Intermittent Fasting Q&A
Intermittent fasting refers to eating your food within a certain window of time in a 24 hour period (usually 12-16 hours) and then fasting for the other consecutive hours. For example, I typically eat all of my food between 11am and 7pm, so that’s called a 16:8 protocol. Someone else may eat between 7am and 7pm, so they would be following a 12:12 protocol.
The best window for you is the one that feels good and that works with your schedule to still allow you to eat enough food in your feeding window. My FASTer Way clients are often surprised when they learn how much food they need to eat to optimally fuel their body. I would much rather they fast for a shorter period of time if that makes it easier to reach their macro (carbs, fat and protein) goals vs fast longer but always be under. Your feeding window may also need to change according to where you are in your cycle, stress, illness, lack of sleep or certain health conditions (like hypothyroidism that isn’t well controlled).
Now why the heck would you want to do intermittent fasting? There are so many health benefits! A major one is that it helps to make you more metabolically flexible. Many people spend most of their time burning mainly sugar (or carbohydrates) for energy and then the extra gets stored as fat. When you go for longer periods of time without eating (ie when you fast), your body will switch to burning fat as a fuel source. For most people this happens after 8-10 hours of fasting. A longer fasting period gives your body more opportunity to burn fat for fuel. Ideally you want to wake up in fat burn and then switch between carbs and fat for fuel throughout the day - that’s what’s called being metabolic flexible. Because it does this, intermittent fasting has been found to have some benefits even when people don’t make any changes to their diet at all - all they do is switch when they are eating!
A lot of people are stuck in sugar burn all the time, and that’s what leads to insulin resistance, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, weight gain and possibly type 2 diabetes. Conversely, becoming more metabolically flexible decreases your risk of these conditions. Switching to fat for fuel also boosts your mental clarity and energy.
In addition, intermittent fasting helps your body get rid of unhealthy or malfunctioning cells - this process is called apoptosis. This results in a higher percentage of healthy, properly functioning cells in your body.
The other big benefit - it’s free! It costs you absolutely nothing to change your eating window around.
Did you see the news that just came out recently about “the study” questioning the benefits of intermittent fasting? It stated that intermittent fasting increases the risk of cardiovascular disease and death by 91%! It was conducted by giving a survey to 5000 random people and looking at the length of time they ate during the day. They didn’t ask them any questions about what type of food they were eating or how much. The survey results showed that people who ate fewer hours during the day also had a higher incidence of heart disease. That’s how they concluded that intermittent fasting is dangerous - crazy right?!? Even more crazy, the study is being shared by the American Heart Association!
There are SO many well-performed studies talking about the benefits of intermittent fasting. It seems like the topic of how helpful it is comes up at almost every medical conference I go to. Obesity is a huge problem these days and this is a very safe tool that can be beneficial to almost everyone.
I’d love to hear from you - have you tried intermittent fasting? What was your experience? If not, have I made you curious?
If you’d like to learn more about how to effectively implement intermittent fasting and how much food you want to aim to eat to optimally fuel your body, there are still a few spots left in my 6-week new client FASTer Way group starting soon! Click the link below to learn more!