Intermittent fasting: The good things it did to my body

I don&#x27;t think we&#x27;re even close to really understanding how the body works here.<p>I&#x27;m not obese, but I gain weight from eating a little more, very easily. Last summer, I followed a Keto (&quot;ultra low carb, high fat, medium protein&quot;) diet for about 4 months. After the first week of feeling terrible, a well-known side effect, I felt perfectly fine. It felt like I was binge eating, I limited <i>what</i> I could eat and just went mad eating it. Any time I was remotely hungry, grab an approved snack. A big plate of bacon and eggs for breakfast, Chipotle for lunch, and a hefty meal for dinner.<p>I never went hungry, and as someone who likes food, it felt more like a treat than a diet. Colleagues thought I was trying to gain weight, and my girlfriend thought I&#x27;d gone mad with hunger. But the fat melted off. I didn&#x27;t walk into a gym in those 3 months, and dropped 2-3lbs a week (starting ~250 at 6&quot;3&#x27;), every single week.<p>I&#x27;m not saying it&#x27;s perfect, or even viable for everybody -- it&#x27;s not cheap, it&#x27;s awkward to eat with friends, and the first week or two can be hell. Despite what people have been told, fat won&#x27;t make you fat, and Keto has been shown over and over to reduce the risk factors for heart disease, &#x27;cure&#x27; diabetics, and provide huge body transformations.<p>For anyone interested, &#x2F;r&#x2F;keto is a reasonably mature community, and can provide a lot more information.

Interesting to see how mainstream intermittent fasting has become. It&#x27;s worth noting where it started.<p>A few years ago a few hardcore fitness fanatics started playing with the idea of using controlled fasting for weight loss and&#x2F;or body recomposition. Two people that should be mentioned are Lyle McDonald[1] and Martin Berkhan[2]. Martin especially made IF popular via his blog, laying out the principles he used as a fitness consultant with his clients.<p>Most research (and especially the commercial IF knockoffs) only take some part of these principles, but the &quot;diet&quot; part is only part of the picture when it comes to body recomposition. It&#x27;s almost worthless without the rest (high intensity, low volume weight training, basic compound movements, progressive overload, no focus on cardio).<p>Quite a few people&#x2F;company are trying to rip off customers via their IF programs knockoffs and supplements. If you want give IF a shot, read through Martin&#x27;s blog, and try the original Leangains protocol.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.bodyrecomposition.com/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bodyrecomposition.com&#x2F;</a> [2] <a href="http://www.leangains.com/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.leangains.com&#x2F;</a>

There was a very interesting documentary on intermittent fasting on BBC Horizon titled &#x27;Eat, Fast, Live Longer&#x27; where Michael Mosley experimented with himself fasting trying different types of fasting including intermittent fasting.<p>It did help him alot but the cool thing was there was a guy who lived on a meal a day which had athlete like body fat levels.<p>There&#x27;s also a runner, Fauja Singh, who ran a marathon at 101 years of age featured in it who practices something close to intermittent fasting [1]<p>It was extremely interesting and I do feel after watching it that 3 meals a day is something conjured by man but may not really be all that natural.<p>Link to episode intro: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGHDBIaibok" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=gGHDBIaibok</a><p>[1] <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fauja_Singh" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Fauja_Singh</a>

Looks like a derivation on the 5&#x2F;2 diet. The 25&#x2F;5 diet. My personal issue with these types of diets is that my concentration levels initially drop. I find the first couple of days extremely uncomfortable.<p>The best lifestyle change I&#x27;ve made is to drastically cut down on carbs, generally avoiding wheat and try never to eat sugar, in particular fructose. Note this doesn&#x27;t stop me eating carbs but that I generally try and avoid them in my day to day eating. I no longer feel tired in the afternoon.<p>I also cycle to work.

Been doing IF every day since July 1, 2013. Before that I was eating slow-carb diet and had lost about 50lbs.<p>When I started doing IF, I was lifting pretty heavy and after the first week I had gained weight. I was pissed because I was hungry all the time it seemed, but I gained weight this week? Huh? Well, fast forward to now, and I put about 20 pounds since July 1, and yet I am not fatter. I am muscular. It&#x27;s weird, and yes I was lifting, but fasting helped my body get from that chubby kid phase to, &#x27;oh wow, I think I am almost ripped&#x27;. There are definitely some real benefits to fasting and no one will tell you that because they can&#x27;t sell it to you in a pill.<p>Something really intriguing to me about fasting for 24hrs+ and then having to eat. For me, I crave healthy foods at that point and I also have the instinct to stuff my face and thus one meal&#x2F;day works for that. It&#x27;s tough to eat a bunch of crap when you are only eating once&#x2F;day.<p>Finally, if you are interested in IF, I recommend reading up on Ori Hofmekler. He is the type of guy who&#x27;s ideas are so crazy at first they are brushed off. Then science proves him right.<p><a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Warrior-Diet-Biological-Powerhouse/dp/1583942009" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;The-Warrior-Diet-Biological-Powerhouse...</a>

I find it frustrating when people often discuss experience with &#x27;intermittent fasting&#x27; without describing exactly what they mean. The term ranges over lots of approaches. I&#x27;ve seen it used to describe just 8 hours (perhaps every&#x2F;most days) without food, to a full day or couple of days without food (perhaps every other day or once per week or two), to other things, as is the case here.<p>Fortunately, clicking through to another article in the series (<a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-25498742" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bbc.co.uk&#x2F;news&#x2F;magazine-25498742</a>) gives more details about what was tested here:<p><i>The food, during the [5-consecutive-day] period of the restricted diet, was designed to be highly nutritious. It consisted of plant-based soups, kale chips, a nutty bar, a herbal tea and an energy drink. The total number of calories, in five days, was about 2,500 - a little more than the average person consumes in one day. No additional food was allowed. For the rest of the month we were allowed a normal diet. The regime was repeated three times, followed by a control period, when we could eat anything.</i>

This is not really a new thing. In India, fasting is a like a culture. More common with females though. Some of them fast like once every week. There are festivals which are based around fasting. Like Karvachauth, in which girls fast for their husbands etc (we are not very feminist yet). There are festivals during which people fast for straight 2-10 days! (chath, durga puja, somwari etc).<p>Even in Islam, during ramzaan people fast everyday for 30 days . They eat before dawn break and eat again after dusk.

A lot of the diets mentioned on this thread are a long way from the diet used in this article. Note it is not mentioned in the article, however it is mostly vegetables with some fish. That is a long way from &#x27;chipotle&#x27;!!!<p>It is worth bearing in mind that a lot of things we consider to be food really does not want to be food. Grains want to be carried away by the wind to plant themselves somewhere else. Their ancestors invariably had toxins in them to dissuade any creatures (including us) from eating them.<p>Not one single animal, insect or fish has evolved specifically to be eaten. Hence the wide range of defensive measures most animals&#x2F;insects&#x2F;fish have to make sure that does not happen too often. Again, toxins come into play. As you move up the food chain so you get an accumulation of those toxins, hence we tend not to eat apex predators.<p>Compare and contrast with fruit. Fruit has evolved specifically to be eaten, particularly by primates. The idea being that we eat some fruit, wander off to somewhere new, have a dump, eject some seeds from the fruit complete with a handy amount of manure and water. Yep, those pesky plants tricked us into doing all of their work for them! They even managed to get us to cover up our leavings, thereby planting their seeds properly.<p>Our vision system co-evolved with fruit, we (as in primates) see in colour not because god wanted us to live in some world of puppies and rainbows but so we could eat fruit that is ripe and ready to eat. The plants, knowing that we were evolving colour vision, kindly evolved through some process of natural selection to produce fruit that kick in to &#x27;eat me&#x27; colours when they are nice &#x27;n&#x27; ripe.<p>With this colour coded system it is possible for plants to avoid waste. We (as in primates) only pick the ripe fruit, the stuff that is still green is identifiably no good to us so we leave it until it magically changes colour.<p>Obviously there came a time when grasslands took over and we had to leave the trees, learn to stand up and walk on two feet (so we could see over the grass) and find new meals to try. At this stage the cult of eating dead animals was borne, we adapted, but not that much, our intestines are still a million miles longer than that of a dog, we still have hands for nabbling fruit rather than vicious claws to rip apart stray wildebeest and we can still chew, as you need to do for fruit, in a way dogs don&#x27;t do.<p>Much like how multi-vitamins are of dubious benefit to you, so it is with fructose. Sugars in fruit are fine, nobody has died of diabetes due to eating too many apples. The &#x27;fibre&#x27; is an important part of it, you need &#x27;fibre&#x27; if you are to consume sucrose.<p>The problem with diet in America is corn. There is nothing edible about corn grown in America today unless it has been processed by an industrial process or another animal first. All of those corn-stuffed animals Americans eat get killed before the corn kills them. If Americans are not careful they will be remembered as &#x27;the corn people&#x27; like some of those American Indian tribes that tried and failed to build corn-based civilisations in pre-Columbian times.

Maintaining a program year after year is more important to long term health than the immediate benefits of any diet. Most any diet studied shows a short term benefit. Even just participating in a study (placebo effect) usually happens short term. But few diets have notable retention rates after 2 years.<p>Having lost &gt;30 lb multiple times and having regained more each cycle, the problem (for me) is that work, stress, sleep deprivation, children, family crises, work crises, business travel, etc. present significant obstacles to any extreme protocols.<p>I tried IF for 6 months; it worked short term. But I felt so unfocused and unstable during the fast days that it was difficult for me to maintain.<p>My latest effort (lost &gt;100 lb, for over a year) has greatly simplified things - eat lots of veggies before I eat protein or other foods for any meal. No other restrictions, calorie counting, or biochemistry hacks. Very easy to eat out, travel, maintain. I did not join a gym or buy equipment this time - instead I walk to work (5 miles each way.) Also maintain sleep program - no more evening alcohol or coffee.

It&#x27;s impossible to have an actual discussion about this in a non-moderated forum given how eager people are to talk about their personal experiences rather than the actual content of the article. For an amusing overview of some research on intermittent fasting (mildly NSFW) - <a href="http://www.leangains.com/search/label/Research" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.leangains.com&#x2F;search&#x2F;label&#x2F;Research</a>

I am really interested in intermittent fasting for the health benefits, having watched BBC&#x27;s Horizon on it.<p>The thing is I am fairly skinny, and struggle to put on weight. Does anyone know if I am likely to loose weight?<p>And are there any good site to learn about it in a fairly scientific way? I see lots of blogs, but never sure how much is worth reading.

Here&#x27;s the thing I don&#x27;t like about fasting - how are you supposed to work out while you&#x27;re fasting? I can&#x27;t imagine going to the gym eating 500 calories a day without passing out.

I guess this is one of the reasons Our Lady in Medjugorje has been calling us to fast on bread and water every Wednesday and Friday.

if the study didn&#x27;t control total calories between groups, the improved health markers on his tests were likely a result of lower total calories over time. i.e. the studies probably did not match calories between groups.

This sounds awfully like regular crash dieting.

It also might have given cancer to Steve Jobs