
So you are comfortable with intermittent fasting and following a schedule similar to 16/8 or even an 18/6 protocol. This is now part of your life and you are enjoying benefits. Fat loss, more energy, mind clarity and less cravings. Congratulations, this is a great achievement!
Incorporating a schedule like 16/8 will greatly help weight loss and improve every day quality but extending the fasting window ever so slightly is where some of the potent health benefits real come from.
Let’s recap what can be reasonably achieved by a 16-18 hour fast.
In addition there is no down-side to it apart from social reasons. But once you are used to intermittent fasting having once in a while breakfast with friends or a late dinner is quite ok.
Intermittent fasting is “easy” to apply with little amount of effort and there is no muscle loss. Read here on how to get started.
Fasting is a well researched area and the benefits are well established. For example a 2016 paper Impact of intermittent fasting on health and disease processes states
Numerous physiological indicators of health are improved on IF diets. Among such responses to IF are:
That is pretty amazing. So how can we get all those benefits?
Fasting and Feasting is a normal cycle of life. Although this way of eating is not promoted by the current society lifestyle it has been practised by many cultures for thousands of years. Our bodies need nutrition to grow a change but equally time to rest and digest. So once we feast with a big nutritious meal full digestion can take up to 8 hours. If we eat 5-6 meals a day then we never give ourselves a chance to rest.
From a science perspective we are balancing between an anabolic state where we are growing and building tissue and a catabolic state where we are resting, recycling and cleaning up. Very few of us clean up our closet and our closet is now full of trash. This is not healthy and potentially a cause for decease. Instead of doing pro-longed fasts of 3+ days which require a lot of effort and attention we can achieve similar effects by shortening our daily eating window. This allows to:
Of course you need to be careful about: