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Effects of Intermittent Fasting on Health, Aging, and Disease [pdf]

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Re: Effects of Intermittent Fasting on Health, Aging, and Disease [pdf]

#61

Post by smilliken »

everdev wrote: post #47
joelrunyon wrote: post #2

If people are interested in learning more about fasting, I put together a few visual guides on it here - http://impossiblehq.com/nutrition/intermittent-fasting I also highly recommend the zero fasting app for tracking. Super simple and really clean app that makes tracking fasts simple. Start small and see how it goes. I find the 16/8 routine tends to work best for me personally with 36 hour fasts sprinkled in every c…

Do you find that you're able to do cognitively demanding tasks while fasting? Even small fasts seem to sap my concentration and critical thinking. Once I eat again I feel like I think better.

You could switch your metabolism to ketosis, then your energy level won't depend on blood sugar and will be more consistent through the day. I do my most cognitively demanding work without food.

Re: Effects of Intermittent Fasting on Health, Aging, and Disease [pdf]

#62

Post by losteric »

everdev wrote: post #47
joelrunyon wrote: post #2

If people are interested in learning more about fasting, I put together a few visual guides on it here - http://impossiblehq.com/nutrition/intermittent-fasting I also highly recommend the zero fasting app for tracking. Super simple and really clean app that makes tracking fasts simple. Start small and see how it goes. I find the 16/8 routine tends to work best for me personally with 36 hour fasts sprinkled in every c…

Do you find that you're able to do cognitively demanding tasks while fasting? Even small fasts seem to sap my concentration and critical thinking. Once I eat again I feel like I think better.

Mental clarity is a challenge when fasting on an otherwise stereotypical American diet... those blood glucose swings are no joke.

However I have no problems on keto, or even just a consistently low-GI low-carb diet. If anything, fasting seems to improve my discipline and "depth-first" thinking.

Re: Effects of Intermittent Fasting on Health, Aging, and Disease [pdf]

#63

Post by pacoverdi »

monkmartinez wrote: post #14

Anecdote: I tried intermittent fasting for 11 months with very, very little to show for it. I did the 18 hours off and 6 hours of eating plan. I have also tried a strict vegetarian diet for 6 months with no real changes in blood work. My Cholesterol didn't move to the dismay of my PCP and myself quite frankly. Biology: I am a professional Firefighter that ran 1000 miles and bicycled 250 miles during this time frame.…

I feel like going on IF without some kind of carbohydrate restriction (ideally, ketogenic diet) is a bit like alternating between stepping on the brakes and on the accelerator, i.e. not as healthy or effective.

Beer can be high in sugar, especially Belgian/Abbey beers that often include glucose syrup in their ingredients. Something I discovered with horror as they are some of my favorites :/

EDIT: clarification, don't want to imply that IF without carb restriction is bad, just probably not as effective.

Re: Effects of Intermittent Fasting on Health, Aging, and Disease [pdf]

#64

Post by notadoc »

joelrunyon wrote: post #2

If people are interested in learning more about fasting, I put together a few visual guides on it here - http://impossiblehq.com/nutrition/intermittent-fasting I also highly recommend the zero fasting app for tracking. Super simple and really clean app that makes tracking fasts simple. Start small and see how it goes. I find the 16/8 routine tends to work best for me personally with 36 hour fasts sprinkled in every c…

> I find the 16/8 routine tends to work best for me personally

That timeline as "fasting" is funny to me up because that is basically how people used to eat in 20th century USA, pre-obesity. You'd eat three meals a day, all reasonably sized (or even small by todays standards), and at specific times. No you can't have a snack, that would ruin your appetite!

But now people are addicted to food and abuse it rampantly as is evidenced by the majorities waistlines and health care expenditure, it's terrible for us all but it's not only the most culturally acceptable form of substance abuse, it's widely encouraged and even celebrated. Strange times.

Re: Effects of Intermittent Fasting on Health, Aging, and Disease [pdf]

#65

Post by notadoc »

monkmartinez wrote: post #14

Anecdote: I tried intermittent fasting for 11 months with very, very little to show for it. I did the 18 hours off and 6 hours of eating plan. I have also tried a strict vegetarian diet for 6 months with no real changes in blood work. My Cholesterol didn't move to the dismay of my PCP and myself quite frankly. Biology: I am a professional Firefighter that ran 1000 miles and bicycled 250 miles during this time frame.…

> I have also tried a strict vegetarian diet for 6 months with no real changes in blood work.

Interesting.

Were you a junk food vegetarian? Were the carbohydrates high glycemic? Or did you eat a ton of dairy?

Re: Effects of Intermittent Fasting on Health, Aging, and Disease [pdf]

#66

Post by somebodythere »

everdev wrote: post #47
joelrunyon wrote: post #2

If people are interested in learning more about fasting, I put together a few visual guides on it here - http://impossiblehq.com/nutrition/intermittent-fasting I also highly recommend the zero fasting app for tracking. Super simple and really clean app that makes tracking fasts simple. Start small and see how it goes. I find the 16/8 routine tends to work best for me personally with 36 hour fasts sprinkled in every c…

Do you find that you're able to do cognitively demanding tasks while fasting? Even small fasts seem to sap my concentration and critical thinking. Once I eat again I feel like I think better.

There is a hump for me around 12-14 hours where I do feel distracted by the urge to eat. Once I make it past that I find that I have more mental clarity than before the fast.

Re: Effects of Intermittent Fasting on Health, Aging, and Disease [pdf]

#67

Post by lemming »

mistermann wrote: post #23
jagannathtech wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

in my experience, sleep is the first problem to be solved. If a person can't get good quality and quantity of sleep nothing else helps. First sleep then meditation to tame the chronic stress response. nothing else - fasting, diet, exercise etc helps before sleep. btw alcohol and caffeine screws the quality of sleep.

Can poor sleep interfere with weight loss?

Yes, see Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker:

The upshot of all this work can be summarized as follows: short sleep (of the type that many adults in first-world countries commonly and routinely report) will increase hunger and appetite, compromise impulse control within the brain, increase food consumption (especially of high-calorie foods), decrease feelings of food satisfaction after eating, and prevent effective weight loss when dieting.

Re: Effects of Intermittent Fasting on Health, Aging, and Disease [pdf]

#68

Post by dirtyid »

monkmartinez wrote: post #14

Anecdote: I tried intermittent fasting for 11 months with very, very little to show for it. I did the 18 hours off and 6 hours of eating plan. I have also tried a strict vegetarian diet for 6 months with no real changes in blood work. My Cholesterol didn't move to the dismay of my PCP and myself quite frankly. Biology: I am a professional Firefighter that ran 1000 miles and bicycled 250 miles during this time frame.…

Ditto.

I tried intermittent fasting as an alternative to relatively fastidious calorie counting and ended up slowly gaining weight due to snackier food choices which I equalized with biweekly all day fasts. I'm sure I can make it work but I prefer meal prep and having regular energy levels throughout the day which gives me much more flexibility in terms of other fitness goals, i.e. I had a much narrow window of performance at gym under IF and I stopped mostly because my it got in the way of gym scheduling.

Re: Effects of Intermittent Fasting on Health, Aging, and Disease [pdf]

#69

Post by qqqwerty »

nmfisher wrote: post #54
5cott0 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The hype around intermittent fasting is nothing more than the novice effect & the diminishing returns kick in pretty fast.

As someone who still practises IF, I have been wondering if many of the immediate benefits (weight loss, low cholesterol, reduced inflammation markers, etc) are mostly apparent in sedentary, obese people. IF might work brilliantly for them because it's a psychologically "easy" shortcut to fixing a terrible diet. For those of us who are already lean + good diet + high activity levels, I'm not convinced that IF really…

I think the anti-inflammatory benefits are very real. Digestion is a taxing process, especially so with our modern western diets that are high in protein, sugar, and fat. There are anti-inflammatory diets that might work with similar results, but I imagine fasting is a much more fool-proof way to get the benefits.

The other benefits are more dependent on the individual. Like you, I tend to binge. But I also weigh myself every morning. If my weight is drifting up I find that it is easier to cutback on calories when I am only interacting with food for a limited time during the day. So yeah, it is a bit of a hack, but I think calling it a psychological shortcut sells it short. A typical modern western meal can easily be more than 1000 calories. And in a time when most folks work sedentary jobs, there is really no reason they should be eating 3 square meals a day plus snacks. From a diet perspective, intermittent fasting is basically just getting people to skip one of those meals a day. Maybe a good alternate name would be the '2 square meals diet'.

Re: Effects of Intermittent Fasting on Health, Aging, and Disease [pdf]

#70

Post by emmelaich »

alxmng wrote: post #31

Slate Star Codex published an article investigating whether intermittent fasting extends lifespan, and found that the research is flawed: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/12/12/acc-does-calorie-restr...

The research may be oversold, but I don't think you can conclude that (all) the research is flawed.

From that SSC article ..

> We, the authors, conclude that the evidence as it stands weakly supports the conclusion that CR modestly extends human life

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