You can either store energy or burn energy.
What brought me to research fasting and how it can apply to my nutritional needs was this quote. It fascinated me, it literally answered all of my questions about nutrition, that is, once I rephrased it.
Remember the key to becoming healthy is to take control of your own health. Do your own research, and find out how your body works. Every body is unique in its chemical and physical makeup.
NO ONE SHOULD KNOW YOUR BODY BETTER THAN YOU!
But I digress, as I stated before I rephrased the above quote to be personal to me. In other words you are either feeding or burning, adding or subtracting. In other words you are in a state of adding fat or using fat.
I do not think that today’s obesity problem is because of to much sugar, fat, or any one thing. I believe it is because we are feeding ourselves all the time. From the moment we wake to when we go to bed.
In the 1960s Americans averaged 3 meals a day, but now we average 6 meals a day – we never give our bodies a chance to digest. We go from one meal to the next without a break.
There is never a break, never a time where our body can go from storing energy to using energy. Our body is always in a mode of storing, like a squirrel preparing for winter our tree trunk is getting fuller and fuller of acorns.
FASTING TYPES
“Breakfast” literally means you are breaking a fast from the night before. Everyday you break a fast its just how long you fast that matters.
There are several ways you can fast. I know from my own religious practice we set aside a time frequently to fast for a 24 hour period but I rarely participated.
But I wanted to find out if fasting would help me with my overall nutrition goals. I felt like I too was eating all the time and buying into the notion that you should each 6+ meals a day to boost your metabolism. But over time I found this was just another diet fad and not sound nutriotional advice.
Over time I would gain weight again. Fasting as explained to me was just giving my body time to use glucose in my body, and use energy. It was giving my system a break from storing the excess stuff I was eating as fat and actually using it for energy.
In order to pick what type of fasting I wanted to try I narrowed it down to 3 types:
1st Type
Time Restricted Feeding – feeding within a window of time. This is done by eating all of your daily calories within a 2-4 hour time frame for the day.
2nd Type
Intermittent fasting or fasting each day for a period of time or once or twice a week for 24 hours. A popular method is fasting for 16 hours and eating for 8 hours in a day. Other methods include fasting for 24-48 hours once or twice a week.
3rd Type
Prolonged fasting – long term fasting that is done under medical supervision, like water only fasting.
I knew from previous experience that I would not succeed with 24 hour or more fasting so I decided to do intermittent fasting. I chose the 16 hour fasting and 8 hour eating window. I normally will fast from 6:00 P.M. to 10:00 A.M.
Problems of Fasting:
Before fasting or taking on any nutritional changes you should speak to your health practitioner. One problem with fasting is that you may not be medically able to.
Another problem with fasting is that further food restriction can lead to starvation. Which in turn can lead to eating disorders. People who fast can have such good results that they think more is better and further restrict food intake.
In addition if you work out to much and fast to long you may get to lean and lose valuable muscle mass. I am sure there are many more but these were ones I felt were critical to making my decision.
Conclusion:
Fasting is a personal choice, and as such what I have chosen may not work for you. I chose intermittent fasting which I normally do for 16 hours every day, except for Sunday I do 18 hours.
I believe this gives me enough time to get rid of all of my glucose reserves, and on Sunday extra time because of the cheat meal I have the day before.
Then I normally work out fasted very early in the morning, since I have adopted this strategy I have kept a very lean physique and a steady weight despite a day of decadence (Saturday sometimes turns into a cheat day).
Each day I will eat normally in an 8 hour window. This works well for me. After getting used to it, it has become quite easy to do and I am rarely hungry even under a reduce calorie cutting phase.
As a nutrition strategy I have grown to love intermittent fasting. I know the critics and the so called “diet and workout” experts espouse other methods. But remember YOU HAVE TO DO WHAT WORKS FOR YOU, and this really does work for me.