Intermittent Fasting – Why fast?

This was my response when I saw how effective fasting was for a master photographer friend of mine, Wesley. This was likely 3 or 4 years back when I witnessed how he went from being rounder than me to becoming fit and lean in a year. I am a ‘live to eat’ person, so it seemed impossible for me to ever get on a plan like this.

I didn’t know about the science behind it, and I think I was confused about what it all was. I thought I knew what fasting was, so I rejected it before even finding out more until I came across a series of videos by Dr. Jason Fung, a medical doctor advocating fasting on YouTube. 

After realizing what fasting was all about, I gave it a try, and I never looked back since. If you remember what I have mentioned in my previous posts, I have lost 16 kg over the course of a year, but specifically, over the past 6 months due to fasting.

Not a Diet

Firstly, intermittent fasting is not a diet, as in you do not restrict what you eat but of restricting when you are eating. You eat only during certain hours of the day, and fast for the rest.

Not a Weight Loss Program

Secondly, let me share what I found out about the benefits for our bodies and brains beyond just weight loss.

Intermittent fasting helps us burn fat faster, lower our blood pressure and cholesterol levels, enhance our cognitive function and memory, and even protect us from diseases like diabetes and cancer(but I will share more about this next time when I talk about the next level of fasting, prolonged fasting).

How?

Well, it’s all about metabolic switching.

Metabolic switching is when our body switches from using glucose (sugar which is stored in our liver) as its main source of energy to using ketones (which is stored in fat). (Reference : NIH)

Basically, this should sound familiar, we learnt this in school during science classes.

But there are some aspects that have only been discovered relatively recently. 

The theory is that metabolic switching isn’t done easily. An analogy I heard used was that our bodies can be described as massive factories. Imagine that the factories can use two sources of power, glucose and ketones. The problem is that when the factory is using one source of power, it cannot switch easily.

It needs a few hours to switch fuel sources. Picture having the entire factory’s workers having to move heavy machinery around whenever a switch is required.

So you can picture how reluctant the factory’s supervisors are to order a switch, and would delay as much as possible.

So, in this analogy, your body is in the glucose processing mode whenever you are eating. And if you are eating every few hours or so, no matter how much, your body would prefer to keep in this mode.

One major problem is that the body also would keep 20% of whatever you eat as fats by default. So even if you only ate ONE cookie when you are hungry in between lunch and dinner, your body would turn 20% of that to storage, AND keep the system at the glucose processing mode.

Research shows that ketone processing mode is never reached if you do not fast for at least 12 hours. What this means is, that additional 20% you stored earlier in fat storage? It will never get used up.

One of the top experts on intermittent fasting is a guy named Mark Mattson, a brain scientist at Johns Hopkins, and he’s been studying this stuff for 25 years. He says that our bodies are actually designed to go without food for a long time. Even for days.

Think about it. Back in the old days, before humans had farms and supermarkets, we had to hunt and gather our food. And that was not easy. It took hours and hours of walking, running, climbing, digging, and fighting. Sometimes we found a lot of food, sometimes we found nothing. So we had to adapt to survive on whatever we could get. Our bodies are designed to keep running lean, hence going for days in the ketones processing mode until we get food.

And you know what? We were healthier back then. We were leaner, stronger, and smarter.

But things have changed a lot since then.

Nowadays, we have food everywhere. And not just any food. Processed food. Junk food. Fast food. Food that makes us fat and sick.

And we don’t stop eating. Ever.

We eat when we wake up, when we work, when we watch TV, when we go online, when we go to bed. We eat all day and all night.

And you know what? We’re not healthier now. We’re now fatter, weaker, and dumber.

The reason for this is that our modern lifestyles make it such that our bodies would NEVER touch fats as a source of fuel unless we stop eating, i.e. fast from 3-18 hours depending on what we ate.

(Reference : https://www.physiciansplan.com/blog/the-science-behind-intermittent-fasting)

So how do we do this?

I would share more about what I did next time, but for now, research has shown that even doing a 12 hour fast is better than nothing. Simply put, you can just start by not snacking after dinner, and have your breakfast only after 12 hours.

As usual, even though 12 hours is super safe, I have to state again that I am not your doctor, so before you start, make sure you check with your doctor first.