Intermitant fasting

[Taha Mohamedali]

A couple of articles I have come across have used Ramadan as a case study and did find better insulin sensitivity in the individuals studied. IMO, i think fasting, Ramadan style, is a great sample to study.

The majority of benefits that come from IF seem to be based in ketosis, so it's arguable that using a cyclic low carb or NHE approach could give you many of the Same befenits as IF.

Brad, in response to your question, i played around with my eating windows and making it too small made it challenging to get all the food in, when i did, I then felt stuffed and energyless for my workouts. I also had trouble when doing multiple workout type activities through out the day as I was always feeling stuffed before my workouts. My energy levels in general were low during IF and I felt weak. I think that if your diet is sub optimal in terms of bad carbs, sugar cravings etc, then IF will help cut that down and help you reach your goals.

[Dolph Geurds]

I attemtped IF for three days after reading some stuff from Art De Vany, he does it and loves it. I am trying to get down to 8-10% BF. I think that I did not get enough calories. I did not realize that you were supposed to consume all your calories in a 4-5 hour window. I trained very hard during the fast period and my body paid for it the next few days--I was completely exhausted and weak. So with this new info I will try it again and watch my calorie intake. Check out Art De Vany's blog.

[Robert Wolf]

Wholly Hyper-analysis Bat Man!
Yael, this is in both P-menu articles and has been hashed around here a bunch:
1-Establish a baseline of fitness that involves a Paleo/Zone or cyclic low carb nutritional approach. You should be lean, have excellent performance and have a handle on how to feed yourself. If terms like "rice" and "bread" still make up a part of your vocabulary, you have NOT established #1!!!

2-Attempt Intermittent Fasting in one of two ways:
i-alternate day fast. ii-compressed feeding schedule.

3-One MUST consume as many if not more calories as on the standard multi-meal schedule. If you fail in this area you will have problems.

4-How do you gauge if this is "right" for you? Performance and body comp will either improve or remain the same. Virtually everyone doing this has reported an improvement unless they botched step 1 or 3.

5-How do you know if you are producing too much cortisol? See #4.

Yael, if you "need" to eat regularly to avoid mood alterations you have some blood sugar "stuff" to get nailed down. You need to get your food quality dialed in. I'd try a cyclic low carb approach with your carb day being at the carb level for a normal Zone eating day. Get 4-6 small protein/veggie/fat meals, get your body comp dialed in and then come back to this stuff.

[Yael Grauer]

Darn, I guess that means nobody wants to see this great study I found while researching something else about how caloric restriction in fruit flies increases life span.

I'm not researching this for myself--and yes I read the articles and I know about wheat and about good food quality and getting my own diet etc. squared away.

I'm just trying to figure out how this would fit into some bigger issues (cortisol etc.) and even diet typologies (glandular and metabolic types), for "fun" I guess you could say. I know about blood sugar "stuff" and I've been reading on the pathophysiology of insulin resistance and how stress, sleep debt, autonomic nervous system issues, constitution and all that tie into it. I get the hint though, I'll save it for the herb lists.

[Robert Wolf]

Yael-
That was not a slap down! It was however a plea to focus on the most impactful elements of nutrition and lefestyle AND a framework for monitoring progress/results that allow one to bypass the minutae of endocrinology and see the "whole" person.

Like you mentioned above, the basic elements are: insulin control and mitigation of food allergies via some kind of sound nutritional approach (Paleo/Zone, CLC etc.), adequate sleep and exercise as a "must have" baseline. This will bring most people to a pretty high level, but if we want to we can focus on adequate probiotics, and give some thought to simplifying meals to optimize digestion (think Lights out and Body Ecology). You could take this a step further and look at specific conditions (through the chinese medicine perspective) like "spleen chi deficiency". None of the previous "must haves" are removed, in fact there is obviously some breakdown in the foundation (too much studying? Bad sleep? allergenic foods?) So all of thie foundational elements must be in place with perhaps the additional refinement of little or no raw foods, with a prefrence for soups and stews, and many small meals to facilitate digestion. I'd say most deficinecy (Xu) conditions are not good candidates for intermittent fasting. By contrast something like liver chi stagnation (in western terms this is elevated estrogen due to hyperinsulinsism) will greatly benefit from intermittent fasting...assuming the foundations are in place.

Again if my tone was cranky I apologize but if you get these foundational elements in place, and really understand their importance, the special cases are really just pertubations from those base elements.

[Greg Battaglia]

Robb, what you've said here is what I've been thinking for so long, but have been unable to put into meaningful and concise words, Awesome stuff.

[Robert Wolf]

Thanks Greg! I've stole most of these good ideas from other people. Larry cooked up the "Zone/CLC first, then IF". Smart stuff.