It seems like everyone is talking about intermittent fasting and weight loss these days. You might be wondering if it actually helps you to lose weight.
Intermittent fasting will certainly help you lose weight if you’re also following a calorie deficit during the days that you do eat. The longer the fast the more weight you will lose.
How do I start with IF?
You may have seen the various time blocking methods used in intermittent fasting. For example, the 16/8 method. This method says that you should fast for 16 hours a day, and keep your daily consumption within an 8 hour window.
There are others such as 5:2 diet which says fast for 2 days out of the week. During the two fasting days, you restrict your caloric intake to a paltry 500 or so calories.
And there is also “do two 24-hour fasts per week” which is pretty self explanatory.
And there are more: 24 hour fasts every other day, eat only 200 calories every other day.
These fasting programs all rely at some level on the basic premise that fasting helps you lose weight. But how accurate is that premise?
The answer to that is not so straightforward. This study (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0303720715300800) seems to suggest that intermittent fasting is more or less just as effective as other methods of caloric restriction.
Fasting is an ancient practice which is practiced in Judaism and Christianity, for example. In ancient times, obesity is not the pandemic that it is today. However, some writers have speculated that in addition to the spiritual element, there has always been a more or less medical basis for fasting even when incorporated into religion.
The fact that modern medicine and nutrition science is not very well informed about fasting is hardly surprising, seeing as how suggesting to people that they cease consumption of anything, whether it be food or consumer goods or what have you, is not going to be a very popular trend when viewed under the economic lens.
This study (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6530042/) suggests that fasting helps reduce the side effects of chemotherapy in patients with cancer.
Some writers have suggested that there is no cancer present in nomadic peoples who have insecure food supply and therefore sometimes go for days without eating, just drinking water. This study (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6362881/) also suggests “The Western diet is the prototype of modern dietary pattern and is mainly characterized by the intake of large amounts of red meat, dairy products, refined grains and sugar. Large amounts of scientific evidence positively correlate Western diet to acne, obesity, diabetes, heart disease and cancer, the so-called “diseases of civilization”.
On a more general note, it is a fact that almost all mammals in nature have insecure food supplies. The large apex predators in Africa, for example, such as the jaguar, can go days without eating as they have to catch their prey and they are not always successful. The nomadic ancestors of homo sapiens went for days or perhaps weeks without eating meat. Tribes of homo sapiens have subsisted on diets of entirely vegetables, or very few vegetables and mostly blubber, and so on.
In this context it seems that is is only natural for the human body to experience fasting, and evolved in order to experience fasting. Therefore to never undergo fasting would mean to never trigger certain biological processes that are inherently natural to the human body. That seems to be the best argument for why fasting is beneficial and effective.
