The Power of Exercise and Intermittent Fasting

If you're already off to a good start on a healthy fitness plan, and you're looking for ways to take it to the next level, then you might want to consider intermittent fasting. In essence this fitness-enhancing strategy looks at the timing of meals, as opposed to those fad plans where you eat just one or two things for several days in a row.

On intermittent fasting, the longest time you'll ever abstain from food is 36 hours, although 14-18 hours is more common. You can also opt to simply delay eating. For example, skipping breakfast may be just the thing to get you off a plateau in your fitness routine. The issue of fasting is a major shift from my typical recommendations. I've not been a major advocate for it in the past, but as many of you who have been reading this site for years know, I am always learning.

To that end, I've now revised my personal eating schedule to eliminate breakfast and restrict the time I eat food to a period of about six to seven hours each day, which is typically from noon to 6 or 7 pm.

http://fitness.mercola.com/sites/fitness/archive/2012/08/24/intermittent-fasting.aspx

I made this shift several years ago and it was a powerful change.  In the bad old days, though, I also tried this, and just wound up savagely hungry in the morning.  What makes it work is eating the good food when you eat.  

Dr. Mercola's other tips:

• Don't blindly trust human studies on IF as some of these show misleading results due to major design flaws.
• Don't even think about intermittent fasting if you eat the typical American portions of high glycemic junk food.
• When following an IF regimen you need to make it low glycemic and high in protein and fiber. Eat whole foods, possibly high in dairy and whey protein, along with nutrient dense antioxidant foods.
• Adjust your fuel food according to your specific condition and type of training.
• Your intermittent fasting regimen must make sense. The length of your fasting intervals should be optimized to yield maximum biological impact. What really counts is your net fasting time (period between meals minus digestion time.) It takes your body roughly 5-8 hours to fully digest a meal and shift into a fasting mode. Three to six hours of "not eating" between meals will not be sufficient to put your body in a fasting mode and therefore will fail to get you the results you're looking for.
• The female-specific response to fasting or intermittent fasting is no different than the female response to intense exercise. There is indeed a tradeoff between benefits and side effects. And the question "should women fast" raises the same issues as the question "should women exercise intensely".

Eat Before You Train? Maybe.

Remember all those folks over the last 20 years that wrote or said it was critical that you eat a large portion of a blue whale before and after each workout so you could avoid muscle catabolism and thus becoming a girly man with tiny biceps?  And that you should eat at least one blue whale fin every 3 hours?  And that breakfast is the most important meal of the day?  
That advice was worth what you paid for it - if you got it for free.

In previous installments, I’ve discussed the powerful effect of fasting on weight loss, particularly with respect toadipose tissue. I’ve explained how intermittent bouts of going without food have been shown to increase cancer survival and resistance and improve patient and tumor response to chemotherapy, and I went over the considerable evidence suggesting that fasting can provide thelife extending benefits of caloric restriction without the pain of restricting your calories day in, day out. And last week, I highlighted how fasting may have protective and therapeutic benefits to the brain.

As such you might be thinking that I only recommend fasting to the sedentary, the aged, and the infirm. Surely I wouldn’t go so far as to recommend to the active, the athletic, and the jacked that they engage in vigorous physical activity without having eaten a solid square meal beforehand – right? I mean, no good can come of a fasted training session, as the gym bros with the sweet ‘ceps are so quick to intone.

So, Sisson, what’s the deal? Can we exercise in the fasted state and live to tell the tale?

Yes. And there may even be benefits to doing it.

http://www.marksdailyapple.com/fasting-exercise-workout-recovery/#axzz3BbffMh79

Simplest Change

Each of our clients wants to lose fat, except maybe one.  Most are already working within the paleolithic model of nutrition.  Some are having spectacular results, and that is putting smiles on both of our faces.  Some are stalled out.  Today's post is about the simplest change one can make to reaccelerate fat loss.

That change is to have a breakfast of only protein (some, 15-30 grams) and fat (a lot).  Why will this help?

First, let's get into how you body fuels itself.  The number two metabolic priority (in terms of urgency) is getting sugar to the brain.  The brain needs approximately 600 calories worth of fuel daily.  That's about 25% of the total caloric requirement for most folks.  If the brain does not get the necessary fuel, it will cease to function, you will fall down, and the ghost might leave the machine, depending upon how fuel deprived the brain is.  To keep this from happening, you were engineered with a redundant fuel system, that allows you to make brain food from fat, carbs or protein.

Most of your body runs best on fat as fuel.  The engineer's intent seems to have been that you would not need to eat or store much sugar, and that the sugar (not in large supply until very recently) you ate or stored would be used primarily by the brain.  The first contingency for lack of available carbs/sugar is that your liver will convert fat into ketone bodies, which can be an alternate fuel for the brain (in fact, there's some evidence the brain is most healthy when fueled by both sugar and ketones).  This system is what lets a person survive day after day with no food available (remember those stories of 60+ days in a life raft?).  If you ever face that situation, the body will also catabolize muscle to make protein and sugar for the brain.  So in all you have three ways to store energy - fat is the biggest source and the best fuel.  Sugar is the smallest source and is a preferred fuel for the brain.  Muscle is the desperation fuel, "for emergency use only."

Now let's get back to why keeping carbs out of your breakfast will help you to burn fat.  First, all night long, since you are not eating, your body has to start converting to fat burning (you know people have a serious sugar problem when they cannot sleep through the night without sugar cravings).  When you "break your fast", if you give the body sugar, it will stop running on fat.  If you give your body too much sugar, it will get busy converting that sugar into fat.  If you give yourself a moderate protein, high fat breakfast, this can keep your hunger at bay but let the body keep burning stored fat for brain fuel.

So the easiest, simplest, change to start burning more fat is to have a carb free breakfast.

If you want to take this one step further, stop eating by 7 or 8 PM.  That way, you may go as long as 12 hours from last meal of the day until first.  That also invites your body to get good at burning fat, and if you don't eat carbs until lunch, that's a 14-16 window of no "carbage".  This kind of carb fasting is very useful for those who want to get healthy and lean.  Why does this help with health?  In short, the number one driver of disease in our nation is metabolic syndrome, which is characterized by loss of glycemic control (that is to say cycling high and low blood sugars).  The above described carb fast interrupts the cycle of excess sugar/carbs, and restores normal blood sugar levels for many who are dangerously close to metabolic syndrome.

This is also why exercise alone does not work for fat loss or health - if you continuously over-eat sugar and carbs, you will not get glycemic control and you will not have your best health no matter how intense your daily workouts are.

If you want to take this another step beyond a carb fast, push your breakfast back by one hour each day, until you can go food free for 14-16 hours.  This path can be risky for some, so if you want to do this, come talk to me first.  You can also search this blog to find prior posts about how to start intermittent fasting.

Are you ready to make the simplest change?  If so, get going and let me know what you learn!

PN on IF

This is a concise summary of various approaches to intermittent fasting, and how to do them well.  This is, in my experience, a very powerful strategy for health, glucose regulation and fat loss.
http://www.precisionnutrition.com/intermittent-fasting/chapter-3

Intermittent Fasting Beats Traditional Diets

• Intermittent fasting or “scheduled eating” is a powerful strategy for shedding excess weight and reducing your risk of chronic diseases like diabetes, heart disease, and cancer
• Three major mechanisms by which fasting benefits your body include increased insulin sensitivity and mitochondrial energy efficiency; reduced oxidative stress; and increased capacity to resist stress, disease, and aging
• A recent human study confirmed that intermittent fasting was actually more effective for weight loss and improving insulin resistance than daily calorie restriction
• Intermittent fasting can also dramatically boost human growth hormone production, reduce inflammation, and lessen free radical damage—all of which have beneficial effects on your health
• To get started, consider skipping breakfast, and avoid eating at least three hours before you go to sleep. This should effectively restrict your eating to an 8-hour window or less each day

http://fitness.mercola.com/sites/fitness/archive/2013/12/20/intermittent-fasting-weight-loss.aspx

I have been doing IF to some degree or another for 3 years, and have found it is powerful for many reasons.  One is it just breaks the habit of eating all the time.  Two, it proved I don't have to eat all the time to "get enough food" to perform well in workouts.  There's no downside, no risk, and no cost - for most folks.  Start easy - push the breakfast back by hourly increments, and have good food on hand in case you "crash".

Good advice:

In order to understand how you can fast daily while still eating every day, you need to understand some basic facts about metabolism. It takes most people eight to 12 hours for their body to burn the sugar stored in your body as glycogen. Now, most people never deplete their glycogen stores because they eat three or more meals a day. This teaches your body to burn sugar as your primary fuel and effectively shuts off your ability to use fat as a fuel.

Therefore, in order to work, the length of your fast must be at least eight hours. Still, this is a far cry from a 24-hour or longer fast, which can be quite challenging. I believe that, for most people, simply restricting the window of time during which you eat your food each day is far easier.

For example, you could restrict your eating to the hours of 11am and 7pm. Essentially, you’re just skipping breakfast and making lunch your first meal of the day instead. This equates to a daily fasting of 16 hours—twice the minimum required to deplete your glycogen stores and start shifting into fat burning mode.

PN - IF Gone Wrong

The link below details an interesting story of an athlete/trainer running smack into thyroid disfunction, which PN attributes to excessively fastidious intermittent fasting and too much "stress" (for the record, and in the interest of language precision, I like to think of "stress" as a good thing; how we respond to stressors makes them "good" or "bad").   

http://www.precisionnutrition.com/doctor-detective-fasting-thyroid

The big lesson is - anything good can be taken too far.  I love the liberty of waking in the morning and not needed food to feel good.  I think IF is a great way to live - for me.  But if anyone takes a basic idea like IF, and gets crazy with it, they can get into the deep end of a pool they are not prepared to swim in.  Which is why, on nights like last night, I eat cake, ice cream, or other food treats with a clear conscience when I'm socializing and celebrating.  About once a month, I even get a candy bar or something stupid like that to remind myself how little I like them (even though, from years of eating them when sugar dependent, I have a positive association to sweets - a HUGE one).  

Attia & IFIK

For my friends and clients working to get into and stay into nutritional ketosis, I posted one day's worth of meals from Peter Attia's web site as an example.  This post is Attia's typically long and information dense post, but I think I'm on read number five or so and still gaining insights into what he's teaching. IOW, I like it.

Note the percentages of intake:

Carbs - 90g or ~360kcal

Protein - 131 or 419-524kcal (some say an average of 3.2kcal of protein becomes fuel after to losses in hair, skin, nails, and protein spills from urine)

Fat - 218 or 1962kcal

Thus, his intake is ~80% fat.  He is measuring his "success" in nutritional ketosis via a ketone measuring tool (.5 to 1.5 mmol/dl being ideal for "nutritional ketosis"), which was something like $1000.  You and I can get a pocket ketone meter nowadays for a few bucks, but the strips are $2-$6 each.  Thank you Canadian online pharmacy for the $2 strips!  Without that I would not be willing to do the ketone self experiments.

One more note - Attia thinks of himself as an cyclist aka endurance athlete, but also does one workout in three of relatively high intensity core strength and conditioning work.

http://eatingacademy.com/personal/what-i-actually-eat-part-ii-ifik-2

• 7 am — morning workout – flat intervals on bike (75 minutes).
• 1 pm – Nicoise salad:
  2 cup butterhead lettuce, 1 tomato, 10 black olives, 8 oz tuna steak, 1 hard boiled egg, 0.5 cup red onion, 2 oz lemon juice, 4 tbsp olive oil, 1 tbsp mustard.
• 7 pm – Chicken salad with nuts:
  2 cup romaine lettuce, 1 tomato, 0.5 cup cucumber, 2 oz cashews, 2 oz walnuts, 8 oz chicken breast, 6 tbsp olive oil, 2 tbsp balsamic vinegar.

Daily totals:

Carbohydrate – 89 gm

Protein – 131 gm

Fat – 218 gm (about 15% SFA, 70% MUFA, 15% PUFA)

Calories – 2,900

Exercise and Weight Loss, Part 3

To summarize the last two posts, some folks say exercise is great for weight loss, and others say the science is ambiguous on the topic.  I've said I think there are too many variables, and the powers that be have not agreed which are the important variables, therefore the experiments that have been done have not been conclusive.   What's left to discuss, you might wonder - and the answer is that there is a way to think about food and diet to see how they might be complimentary for changing one's body composition towards more muscle, less fat.

First, training should be focused on desired physical outcomes - do you want to compete in endurance events?  Do you want to prepare for a fight or a sport or the needs of a profession (firefighting for example)?  Well then, you have a different priority than those many who simply want to look good naked.  Either way, burning calories doing mindless exercise that does not increase your work capacity is a dead end game.  Train for strength, speed, stamina, endurance, agility, balance, coordination, accuracy, power and skill - or any subset of the above.  Of those listed above, strength is often the most amenable to large, long term gains, but the best performance increases in the short term come from short, high power output workouts that demand and develop anaerobic fitness.  Go hard, rest, do it again, as many different ways as you can think of to go hard.  This is the CrossFit model, but you don't have to be an expert in CrossFit to either see/experience the virtue of this approach or to implement it.

Will this help you lose body fat and gain muscle?  Yes to the latter, but I can only offer a "maybe" to the former.

That's because, as has been said many times, you cannot out train a bad diet.  If you are pounding down 300g/day of "complex, whole grain carbohydrates", you better be training 2-4 hours per day or you are likely to be fat and sick.  A 30 minute drill on the elliptical trainer is not going to beat back the impact of that much sugar.

The goal of eating, if you are already fat and sick or if you feel yourself sliding down that pathway, must be to eat for glycemic control and nutrient quality.  Thus the prescription - eat meat, eggs, vegetables, nuts and seeds, little fruit or starch, no sugar/wheat.

Eating in this protein adequate, high fat, and relatively low carb template gives your body a chance to regulate blood sugar, and redevelop the capacity to run itself on the best human fuel - fat.  Most people on this type of a diet find that their body's 1.5 million year old system of feedback loops gives them a chance to eat only what they need, to trust hunger signals as legitimate signals of need, and therefore to eat what they need for health, and not more.  When eating this way, exercise may help to speed recomposition, especially if you train for intensity in short workouts.  

Avoid the big nasties of neolithic nutrition - wheat, sugar (HFCS, table sugar) and polyunsaturated oils.

Establish a baseline of carb intake - if 100g/day of carbs lets you lose weight over time, you have yourself a solution.  For many, especially if they've been punishing their metabolic systems for years, 100g/day will be too much.

Lastly, once you stabilize on your carb intake and food quality, experiment with fasting.

Whatever you do, don't think of it as a diet.  Think of ways you can sustain the new eating patterns for a lifetime.  There's no going back - if you lose weight and then start eating like you used to, you are no different than the alcoholic who relapses or the smoker who takes up the habit again.  Save yourself the hassle!

My recommendation - don't exercise for weight loss, that's a fool's game and wasteful.  Eat the right way (carb restriction, high quality food), and exercise to optimize improvements in desired physical capacity.  As you do this you are also heading off most of the diseases of civilization - osteoporosis, obesity, high blood pressure, metabolic syndrome - and the "A List" of diseases that follow metabolic syndrome:  cancer, vascular disease (heart attack and stroke), and neurological disease (Alzheimer's and the rest).
(edited 21 July)

Not Necessary

http://fitness.mercola.com/sites/fitness/archive/2012/06/29/whey-protein-for-sports-nutrition.aspx

The link above will take you to an article about nutrient timing.  It's good enough for what it is, but it's also not necessary to do anything this article recommends.  Eat good food, train smart, hard and consistently.  Train with intensity, use the major lifts, vary your workouts.

If you have time for more than that, perhaps you need what Dr. Mercola recommends.  More likely, you would do better not to worry about anything to do with nutrient timing; unnecessary complication.

Berardi and PN, Part 3

JB has also recently experimented with intermittent fasting, although he's taken a liking to a once weekly fast, vice the 5x mornings a week I'm liking these days.

How's his fast work?

Personally, I’ve been playing around with a 24 hour fast once per week. Sunday is generally my fasting day. Here’s how I do things:

• 10 pm Saturday: stop eating
• 9 am on Sunday: 1 multi-, 5 BCAAs, ½ serving greens+ in 1L water, 1 c green tea
• 1 pm on Sunday: same as above
• 5 pm on Sunday: same as above
• 10 pm Sunday: eat a small protein, veggie, legume, and healthy fat meal

I’ve been doing this for 4 months, all as part of a fat loss experiment I’m working on. My goal is to lose as much fat as I can – and maintain this loss for a full year – while doing less than 90 minutes of super-intense exercise per week.

http://www.precisionnutrition.com/berardi-interview

As JB cautions, fasting isn't for everyone.  I usually tell folks they should try to get comfortable just eating paleo for a couple of months before trying a fasting experiment.  However, I have a good friend who's recently switched to paleo style low carb, and started a "once per day" approach to eating.  In short order he lost 12 pounds and 1.25 inches off of his belly - that's a heck of a start!  He reports never being hungry and feeling very, very good.  I look forward to hearing how his next marathon training routine goes now that he's shedding the excess fat and restoring his health.  I also hope he's one of the 80% of folks who can get rid of their blood pressure medication with carb restriction.

Here's JB's very detailed publication on IF:
http://www.precisionnutrition.com/intermittent-fasting

Next, we'll tap into JB's advice on post workout nutrition.

Get Healthy - Don't Eat

Not enough detail in this study to make too much of it, but the facts resonate with my observations of the effect of fasting, as well as with other studies I've seen (e.g. Muslims show better lipid profiles post Ramadan).  The bit at the end about HGH levels isn't something I'd seen before - but it's very interesting. 
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2011-04/imc-sfr033111.php

So, while I think fasting for up to 16 hours is something folks will benefit from if they are already on a "good diet" - lots of good quality fats, adequate protein, and with enough vegetables/nuts/seeds - it's not something to mess with until then.  Before playing with IF, get used to eating meat, vegetables, nuts and seeds, little fruit or starch and no sugar/wheat.  Once there, and with stable blood sugar and progress towards your health goals, stretch other time interval until your first meal of the day. 

Two cautions - first, make sure as always that your "breakfast" includes a good helping - MINIMUM of 20g - of real protein; something that had a face and a mother.  That applies to your first meal whether or not it follows a normal fast (sleeping) or an extended fast. 

Second, don't try to go from last meal of the day until noon - just push breakfast back an hour.  If that goes well, try and move breakfast back another hour in the next day or two.  Keep up that pattern until you are reaching a 14-16 hour daily fast.  In general, men can tolerate a 16 hour fast, women 14 - after that, the body will be running short of available amino acids, and you may feel hungry even if your energy needs are well supplied through body fat. 

Does it feel good?  Does it help you reach your health and body composition goals?  If so, keep it up.  However, I recommend you pick one or two days to eat breakfast - perhaps on the weekends. 

Whether fasting in this way works by HGH manipulation, by resetting leptin, or by some other mechanism - or it just works because you tend to eat less when you focus on eating only within an 8 hour window - I don't know.  I do know that it has been a powerful tool for me for the last year, and I can see no downside as yet.

I plan to try 24 hour fasting, and have known folks who have fasted for much longer periods and felt it was very good for them - even athletes.  My only comment on that is "don't try this at home."  Find a mentor to help with the longer fasts as the potential is there for metabolic injury.

Coconut Oil For Alzheimer's

This is a nice video -

BLUF:  Ketones generated from coconut oil consumption seem to help folks who are losing their minds.

I hope this is right, and if it is, then intermittent fasting (which mainly means not eating between dinner and lunch), in combination with coconut oil, should do even better, since that fasting period enables/demands significant ketone production (IOW, you don't have to be on a full, stage 1 Atkins level of carb restriction to be in ketogenic metabolism by the time you get up in the AM, and you can extend that phase through IF).

So how would it feel to be losing weight, to be full of energy (and not hungry) even though you rarely eat anything before 10:00AM, to not have to bother with making a meal every morning, and to possibly be disease proofing yourself at the same time?  You'd be setting yourself up for optimal blood sugar control, by running primarily on fat all day long.  How much impact would that make in your life?  For me, it has been most excellent and I highly recommend you experiment with IF after you achieve glycemic control through a 30 day run of eating meat, vegetables, nuts and seeds, little fruit or starch, no sugar/wheat.

Lean Gains Led The Way

After reading the wealth of information on fitness and fasting at Lean Gains I tried an implementation last spring.  I can't I say I did exactly what Martin Berkhan would have recommended, but adapted the info he provided to a version I knew I could commit to.  It worked. I lost body fat while maintaining the ability to lift large loads long distances rapidly via CrossFit programming.

I got even more than better body comp and excellent physical performance, though; I also got liberty.  Liberty to get up and get going without worrying about eating.  Liberty to be unafraid if I miss a meal.  Liberty to know that I can eat when I want to and not have a blood sugar crash.  Liberty to train when I want to, not around some notion of a pre-training fuel requirement.  Time is money, time is relationships, time is the only truly limited commodity - having more time and flexibility in how I spend it is truly the gem of intermittent fasting.

And I never would have tried IF except for Martin's testimony - and the convincing photos - that one can both lean out and maintain the muscle needed to perform well, even perform better, through demanding high intensity workouts.  Farewell to the specter of fasted training leading to muscle catabolism - I won't miss you.

I think IF is nearly mainstream now, as even Precision Nutrition is onto the game - as evidenced by the PN IF Guide.  PN has not always struck me as an avant guard institution - although it is a very, very well run business and does a tremendous job for clients - so when they took the time to validate IF, I think it's a reasonable sign that IF is no big secret.

Bottom line - IF works, it benefits health as well as body composition, and I think it is self evident why the news is spread mostly via the web, and not via some print monstrosity that makes all its money via advertisements for junk that folks don't need - which people buy anyway due to the poor quality of science in diet and nutrition.  Because so few of the opinions asserted in the muscle rags can be tested, folks fall for anything and everything.

Ignorance leads to fear and poor choices, universally as far I can tell.

Folks argue that there's more mis-information now that ever due to the web - but there's also an amount of knowledge one can gain, in exchange only for time and effort, that was never before accessible to many for so little.  Amazing times!