I’ve been doing some form of intermittent fasting for a large part of the last 15 years.
I started with 36 hours once a week because I made money based on the appearance of my body. It works tremendously well in the short-term, but it’s deceptive. The tissue loss is mostly fat, which looks great, but there is definitely some muscle loss, which is an order of magnitude harder to gain back, so the long-term effect is muscle wasting and fat rebound as caloric demands drop. It’s easy to see in my photos. Later I did OMAD several times for stretches of about a year with roughly similar short and long-term effects. Recently I completed a 100-hour fast.
There are a few basic issues. First, with IF you’re not really fasting as long as you think you are. Small intestines take about 6 hours, and the colon turns fIber into MCTs for days. Second, the insulin surge becomes preferential to fatty acid storage over muscle glycogen. Third, you lose the ghrelin-induced GH that releases fatty acids throughout the day to feed the muscles. There may be autophagy benefits, but that may be as true for satellite cells as it is for cancer, and maybe more so because cancer usually originates in fatty tissues with lots of energy nearby.
At this point, by experience and by science, I don’t think IF is the best diet protocol if you have the discipline for a more continuous protocol. I don’t, so I can’t say I’ve tried that, and I hate the fat on my body, so I’m not sure where to go from here. I’m not 100% convinced either way, but I wanted to give a balancing perspective.
I started with 36 hours once a week because I made money based on the appearance of my body. It works tremendously well in the short-term, but it’s deceptive. The tissue loss is mostly fat, which looks great, but there is definitely some muscle loss, which is an order of magnitude harder to gain back, so the long-term effect is muscle wasting and fat rebound as caloric demands drop. It’s easy to see in my photos. Later I did OMAD several times for stretches of about a year with roughly similar short and long-term effects. Recently I completed a 100-hour fast.
There are a few basic issues. First, with IF you’re not really fasting as long as you think you are. Small intestines take about 6 hours, and the colon turns fIber into MCTs for days. Second, the insulin surge becomes preferential to fatty acid storage over muscle glycogen. Third, you lose the ghrelin-induced GH that releases fatty acids throughout the day to feed the muscles. There may be autophagy benefits, but that may be as true for satellite cells as it is for cancer, and maybe more so because cancer usually originates in fatty tissues with lots of energy nearby.
At this point, by experience and by science, I don’t think IF is the best diet protocol if you have the discipline for a more continuous protocol. I don’t, so I can’t say I’ve tried that, and I hate the fat on my body, so I’m not sure where to go from here. I’m not 100% convinced either way, but I wanted to give a balancing perspective.