[masraum]

Originally Posted by kach22i

Fascinating, I have't read about this before.

It does seem like an extreme regiment for the very dedicated and professional athletes.

The only things I'm interested in are things I can do for the rest of my life, no fads or temporary measures.

Read his posts with the fasting tag. He's got about 30 blog entries on fasting. He's got a clinic where he mostly treats diabetes and obesity. He promotes fasting as a way to stay healthy for pretty much everyone (no children, no pregnant women, and folks with medical issues or on certain medications only under medical supervision).

He talks about all manner of fasting 12 hours (eat everything between 7am and 7pm or whatever), 16 hours (eat all food in 8 hours/day), 24 hours (skip 2 meals), 36 hours (skip 1 day), 42 hours, etc.... A lot of what he talks about seems to be the intermittent (like 16 hours) or alternate daily fasting (24 or 36 hours). Pretty much all of his posts cite some sort of medical study.

One interesting thing is that when you fast, your resting energy does not go down. It actually goes up. Your body switches to fat as it's energy source and revs things up a bit.

But if you heavily restrict your caloric intake, your resting energy goes down because your body is consuming calories, but it's not getting many calories, so it has to turn things down to match the caloric intake. And if you do it for long enough, your body will continue to turn your resting energy down until it matches your caloric intake, then you stop losing and will actually start gaining weight. That won't happen on a fast.