Intermittent fasting (IF) is not a diet plan, per se. Rather, it’s a pattern of eating that alternates periods of eating with long periods of not eating (fasting). It allows the body to maximize the metabolic processes that take place only in a fasted state.
Why fast?
Scientific studies on fasting date back to the 1940s. One early study in rats found that rats that fasted 1 day out of every 3 lived longer than rats that did not fast. Caloric restriction has long been known to prolong life. The problem is, who wants to live longer if it means starving to do so? Well, Intermittent Fasting attempts to achieve the same benefits seen with long-term fasting by cycling between fasting and fed states. Recent research suggests that IF can result in weight loss and decreased insulin levels in people with and without diabetes. As IF continues to gain in popularity, more evidence on its benefits will become available.
What is the Fasted State?
It takes your body about 3 to 5 hours to digest and absorb a meal. When you eat a meal, your digestive system mechanically and chemically digests the food you eat and absorbs the nutrients from it. Your insulin rises in response to your increased blood glucose, and all of the cells of your body are working to process and store the energy you’ve eaten. Your liver cells turn excess energy into glycogen and fat for storage.
Once your meal has been completely digested and absorbed, your body enters what is sometimes referred to as the “post-absorptive” state, which can last up to 8–12 hours after a meal. During this time, your metabolism starts to shift from “fed” to “fasting.” Your insulin levels decline, and in the reverse process of storing excess calories as fat, your body begins to tap into those stores and break them down as fuel.
The fasting state, which begins 8–12 hours after eating, allows your body to burn fat. Most people begin to enter the fasting state while they are sleeping. If you eat dinner at 7 PM and then don’t eat breakfast until 8 AM, your body will have switched over to fat-burning mode. The problem is that most of us don’t stay in that fat-burning mode for long, because once we’re awake, we tend to eat every 3 to 4 hours, until we go back to sleep. Purposely changing your patterns of eating so that you spend more time in the fasted state will allow your metabolism to stay in fat-burning mode longer. This allows you to burn more fat without changing how much you eat…but rather, by changing when you eat.
There are several popular methods of IF. I will go into these in more detail in my next article.
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