I Started Intermittent Fasting in 2015 and It Changed My Life
I have used the 16/8 intermittent fasting program since 2015. It has been the foundation to losing my cravings, planning my food choices, and helping me lose some weight that I have kept off. the 16/8 plan means that I fast for 16 hours and do my eating over a 8 hour period. I generally eat from 11 Am to 7 PM. I have lists for the food I eat of the protein, fiber, carbohydrates, and calories in each food. Because I am 80 years old, I need protein=60 grams , fiber=21+ grams, carbohydrates=215–311 grams, and fat= 43–74 grams. I also keep an eye on the calories I eat but my main focus is that I am eating the daily nutritional needed for my age, weight, and activity level.
From Intermittent Fasting Made My Life Easier, and Happier:
“The first step on my intermittent fasting journey was deciding how long to fast. Studies of the diet are still in their infancy, and time frames during which you’re allowed to eat vary in length, typically from eight to 10 hours. Some research suggests shorter may be better, so I went with eight hours, eating my first meal at 11 a.m., and finishing my last by 7 p.m. A decades-long late-night snacker, I vowed that the only thing to pass my lips after dinner would be herbal tea. Then I went to the market, bought some fancy teas, and prayed.
Once I decided on my schedule, the rest came easily. I fell into a nice pattern that included, typically, two meals a day and a small snack somewhere in between. I stuck mostly to the whole foods I loved: salads, eggs, fish, vegetables, yogurt, nuts and fruit, and the occasional square of dark chocolate or cookie.
Unlike Whole30, time-restricted eating offered me the latitude I needed. I could have that glass of wine, I could eat that wedge of cheese, and I could go back to loving chickpeas — my spirit animal legume. The beauty of this diet was that it was more about when I was eating than what I was eating. I could eat anything — and as much as I wanted! — as long as it was during my non-fasting hours. Although always mindful, it was a relief to be unburdened from calorie counting.
Intermittent fasting also provided a more Zen-like approach to my waking hours, a change that I soon came to realize I desperately craved. Because by no longer eating three to five meals a day, my mental load — the one I have from living with diabetes — went “poof.”
From Intermittent fasting works for many — not only for weight loss but also for heart health
“One of the study’s co-leads, Hopkins’s Mattson, explained the significant benefits to heart health: “Intermittent fasting enables overweight people to lose weight and improve many different health indicators including glucose regulation, cardiovascular risk factors and inflammation.”
Those risk factors include blood pressure, resting heart rate, HDL (good) and LDL (bad) cholesterol levels, triglycerides, glucose, insulin, and insulin resistance — in other words, metabolic syndrome.
Agatston, my cardiologist, told me he thought intermittent fasting would effectively address my insulin resistance, which is caused by consuming too much sugar and refined carbohydrates (including bread, white rice and pasta). Insulin resistance often progresses to prediabetes, then diabetes, high blood pressure and even atherosclerosis or hardening of the arteries.
….Mattson concedes that new followers are initially likely to “be hungry and irritable during the time when they had previously been eating. . . . However, within two to four weeks their energy-regulating neuroendocrine systems and hunger-regulating circuits in their brains will adapt and they will no longer be hungry during the fasting period.”
It’s all about timing, Mattson says. When you eat a meal, the hormone leptin is released into your bloodstream. “Leptin acts on the hypothalamus,” he says, “and sends signals to higher brain centers, which give you the ‘I’m full’ feeling. On the other hand, when you have not eaten anything for a long time, a hormone called ghrelin is released instead. Ghrelin acts on the hypothalamus to trigger the ‘I’m hungry’ feeling.”
From The 7 Types of Intermittent Fasting, and What to Know About Them
There are so many different ways to do IF, and that’s a great thing. If this is something you’re interested in doing, you can find the type that will work best for your lifestyle, which increases the chances of success. Here are seven:
1. 5:2 Fasting
This is one of the most popular IF methods. In fact, the book The FastDiet made it mainstream, and outlines everything you need to know about this approach. The idea is to eat normally for five days (don’t count calories) and then on the other two eat 500 or 600 calories a day for women and men, respectively. The fasting days are any days of your choosing.
The idea is that short bouts of fasting keep you compliant; should you be hungry on a fast day, you just have to look forward to tomorrow when you can “feast” again. “Some people say ‘I can do anything for two days, but it’s too much to cut back on what I eat all seven days,’” says Kumar. For these people, a 5:2 approach may work for them over calorie cutting across the entire week.
That said, the authors of The FastDiet advise against making fast days on days where you may be doing a lot of endurance exercise. If you’re prepping for a bike or running race (or run high-mileage weeks), evaluate if this type of fasting could work with your training plan or speak with a sports nutritionist.
2. Time-Restricted Fasting
With this type of IF, you choose an eating window every day, which should ideally leave a 14 to 16 hour fast. (Due to hormonal concerns, Shemek recommends that women fast for no more than 14 hours daily.) “Fasting promotes autophagy, the natural ‘cellular housekeeping’ process where the body clears debris and other things that stand in the way of the health of mitochondria, which begins when liver glycogen is depleted,” says Shemek. Doing this may help maximize fat cell metabolism and helps optimize insulin function, she says.
For this to work, you may set your eating window from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., for instance. This can work especially well for someone with a family who eats an early dinner anyway, says Kumar. Then much of the time spent fasting is time spent sleeping anyway. (You also don’t technically have to “miss” any meals, depending on when you set your window.) But this is dependent on how consistent you can be. If your schedule is frequently changing, or you need or want the freedom to go out to breakfast occasionally, head out for a late date night, or go to happy hour, daily periods of fasting may not be for you.
3. Overnight Fasting
This approach is the simplest of the bunch and involves fasting for a 12-hour period every day. For example: Choose to stop eating after dinner by 7 p.m. and resume eating at 7 a.m. with breakfast the next morning. Autophagy does still happen at the 12-hour mark, though you’ll get more mild cellular benefits, says Shemek. This is the minimum number of fasting hours she recommends.
A pro of this method is that it’s easy to implement. Also, you don’t have to skip meals; if anything, all you’re doing is eliminating a bedtime snack (if you ate one to begin with). But this method doesn’t maximize the advantages of fasting. If you’re using fasting for weight loss, a smaller fasting window means more time to eat, and it may not help you decrease the number of calories you consume.
4. Eat Stop Eat
This approach was developed by author Brad Pilon in his book Eat Stop Eat: The Shocking Truth That Makes Weight Loss Simple Again. His approach differs from other plans in that he stresses flexibility. Simply put, he stresses that fasting is just taking a break from food for a time. You complete one or two 24-hour fasts per week and commit to a resistance training program. “When your fast is over, I want you to pretend that it never happened and eat responsibly. That’s it. Nothing else,” he says on his website.
Eating responsibly refers to going back to a normal way of eating where you don’t binge because you just fasted, but you also don’t restrict yourself with an extreme diet or eating less than you need. Occasional fasting combined with regular weight training is best for fat loss, says Pilon. By going on one or two 24-hour fasts during the week, you allow yourself to eat a slightly higher amount of calories on the other five or six non-fasting days. That, he says, makes it easier and more enjoyable to end the week in a calorie deficit without feeling as if you had to be on an extreme diet.”
