We had lunch with some friends in Missouri last week. It’s been almost a year since I’d seen her. She walked in and I was struck by how terrific she looked. She’d acknowledged she’d lost weight, but it was more than that. She looked healthier and had a glow about her that I’ve never noticed before. And I told her so. I asked how she’d accomplished it. I was delighted to hear her attribute the change to intermittent fasting (IF).
I wasn’t surprised intermittent fasting worked for her. I know, up close and personal, that intermittent fasting works. This past year has been a testimony for both me and Randy to its effectiveness. And as I wrote last week in a post called The Eating Season, it stopped working when Randy and I got out of our fasting routine. Oh, how quickly we lost sight of all of the benefits other than weight loss of the IF lifestyle. Hearing this from her reminded me that my new year’s post is a good time to recap the benefits of intermittent fasting. It’ll help get me and Randy motivated to waste no time in getting back to not eating so much when we get home this week.
You may or may not know anything about how time restricted eating, which is another way of referring to IF, benefit humans. Though I’ve referred to IF tangentially in posts over the past year, I never talked about it in much detail. Today’s and next week’s post is a bit of a primer on the practice and the benefits. Maybe you’ll hear something that might influence you to give it a try.
There’s a dizzying amount of information about intermittent fasting on the internet these days. You can find as much or as little as you’re interested in. If you want a recommendation, mine is to start with anything you can find by Dr. Jason Fung. He has a book on fasting that’s excellent, but he’s also written three other books that show how our standard American diet (SAD) contributes to so many modern medical issues and how intermittent fasting can help reverse a lot of the problems caused by those ailments. I own, have read more than once, and cherish all four of his books, The Complete Guide to Fasting, The Obesity Code, The Diabetes Code, and The Cancer Code. If books aren’t your thing, there’s always videos. Here’s a good introductory video that’s about 48 minutes long. If you don’t have that kind of time, he has several much shorter videos on YouTube.
To help understand why intermittent fasting is so effective, there is an illustrative story about early man and how they survived. Long (long, long) before food was plentiful humans were hunter/gatherers. They ate when food was available and didn’t eat (fasted) when food was not available. So they often gorged, then fasted, for days at a time. They survived, and had the energy to hunt and gather another day. Well, most of them.
As agriculture was invented food became much more regularly available. And of course, with the invention of refrigeration in the 20th century, not to mention industrial processing of food, there’s little need for any average American citizen in the 21st century not to have access to food anytime they feel like eating. And so we do eat, often, and in quantities that far exceed what it takes to survive. All to our health detriment.
In those same years of the 20th century we were taught that calories in, calories out was the model for weight gain and loss, that fat in our food was bad for us, that 6 small meals a day is better for you, that breakfast is the most important meal of the day, and that to lose weight you had to exercise a lot. All of that is wrong on some level, but it’s taking a whole lot of unlearning to figure it all out. And some people will never accept that what they already know isn’t necessarily right.
The truth is that every body is different and weight gain and loss is regulated in large part by the hormone insulin. Exercise is good for you in a myriad of ways, but is not key to losing weight. Fat is the only fuel a human heart can process and removing so much fat from our diets has resulted in an epidemic of heart disease. Eating often throughout the day keeps blood sugar spiked to the point where it often screws up the natural insulin function. That too has resulted in another epidemic…Type 2 diabetes.
Intermittent fasting, or time restricted eating, works positively to help correct each one of these mistaken notions.
It looks, because I’m at the word count pushing my 5-minute read limit, like I’m going to have to make this a two-part post. So let me just wrap up this background introduction to intermittent fasting by saying this: a lot of people hear about time restricted eating and make an immediate judgment that they could never do that.
I am here to tell you that time restricted eating is the easiest, and by far the most effective, thing Randy and I have ever done to lose weight and improve how we feel. It works for both of us, and I’ve never heard of anyone who’s given it an honest try, who it hasn’t worked for.
In next week’s post I’ll give you the low down on how and why intermittent fasting works so well. By the time I write the post for next Tuesday we’ll have been home for three and a half days so I can chronicle just how quickly a body responds to the benefits created by time restricted eating.
Stay tuned!
P.S. We’re on the road again this morning…headed back to the sunny blue skies of Florida. Looks like we’ll have good weather for the two and a half days we’ll be on the road. I am not sorry to leave the gray winter skies of winter in the Midwest behind. Not sorry at all. I am sorry, though, to leave Lynn and Dave behind. We sure do love spending time with them.
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