What to Consider When Practicing Intermittent Fasting or Time-Restricted Eating

Guidelines for making your fasting beneficial

Why are more and more people adopting this way of eating? The number one evidence is that it optimizes your energy levels, or better yet, it maintains your energy for longer before reaching fatigue.

As the name implies, time-restricted feeding means that you only eat food during a limited number of consecutive hours each day.

The benefits are significant:

• It provides you with energy because it improves mitochondrial function, that is, the production of energy from the energy factory of our body, the mitochondria.
• It improves your metabolism or what has been called metabolic flexibility which, in a nutshell, means that your body makes better use of the foods you eat and easily adapts to using fat as fuel.
• Fasting helps lower your blood sugar levels. The body then reacts by using fat instead of glucose as an energy source after converting the fat into ketones, as explained by dietician Kathy McManus of the Department of Nutrition at Harvard University in the United States. ( 1 )
• Frequent fasting in animals is associated with weight loss, lower blood pressure and heart rate, reduced insulin resistance, balanced cholesterol levels and reduced inflammation. Some studies even suggest that it improves memory.
• Fasting has been associated with an increase in life expectancy, at least in animals. ( 2 )

What you should keep in mind to be able to eat during a restricted schedule and not fail in the attempt.

 

• Start slowly. You can start by doing 12-hour fasts, for example. By having your last meal at 8 pm and the next at 8 am, you've probably spent most of your time sleeping and haven't even realized you've fasted for 12 hours, so it's relatively easy to accomplish.  As you get used to it, you can increase the fasting time.

• There are several forms of intermittent fasting: there may be restrictions on both “when” and “how much” you eat. In alternate-course fasting, you eat normally on one day and fast every other day.  Example, if you consume 2000 calories Monday-Wednesday-Friday, then Tuesday-Thursday-Saturday you consume a single meal of 500 calories.

• When you have fasted for 12 hours it means you have a 12 hour “window” to consume your food. As you adapt to your fasting hours, these can eventually increase to 14 hours and at an advanced level up to 24 hours for consuming only one meal a day, which is fine if you are young and healthy. However, as you get into middle age or older, it can be counterproductive.

Precautions and cases in which fasting may be unfavorable

For some older people, if they lose too much weight, it could affect skeletal muscle, causing sarcopenia, lower their energy levels, and alter their immune system in general.

According to Dr. Suzanne Salomon of Beth Israel Deaconess Center for Gerontology, which is affiliated with Harvard University, people who must take medications with meals to prevent nausea and stomach irritation may not do well with extended fasts.

People who must take medications for heart conditions or high blood pressure are at risk of experiencing imbalances in their sodium and potassium levels during fasting.

For people with diabetes who need to eat or take medication to control their blood sugar, this way of eating can be risky.

However, if you fall into any of these groups and still want to practice some form of intermittent fasting, keep the following steps in mind:

• Consult your doctor

• Ideally, you should start with the 12:12 fast because, as I mentioned above, you spend most of the fast sleeping, which is crucial because it is during this time that the body recovers and energy is used for restorative functions such as mitochondrial repair and brain cleansing via the glymphatic system which is the waste pathway of the central nervous system (CNS), but not for digestion. For this reason, it is recommended to have your last meal 3 hours before bedtime.

• Dr. Alexander Soukas, an endocrinologist and molecular geneticist at Massachusetts General Hospital affiliated with Harvard University, sees no problem with continuing to take his medications while practicing intermittent fasting, and says that consuming calorie-free beverages such as water or black coffee does not break his fast either. ( 3 )

• If you need to take any medication with food, you can do a modified fast that can provide virtually the same benefits.

What you need to keep in mind to make intermittent fasting work for you 

Exercise. Exercise, or at least physical activity, allows your body to react more quickly to the effects of fasting and begin to reap its benefits.  Likewise, physical activity will help you get a more restful night's sleep, help you feel better about yourself, and have all your energy when you get up each morning.

Take care of your circadian rhythms . By realigning your sleep-wake cycles, your entire body functions more efficiently. Adequate sleep is essential for organic recovery to take place. Melatonin is a hormone that is activated in the dark to regulate sleep, it is an antioxidant, it strengthens the immune system, it improves mood, it helps you reach your ideal weight as it transforms white fat cells into brown cells that facilitate thermogenesis (use of body energy). So there are several mechanisms that are activated during the night so that during the day your body functions properly.

Implement ketogenic cycles.  By combining fasting with ketogenic diet cycles, you reinforce your metabolic activity, making the loss of accumulated fat in the body more efficient through its use in the activities you perform.

If you don’t know what a ketogenic diet is by now, let me explain quickly: it’s eating meals that are 60-75% fat, 15-30% protein, and 5-10% carbs. This puts you in a state of ketosis , where you can burn ketones from fat instead of glucose from carbs, which speeds up your metabolism and increases your weight loss potential (according to proponents of the diet). Between the fat burning during ketosis, and the loss of water weight that you normally hold on to as stored carbs for energy, you can lose quite a few pounds on keto .

The flagship foods of the ketogenic diet are healthy fats such as avocado, animal protein and dairy products.  Foods that are left out are pasta, bread, starchy vegetables like potatoes, beans, and anything that contains sugar.

Of course, there is a vegetarian and vegan version that relies on healthy fat sources such as coconut oil, nuts and seeds, avocados and some dairy products.

Combining keto eating with intermittent fasting simply means adhering to the parameters of a ketogenic diet and eating within a condensed time window."

If you decide to combine the two, it's a good idea to start slowly and with the easiest way, which is a 12- or 14-hour fast with a 12- or 10-hour replenishment window while consuming a ketogenic diet. This practice can be done several days a week, alternating or in conjunction with intermittent fasting.

Eliminating certain foods such as gluten and those containing lectins facilitates the action and benefits of fasting . The ketogenic diet itself excludes high carbohydrate consumption, so for the effects and benefits of fasting to be overwhelming, try to reduce the consumption of grains, black beans and other types of beans, as well as soy, which are the foods that contain the most lectins.

Lectins are like a defense mechanism developed by plants, a kind of natural repellent to protect themselves and their seeds from predators (including humans).

Depending on your sensitivity to this protein, other foods that may alter your process are,

• Dairy products from animals fed grains and concentrates.
• Legumes such as beans, cashews, peanuts and soybeans.
• Dark-skinned vegetables such as eggplant, potatoes and peppers.
• Wheat and other grains such as barley, corn, millet, oats and rye.

Tips to eliminate high lectin content in foods:

• Soak the grains before cooking and cook them preferably in a pressure cooker.
• Eat fermented foods such as sauerkraut and other pickles (make sure they are sugar-free); Fermented soy products such as miso, tamari and tempeh.
• Germinate seeds such as broccoli, especially for their high sulforaphane content. Here you can see my article about sulforaphane and its antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, nervous system protective benefits and more.
• If you are going to consume dairy products such as cheese, it is preferable that it be made with goat, buffalo or sheep cheese since this milk contains casein A2. Cow's milk contains casein A1.  Nowadays, cows produce A1 casein, even in organic milk.  A1 proteins are metabolized in the gut to produce beta-casomorphin, which can bind to beta cells in the pancreas and trigger an autoimmune attack. Kefir is the best alternative to drink as it contains a wide range of probiotics.

Both intermittent fasting, alternating fasting, and fasting adapted to your health conditions, as well as your daily physical and mental activities, can improve your health in many ways, but especially by improving your quality of life with the energy you need to get up every morning and achieve what you set out to do.