasting, one of the expanding dietary trends, fit into this world? It is not fashion. Science is promising, its history is long and, when treated with patience and consideration, it can actually burn fat, promote weight loss and improve overall health. Of course, there will be sacrifices. Here’s how to handle intermittent fasting and what to expect.
The benefits of intermittent fasting
AN study published in the New England Journal of Medicine last December, it summarized decades of research on the practice that found that intermittent fasting leads to weight loss and improves blood pressure, cholesterol, asthma symptoms and risk of cardiometabolic disease. Less definitive evidence, for example, clinical trials, suggests that fasting can improve insulin resistance in patients with type 2 diabetes, improve surgical outcomes by reducing tissue damage, delaying the onset of Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease, mitigating symptoms multiple sclerosis and prevent tumor growth. Animal studies have found intermittent fasting to improve the body’s response to stress, reduce tumor growth, reduce symptoms of multiple sclerosis and attenuates 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, the stores of glucose run out, forcing the body to turn to triglycerides, a type of fat, for energy. “Each time you eat, you replenish your liver’s glucose stores.”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. During each hour after that, fat is broken down into ketone bodies, which provide energy to the brain. This metabolic change has several effects that are good for health.
Mattson says most cancer cells depend on glucose, so making the body dependent on ketones can deprive cancer cells of energy and inhibit tumor growth. Currently, there are ongoing clinical trials of intermittent fasting in patients with breast, ovary, prostate, endometrial, brain and colorectal cancers. And animal studies have found that fasting can reduce tumor growth and improve the body’s response to stress, which Mattson says provides reasons to believe it could improve the side effects of chemotherapy and radiation, which are extremely stressful for the body.
In Mattson’s research with rats, fasting activated the parasympathetic nervous system, the opposite of 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 down the heart rate and lowers blood pressure, similar to aerobic exercise, says Mattson. Intermittent fasting also appears to protect mouse neurons (specialized cells that transmit information in the brain) from aging, which reduces the risk of Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease and stroke.
In the future, intermittent fasting may 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 bloodstream. When the body is sensitive to insulin, it can process food and eliminate blood sugar quickly, says Dr. Felicia Stager, a registered nutritionist and postdoctoral researcher at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. When you are desensitized to insulin, your blood sugar remains high, which can cause eye and kidney problems and lead to type two diabetes. On a study of men with pre-diabetes, eating the same number of calories as usual, but restricting meals to a six-hour window earlier in the day, increased insulin sensitivity and decreased blood pressure and oxidative stress – a type of inflammation caused by an imbalance between free radicals and antioxidants that can cause diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and cancer.
Why would previous meals help? Stager says it’s all about the circadian rhythm, or sleep-wake cycle. In the morning, we are more sensitive to insulin, which helps control blood sugar. It describes the circadian rhythm as an anticipatory system. Your body anticipates dawn and increases your insulin sensitivity in the morning to prepare for the day, and reduces it at night, before sleep. “Eating in alignment with the time of day 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 meals at a six-hour window, finishing dinner before 3 pm. But Stager says it doesn’t have to be that dramatic. “In general, we know that reducing someone’s normal eating patterns, so if someone normally eats for a 12-hour period, reducing it to a 10-hour period is likely to have some benefit. I think that more than the duration of the fast is the time of the fast, ”says Stager. To start, she recommends just changing dinner a little earlier.
After a few weeks of eating like this, study participants on restricted food at the beginning of the study lost their appetite in the evening, so it is likely that after you overcome that initial 2-4 week crisis, intermittent fasting can be relatively easy to maintain. . But for those who struggle to spend many hours without eating, exercise can help speed up the time it takes for metabolic change to happen. “[Exercise] it will accelerate the depletion of energy stores in the liver and the shift to fat, ”says Mattson. While many people find it easier to keep a short window to eat by skipping breakfast, Stager says that waiting all day to eat and then getting fed up with dinner will not be as beneficial as you will probably eat differently than you would before. by day.
If you are looking for an intermittent fast to help you lose weight without changing what you eat, you must know that it is not that simple. The NEJM study says that intermittent fasting is a method of weight loss as effective as dieting, citing a literature review of six short-term studies. These studies he had intermittent fasting on alternate days, in which participants spent a few days a week eating only a few hundred calories. It makes sense that cutting whole days of food leads to weight loss. But the researchers noted that these types of eating patterns “were not well tolerated”.
Restricted eating at the beginning of the day, the type of intermittent fasting that was the subject of the second study, in which individuals eat all meals for six hours a day, did not lead to weight loss, although this was intentional. Participants said that eating all regular meals in such a short period of time was more difficult than not eating at night, so this type of behavior may not be replicated outside of a laboratory setting. Anyway, the results of the study indicate that “It’s not really a weight loss method,” says Steger, noting that people who lose weight at IF max are around 1 to 2 percent of body weight. “I kind of refer to it as a backup for people who are really struggling to make any other changes to their diet,” says Stager.
Like other healthy but difficult-to-maintain habits, the effects of intermittent fasting only work as long as you do. Although the benefits can be seen in just 2 to 4 weeks, they reverse just as quickly when you stop fasting. “IIt is a kind of decrease in returns ”, says Mattson, comparing it to exercise. Although you have benefited from any period of intermittent fasting, the benefits will not be sustained when you return to normal eating. If you lose weight, you’ll regain it the same way you would after stopping any other diet, says Stager. So IIf you use fasting to lose a few pounds and then stop, weight loss will be no more sustainable than going on a radical diet and then resuming your normal eating patterns.
More, the effects of intermittent fasting are lessened compared to those you would see with significant weight loss. AND nor can it represent healthy eating habits. “If someone is eating very badly, they should probably target what, not when ”. Stager says. Children, the elderly, pregnant women and anyone who has struggled with binge eating and purging should avoid intermittent fasting. In general, restricting your meals to a shorter period of time seems to have some benefits over grazing all day. But nothing replaces a diverse and balanced diet.
Related articles:
Does the post Does Intermittent Fasting Work? first appeared in Fatherly.