Intermittent Fasting Post

We're talking about Intermittant Fasting below. Here are some videos about it.

I'm doing LCHF (Low carb high fat, like Atkins or Paleo or a dozen variations) plus IF (Intermittent fasting). I've lost 14 pounds in about a month (and remember, I was mostly in bad for a lot of it due to my eye exam). Another commenter went on it and lost 10 pounds in a month.

"Calories in calories out" is the most deadly mistake science has ever made, this researcher says.

It's completely wrong -- or not even wrong, says Gary Taubes.

All overweight is caused by chronically high insulin levels in the blood. Insulin sweeps energy out of your blood -- it tells glycogen to exit the blood and enter muscle or fat cells. But it mostly enters fat cells, unless you're exercising.

So having too much insulin results in you feeling hungry (because the energy-sustaining glycogen has been swept out of your blood and your brain gets signals it needs more energy) while simultaneously making you fat.

The way to fix this is to drive your insulin levels down. The two ways to do this is to avoid carbs -- which is the macro nutrient which causes the highest insulin response (fat causes very little insulin response) -- and not eating anything at all for extended periodsk, which is intermittent fasting. Basically, skipping breakfast and not having nighttime snacks so that for 16 (or more) hours per day you're in a "fasted state" -- say, from 12pm to 8pm you eat, but then you don't eat anything.

Why is that important? Because after 11-13 hours of no food, your fat burning machinery kicks on and then skyrockets. You burn fat in the "fasted state" because you have no other choice -- all the easy-to-burn glycogen in your blood has been used up and now the body must turn to burning fat.

Obviously, the longer you can continue this fasted state (up to 24 hours, or even longer, if you're a fasting monster), the more fat you burn.

So here's what this is all about:

These guys introduced me to Intermittent Fasting, and have a whole youtube channel on it (FAsting Twins). They curse a lot, but are hilarious.

They say that with conventional diet and exercise, they couldn't get below 10% body fat, but when they started Intermittent fasting, they went down to 6% or so in a hurry, and in fact got their body fat down to such a low level they had to back off the IF and do it less strictly.

This doctor, an expert on diabetes and obesity, says he cures people of diabetes (and obesity) by putting them on intermittent fasting regimes.

Fung is a major legitimizer of the practice -- a doctor that says not only is this safe, it's healthy.

This guy recommends a slightly more extreme version of Intermittent Fasting called the Warrior diet, which is a one meal per day plan. Thus, for about 23 hours a day, you're fasting.

I'm doing this now because I hit a plateau and I'm just not losing as fast as I want.

This guy says he lost 145 or 150 pounds (depending on when the video dates from) over two years using High Fat Low Carb and Intermittent Fasting in combination (which Dr. Fung recommends).

This video he also did is good as far as explaining disordered insulin response (which almost all overweight people have), and how intermittent fasting combats it. Skip to 18:00 to see how your fat-burning begins zooming up at eleven hours without food.

Finally, this is Gary Taubes explaining that no, fat doesn't make you fat -- carbohydrates do. Carbs drive insulin response, and insulin sweeps glycogen out of the blood and packs it into fat cells.

How hard is this? Not hard. Initially, your brain will tell you to eat when you're used to eating. It will tell you to have breakfast, and lie to you that you're hungry

But after a week or so, your body adjusts to the new regime, and fat-burning now fills your blood with sugar (gycogen), and you're not really hungry on the plan anymore.

Once you're doing 16 hour fasts regularly, it's pretty easy to extend that to 23-24 hours. Hell, sometimes you just sort of blunder into it.

Now, a 16 hour fast is easy; a 24 hour fast, for me at least, is not easy. It's doable, but yeah, at the 20-21 hour mark, I start thinking about food a lot.

posted by Ace at 05:52 PM

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