Time Restricted Eating

[CA_WhaleTail]

Does not eating, say from 8 pm to noon the next day, have real health benefits?

Second part of this- if so, how does coffee or tea fit into the overall scheme?

[KFC911]

I usually go from about 6ish to nearly noon the next day....about 20oz of Coffee every morning. The real health benefit is that I keep weight off...

I know I'm missing a great meal.....I simply love a big azz breakfast...but that's what I do.

[wildthing]

Fasting has benefits. Mainly your wallet.

Coffee is good for you according to the most recent study funded by the coffee growers association of the world.

Tea makes you pee or poop depending on whether it's green or black.

[ckelly78z]

We generally eat a late dinner, and I will have a yogurt/toast for breakfast around 5:00 am. I start getting Hangry if I don't eat. No caffiene other than at lunch, haven't ever found a taste for coffee. 5'10" 185 and very active.

[Tobra]

Yes

Had a buddy from Colorado Springs that was a weightlifter/body builder guy. He would fast the day before a competition, said it made him a little more cut. Probably urban legend, but it sort of looked like it to me too. If I fast for a day, water and maybe some juice if you I get hypoglycemic and need some calories, it sort of clears things out, so to speak.

I have found that not eating late in the day works well for me, particularly if I feel like I am a little heavy and want to drop some weight. For example, don't eat after 1700. I am an early riser, but don't always eat breakfast. Drink some water when you get the urge to have a little gnosh. I think it is not such a bad thing for your stomach to be empty, particularly if you are going to do something physical, like go for a run or do some yard work. I sleep better if I don't eat late in the day.

Caffeine can suppress your appetite. Can keep you up at night, but it does not really do me like that much. I like coffee and tea, having an iced coffee as I type this.

The trick is to not eat if you are not hungry.

[Don Ro]

Originally Posted by Tobra

Yes

Had a buddy from Colorado Springs that was a weightlifter/body builder guy. He would fast the day before a competition, said it made him a little more cut. Probably urban legend, but it sort of looked like it to me too. If I fast for a day, water and maybe some juice if you I get hypoglycemic and need some calories, it sort of clears things out, so to speak.

I have found that not eating late in the day works well for me, particularly if I feel like I am a little heavy and want to drop some weight. For example, don't eat after 1700. I am an early riser, but don't always eat breakfast. Drink some water when you get the urge to have a little gnosh. I think it is not such a bad thing for your stomach to be empty, particularly if you are going to do something physical, like go for a run or do some yard work. I sleep better if I don't eat late in the day.

Caffeine can suppress your appetite. Can keep you up at night, but it does not really do me like that much. I like coffee and tea, having an iced coffee as I type this.

The trick is to not eat if you are not hungry.

I agree. Not hungry, don't eat.
Ex g/f was a personal trainer and she knew a lot of the serious body builders in the club.
She said that they'd not only fast a day or so before (very little water) but a week or two prior to competition they'd eat nothing but Tuna packed in spring water and steamed Broccoli so that their muscles would "jump out" more.
.
An aside: this club had a lot of the 49er's come in for a work out during off season.
I was always impressed with Jerry Rice's body.
It looked like skinned frog legs...long lean muscles and so cut.

[masraum]

Do you want to read blog posts by a medical Dr backed up by science and research on the subject of "intermittent fasting" which is a common term for eating all of your food during a limited time (often 8 hours)? Some are 12/12hrs, some are 8/16 hours, there are even folks that will do 4/20 hours or eat dinner, then skip breakfast and lunch and eat the next dinner.

Dr Jason Fung who mostly treats type 2 diabetics and the obese in his clinics, but promotes fasting for everyone for health purposes (excluding kids, pregnant women, and folks with certain medical issues or on certain medication unless monitored/directed by a Dr).

https://idmprogram.com/tag/fasting/

From https://idmprogram.com/fasting-a-history-part-i/

The answer to this vexing problem lies not in the latest and greatest diet trend, but in the tried and true. Instead of searching for some exotic, never-before-tried diet miracle, we should focus on ancient healing traditions of the past. The waaaayyyy past. Fasting is one of the most ancient healing traditions in human history. This solution has been practiced by virtually every culture and religion on earth.

Whenever fasting is mentioned, there is always the same eye-rolling response. Starvation? That’s the answer? No. Fasting is completely different beast. Starvation is the involuntary absence of food. It is neither deliberate, nor controlled. Starving people have no idea when and where their next meal will come from. Fasting, on the other hand is the voluntary withholding of food for spiritual, health, or other reasons. It is the difference between suicide and dying of old age. The two terms should never be confused with each other. Fasting may be done for any period of time, from a few hours to months on end. In a sense, fasting is part of everyday life. The term ‘break fast’ is the meal that breaks the fast – which is done daily.

Fasting is one of the most ancient and widespread healing traditions in the world. Hippocrates of Cos (c 460 – c370 BC) is widely considered the father of modern medicine. Among the treatments that he prescribed and championed was the practice of fasting, and the consumption of apple cider vinegar. Hippocrates wrote, “To eat when you are sick, is to feed your illness”. The ancient Greek writer and historian Plutarch (cAD46 – c AD 120) also echoed these sentiments. He wrote, “Instead of using medicine, better fast today”. Ancient Greek thinkers Plato and his student Aristotle were also staunch supporters of fasting.

The ancient Greeks believed that medical treatment could be observed from nature. Humans, like most animals, do not eat when they become sick. For this reason, fasting has been called the ‘physician within’. This fasting ‘instinct’ that makes dogs, cats and humans anorexic when sick. This sensation is certainly familiar to everybody. Consider the last time you were sick with the flu. Probably the last thing you wanted to do was eat. So, fasting seems to be a universal human instinct to multiple forms of illnesses. Thus fasting is ingrained into human heritage, and as old as mankind itself.

The ancient Greeks believed that fasting improves cognitive abilities. Think about the last time you ate a huge Thanksgiving meal. Did you feel more energetic and mentally alert afterwards? Or, instead did you feel sleepy and a little dopey? More likely the latter. Blood is shunted to your digestive system to cope with the huge influx of food, leaving less blood going to the brain. Result – food coma.

Other intellectual giants were also great proponents of fasting. Philip Paracelsus, the founder of toxicology and one of three fathers of modern Western medicine (along with Hippocrates and Galen) wrote, “Fasting is the greatest remedy – the physician within”. Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), one of America’s founding fathers and renowned for wide knowledge in many areas once wrote of fasting “The best of all medicines is resting and fasting”.

[masraum]

Part 2 https://idmprogram.com/fasting-physiology-part-ii/ talks about the physiology of fasting.

Part 3 https://idmprogram.com/fasting-and-growth-hormone-physiology-part-3/ goes into some more effects of fasting.

Part 5 https://idmprogram.com/fasting-myths-part-5/ addresses a bunch of the myths and misconceptions.

Many myths are associated with fasting. These myths have been repeated so often that they are often perceived as infallible truths. Some of the these myths include:

Fasting puts you in ‘starvation’ mode
Fasting will overwhelm you with hunger
Fasting causes overeating when you resume feeding
Fasting will make you lose muscle
Fasting deprives the body of nutrients
Fasting causes hypoglycemia
The brain needs glucose to function
It’s just ‘crazy’

Part 6 https://idmprogram.com/fasting-regimens-part-6/ talks about some of the various regimens including eating everything in 12 hours or 8 hours or 4 hours, etc....

THere are links and graphs in the link above that I didn't copy into the quote below.

There are many different fasting regimens. Let’s be very clear to start, though. There is simply no ‘best’ one. They all work to different degrees for different people. Just as some people prefer steak to chicken, there is no right or wrong answer. One regimen will work for one person but be utterly ineffective in the next.

Fasting is defined as the voluntary act of withholding food for a specific period of time. Non-caloric drinks such as water and tea are permitted. An absolute fast refers to the withholding of both food and drink. This may be done for religious purposes, such as during Ramadan in the Muslim tradition, but is not generally recommended for health purposes because of the accompanying dehydration. In our IDM program, we do not ever use the absolute fast.

Fasting has no standard duration. Fasts can range from twelve hours to three months or more. You can fast once a week or once a month or once a year. Intermittent fasting involves fasting for shorter periods of time on a regular basis. Shorter fasts are generally done more frequently. Longer fasts are typically twenty-four to thirty-six hours, done two to three times per week. Prolonged fasting may range from one week to one month.

I categorized fasting periods with a break point at 24 hours, although this is somewhat arbitrary. In my experience in the IDM program, I generally use shorter regimens for those who are mostly interested in losing weight without much in the way of type 2 diabetes, fatty liver or other metabolic diseases.

For those who have more significant illnesses, I use longer duration regimens as they tend to give faster results. After the initial ‘breaking’ in period, we always work with the patients to find out what they prefer to do. A surprising number of patients prefer longer duration fasts less frequently.

Short Daily Fasting Regimens

1. 12 hour fasting – There are several regimens of fasting that use a shorter period of fasting but done every day. A 12 hour fasting period done every day used to be ‘normal’. That is, you would eat 3 meals a day from, say 7 am to 7 pm and refrain from eating anything from 7 pm to 7 am.

At that point, you would ‘break your fast’ with a small breakfast. This was pretty standard in the 1950s and 1960s. There wasn’t much obesity back then. However, there were two major changes that happened since then. First was the change to a higher carbohydrate, lower fat diet. This tended to increase insulin. Second was the increase in meal frequency, as we detail in a previous post, which tended to reduce fasting periods.

If you could eat unprocessed foods, avoid excessive added sugars, and did not have significant insulin resistance to start, this 12 hr daily fasting was probably good enough for most people to avoid obesity. However, it is not really strong enough to reverse decades of insulin resistance.

2. 16 hour fasting – This regimen involves using a daily 16 hour period of fasting and an 8 hour ‘eating window’. For example, this would mean eating from 11 am – 7 pm, and fasting from 7 pm to 11am. This generally means skipping the morning meal every day. Some people choose to eat 2 meals during that 8 hour window and others will eat 3.

This regimen was popularized by a bodybuilder by the name of Martin Berkhan who blogged about it on his website www.leangains.com, and so the method is sometimes called the LeanGains method. He wrote extensively in the years 2007-2010 but I don’t see much activity on his blog anymore, which is a real shame, because he had some great ideas and original thought. There are still some excellent posts there.

He wrote extensively about training in the fasted state and eating predominantly in the post-workout period. These ideas are supported by the science available (albeit not a lot). However, they do make a lot of common sense.

Several years later, an editor at Men’s Health wrote a book called The 8 hour diet, which essentially used the same 8 hour eating window as the LeanGains method. In his entire book, he strenuously avoided any mention of LeanGains or Berkhans, even though this method transparently ripped-off LeanGains. You can’t really patent a time period of fasting, but the intellectual dishonestly was appalling, regardless. It is like writing about E=MC2 and never mentioning Albert Einstein, but instead pretending to have ‘discovered’ it yourself.

3. The ‘Warrior’ diet – This was one of the first diets to popularize intermittent fasting regimens. Written by Ori Hofmekler in 2002, this diet stressed that timing of meals mattered almost as much as composition of meals. In other words, ‘when you eat makes what you eat important’. Actually, I think both are important, but the ‘when’ question is seriously under-appreciated, and this book was one of the first to really point this out.

Drawing upon inspiration from ancient warrior tribes such as the Spartans and Romans, the core of the diet consists of eating all meals in the evening during a 4 hour window. The fasting period of 20 hours consisted of most of the day. There was also an emphasis on natural unprocessed foods and high intensity training.

The main point of all these fasting regimens is the same. It allows the body to lower insulin levels very low for a specified period of time longer than usual. This is precisely what helps to break, or prevent the development of insulin resistance. As we’ve mentioned previously, this is the fundamental biologic principle of homeostasis.

The body likes to maintain everything within a relatively narrow range. Any prolonged stimulus leads to resistance as the body tries to resist the change. In this case, prolonged periods of high insulin will lead to insulin resistance, which will lead back to high insulin levels – in other words, insulin causes insulin resistance.

So, by incorporating daily, or almost daily periods of low insulin, we are able to prevent the development of insulin resistance and even reverse relatively minor levels of resistance. For more established resistance, we would need longer fasting periods – 24 hours or greater.

One of the key advantages of fasting, from a therapeutic standpoint is the lack of upper limit. What this means is that we can continue to apply fasting in an almost unlimited manner with no upper ceiling. The world record for fasting was 382 days, during which the patient suffered no ill effects.

Think about medications for a second. If you take metformin – there is a maximum dose. Same for virtually all meds. Think about low carb or low fat diets – you can only go to zero carbs or fat. There is a maximum dose. That is why insulin is so popular with doctors. You can keep increasing the dose with no ceiling. (As an aside, we recently had a lady taking 400 units of insulin per day in our clinic. Her endocrinologist was happy that her sugars were ‘finally’ controlled. I was appalled.)

Fasting, similarly has no ceiling, which offers much more therapeutic flexibility. In other words, if I can keep applying fasting until I see the desired effect. The dose can go up indefinitely. If you don’t eat, will you lose weight? Of course. So there is almost no question of efficacy. It is only a question of safety and compliance. So for more complicated or serious cases, we can simply increase the dose. We will consider these longer regimens in the next post.

[Don Ro]

^^^
Interesting. Thanks Steve!
.
Edit: "The ancient Greeks believed that fasting improves cognitive abilities."

In the distant past when I fasted for a day or more, I would sometimes feel like I just inhaled ammonia - smelling salts.
I felt strangely clear headed. A pleasurable feeling, to say the least.
.
Edit II: I fasted for two days once when I was about 30 yrs. old. When I stopped I built a sandwich the size of a condominium.

[masraum]

Oh, and forgot to address the second point. I've read all of the Dr's blog posts. He promotes coffee, tea and water during fasting as long as they don't include sugar or sweeteners. I think he says if you really have to have something, then you can use a small amount of cream, but then you aren't really fasting. I think that's what he says, but since I don't drink coffee or put anything in my tea, I didn't pay attention to those parts.

For probably the past 6-8 months, I've been trying to do all of my eating during an 8 hour period (not always successfully). For about 1-2 months I've kicked it up a notch, and I've been fasting about 2 days a week. Usually 2x for 24-36 hours, but a couple weeks I've done 48-60 hours (one long fast). I feel fine before, during and after the fasts. I started running again about 3-4 months ago. I have run on days that I've fasted and even on my second day fasting for 30-60 mins, up to 6.5 miles. I'm not setting any records, but like I said, I only recently took it up again. What I can tell you is that I'm not really seeing any difference if I exercise while fasting, at least, not any more than I normally see day to day fasting or not.

[masraum]

Originally Posted by Don Ro

^^^
Interesting. Thanks Steve!
.
Edit: "The ancient Greeks believed that fasting improves cognitive abilities."

In the distant past when I fasted for a day or more, I would sometimes feel like I just inhaled ammonia - smelling salts.
I felt strangely clear headed. A pleasurable feeling, to say the least.
.
Edit II: I fasted for two days once when I was about 30 yrs. old. When I stopped I built a sandwich the size of a condominium.

My wife has done various fasts over the years. I've not really ever done it until more recently. Based on her experiences, and my experience and reading, the second day is the hardest. It's the day when most folks feel the hungriest whether that's due to chemicals or just your brain telling you "hey, where's the food, dude?!?"

I've found it surprisingly easy to fast. I will cut fruit into water and usually drink 6 pints of those over the course of 8-10 hours. If I exercise, that'll mean more water. When you fast, your kidneys (or is it the liver) flushes sodium and water. You basically go into diuresis. So you may see yourself "lose" 3-4 #, but a lot of that is water. As soon as you start to eat, you'll gain most of that back.

This particular post specifically addresses one of the hormones involved in feeling hungry and how that works while you're fasting.

https://idmprogram.com/fasting-ghrelin-fasting-29/

Ghrelin is the so-called hunger hormone. It was purified from rat stomach in 1999 and subsequently cloned. It binds to growth hormone (GH) secretagogue receptor, which strongly stimulates GH. So, for all you people who thought that eating makes you gain lean tissue, it is actually the opposite. Nothing turns off GH like food. Of course, food provides the nutrients needed to grow, so in fact, you need both feeding and fasting cycles to properly grow. Not all feeding, and not all fasting. Life lies in the balance of the two. The cycle of life is feast and fast.

Ghrelin, has also been found to increase appetite and weight gain. It also antagonizes the effect of leptin (in rats at least). Leptin, as you might recall, is the hormone produced by fat cells which turns off appetite and makes us stop eating. Ghrelin turns on appetite. So, if you want to lose weight on a long term basis, you need to tune down ghrelin.



So, how to do that? As we discussed last week, eating all the time sounds like it will turn off hunger and ghrelin. But that’s far too simplistic. Surprisingly, the answer is the opposite – fasting.

Let’s look at this study “Spontaneous 24-h ghrelin secretion pattern in fasting subjects“. Patients undertook a 33 hour fast, and ghrelin was measured every 20 minutes. Here’s what ghrelin levels look like over time.

There are several things to notice. First, ghrelin levels are lowest at approximately 9:00 in the morning. This corresponds to the measures of the circadian rhythm which find consistently that hunger is lowest first thing in the morning. Recall that this is also generally the longest period of the day where you have not eaten. This reinforces the fact that hunger is not simply a function of ‘not having eaten in a while’. At 9:00, you have not eaten for about 14 hours, yet you are the least hungry. Eating, remember, does not necessarily make you less hungry.

Next, notice that there are 3 distinct peaks corresponding to lunch, dinner and the next day’s breakfast. BUT IT DOES NOT CONTINUALLY INCREASE. After the initial wave of hunger, it recedes, even if you don’t eat. Ghrelin shows a “spontaneous decrease after approximately 2 h without food consumption”. This correlates perfectly to our clinical experience that ‘hunger comes in waves’. If you simply ignore it, it will disappear. Think of a time that you were too busy and worked right through lunch. At about 1:00 you were hungry, but if you just drank some tea, by 3:00 pm, you were no longer hungry. Ride the waves – it passes. Same goes for dinner. Further it has been shown that ghrelin spontaneously decreases independently of serum insulin or glucose levels.

Also, note that ghrelin does have a learned component since all these subjects were used to eating 3 meals per day. It is not merely by coincidence that these peaks of ghrelin happen. This is similar to the ‘cephalic phase’ of insulin secretion that we’ve discussed previously.



There was one other big finding of this study. Look at the average ghrelin levels over 24 hours. Over the day of fasting, ghrelin stays stable! In other words, eating nothing over 33 hours made you no more or less hungry than when you started! Whether you ate or did not eat, your hunger level stayed the same.

As we discussed in our last post – eating more sometime makes you more hungry, not less. In the same vein, eating less can actually make you physically less hungry. That’s terrific, because if you are less hungry, you will eat less, and are more likely to lose weight.

So what happens over multiple days of fasting? This study looked at the question specifically. 33 subjects had their ghrelin measured over 84 hours of fasting and they divided the results by men and women, as well as obese and lean. There were no significant differences between the lean and obese subjects, so I won’t dwell on that further. Once again, there were distinct circadian variations.



Over 3 days of fasting, ghrelin gradually DECREASED. This means that patients were far LESS hungry despite not having eaten for the past 3 days. This jives perfectly with our clinical experience with patients undergoing extended fasting. They all expect to be ravenously hungry, but actually find that their hunger completely disappears. They always come in saying ‘I can’t eat much anymore. I get full so fast. I think my stomach shrank’. That’s PERFECT, because if you are eating less but getting more full, you are going to be more likely to keep the weight off.



Notice, also the difference between men and women. There’s only a mild effect for men. But the women show a huge decrease in ghrelin. Again, this addresses one of the major worries that women are not able to fast. Actually, women would be expected to have more benefit from fasting because their hunger can be expected to decrease better than men. Notice, too, how much higher women’s ghrelin level reaches. I suspect this correlates to the clinical observation that many more women are ‘addicted’ to certain foods eg. chocoholics. Sugar addicts. etc. So many women have remarked how a longer fast seemed to completely turn off those cravings. This is the physiologic reason why.

A few other notes about the hormonal changes of fasting. Notice that cortisol does go up during fasting. Yes, fasting is a stress to the body and cortisol acts as general activator as well as trying to move glucose out of storage and into the blood. So, if too much cortisol is your problem, then fasting may not be right for you.

Insulin also goes down, which is what we expect. Growth hormone, as we’ve previously noted, goes up during fasting. I suspect this helps to maintain lean muscle tissue and to rebuild lost protein when you start to eat again.

However, the main point of this post is to show that over intermittent and extended fasting, ghrelin, the main hormonal mediator of hunger does not increase to unmanageable levels. Rather it decreases – which is exactly what we are looking for. We want to eat less, but be more full. Fasting, unlike caloric restriction diets is the way to do that.

[Don Ro]

I fasted a few times during the period of my life when I played tournament tennis.
I would work out quite a bit...paying special attention to my abs.
One day, during a two day fast, I did a gob of crunches...more so than otherwise.
I swore that I could touch my spine with the interior of my abs.
It was an exhilarating experience.

[Don Ro]

Thanks again, Steve, for all the info and links! Very educational.

[tabs]

Losing ones desire to eat and fasting is also part of the process of dieing.

[911 Rod]

Originally Posted by tabs

Losing ones desire to eat and fasting is also part of the process of dieing.

I spent some time visiting a palliative hospice and this is very true. When people decide it is time to go, they simply stop eating and let nature take its course.

[GH85Carrera]

I tend to restrict my time to eat to waking hours only. I have never once in my life gotten out of bed to have a midnight snack or any other eating after I go to bed.

[Noah930]

Originally Posted by tabs

Losing ones desire to eat and fasting is also part of the process of dieing.

Now where's the buffet?

[KFC911]

Originally Posted by tabs

Losing ones desire to eat and fasting is also part of the process of dieing.

We all die a little bit more everyday....beats the hell out of the alternative imo . I don't consider my routine (18 hrs most days) to be fasting at all...just what works for me.

Did you ever lose yer desire to eat after grazing at the buffet for an hour or so ?

[brainz01]

There’s a ton of research and YouTube videos about this topic. Count me as a subscriber. As someone who lost an apparently otherwise healthy (by traditional measures) father to early Alzheimer’s, intermittent fasting is now on the list of supported prevention protocols. Not starvation per se, but rather giving your body, brain, and liver a periodic break to clean house. It’s the feeding/metabolic equivalent of sleep. The research suggests it actually helps with reducing insulin resistance, improves healthy hormone levels, and stimulates autophagy to “take out the trash” your body accumulates while in the feeding state. I’ve yet to do more than 24 hours at once — honestly, it’s hard given how many activities involve eating — but supposedly there’s an incredible mental focus that also develops if you push it more than a day. Unless you’ve already gone on a low carb diet (which I also recommend based on research and personal experience), I expect one to find IF to be pretty difficult/painful. But if you’re already low-carb/keto adapted, then it’s really not too hard as you don’t suffer hangriness from missing a meal. In my experiments with skipping breakfast (8/16 IF protocol), a cup of coffee with a tablespoon of butter in the morning will easily get you through to lunch — and yes, this counts as fasting as there’s no insulin response from the butter coffee. I’m a skinny guy (6’2” and now sub-170lbs), and have been somewhat surprised by how much weight (~15-20lbs, not muscle loss) I’ve lost on low-carb over the past 2 years. The inclusion of IF into the regime seems to have continued the weight loss, somewhat to my dismay. As such, I’m forcing myself to eat more calories during my 8 hour feeding window. I think that’s a high class problem for a 45 year old, hence partly why I’m not super interested in trying a multi day fast. I will say, however, I feel amazing — feels like a 30% boost in brain function, my running performance is like rolling back the clock 2 decades, and all my biomarkers (blood pressure, cholesterol, etc are improved). So yeah, I’m a believer in IF for many reasons, but consider implementing a low carb diet first (give it a month) if you’re looking for maximum benefit and sustainability.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

[masraum]

https://www.bbc.com/news/health-44005092

Dr Rubinsztein is optimistic about the future benefits of autophagy for treating disease.

His laboratory discovered that proteins form in clumps in the nerve cells of people with diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.

"We discovered that if you switch on autophagy you remove these proteins rapidly and protect against neurodegenerative diseases like Huntington's and forms of dementia."