Surprise!! It's Not the Food. It's the Fast!!

 Hi,

That old saying: "Early to bed, and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise" went through my mind as I began to think about some information I just came across. I wondered what affects that information might have on my life if I put it into practice.

I've been looking at fasting-type diets and I think I've found a useful method in an article that was printed in the Los Angeles Times. It was written by Melissa Healy who reviewed a study that was done on mice at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California and printed in the journal "Cell Metabolism." 

(Here's a link to her LA Times article if you are interested in reading the whole thing:  http://articles.latimes.com/2012/may/18/science/la-sci-fasting-diet-20120518 .)

The headline reads: "Nighttime fasting may foster weight loss" and the information makes complete sense to me. The intro said: "A study involving mice suggests that someone on a high-fat, high-calorie diet can stay lean with sufficient fasting between day's end and breakfast the next morning."

The conclusion reached was that if you simply do your eating in the early part of the day and time sixteen hours between your last meal of the day and your first meal of the next day, your body will not only be leaner, but stronger, healthier and have more endurance, too.

This boils down to having an eight hour period when you eat (preferably healthy and not junk or processed foods) and twice that amount of time when you don't eat. Of course about half that "no eating time" is used up while you are sleeping so what you are really doing is eating for one third of the day, sleeping for one third, and fasting for one third of every 24-hour period. It seems to me that if you also finish your last meal by the time your "fast" begins you will feel full up to bed time, hopefully, and then simply go to bed. That is, I think, what our ancestors did. They ate in the day time and slept at night. The kitchen closed after dinner and that was it. You did not eat after that.

If your first meal is at 8 a.m. then your last meal would have to be finished by 4 p.m. in order for there to be 16 hours between the last meal today and the first meal tomorrow. That would allow for three very nice sized meals, which, theoretically should be enough to keep you feeling fed. I don't know if you could adjust that later or earlier. If you moved breakfast to 10 am, then dinner would need to be done by 6 pm. with any number of meals and snacks you could fit in between. Hopefully three meals should "do it."

Of course, I've had the thought that humans are not mice, so, what if we made the fast for 14 hours... would we still get the same effect? That would allow breakfast at 8 and last meal finished by 6 pm. with nothing after that, which is, I think, a more normal schedule.

I've often read, without paying attention to, people who have suggested that not eating after 7 pm helps you to lose weight. I never really believed them. Some people state a similar principal as "not eating for three hours before bed," so this is not a new idea. It was simply presented in such a way that it finally seemed believable to me.

I suppose going for the full 16 hours might possibly promote better and faster weight loss, too. So it would have to be up to the individual what they are willing to try and how desperate they are. Perhaps going for the 14 hour fast could be a "first step" into going for the full 16 hours, later. Sometimes we humans need an adjustment space. I'd love to hear from anyone who tries out either of these methods to see how it went for them.

You know, as I think about it, it was at about the time the TV was invented and people began snacking in front of it before going to bed that our obesity epidemic started. The "going to the movies" popcorn and candy habit got transferred to the living room in front of the TV. It went from once a month, to once a day. After that, we all started getting fatter. What if that were the real reason our nation has become obese? I'm not blaming TV, but the eating in front of it. "Looking for solutions in all the wrong places," comes to mind.

The study in the Times article was led by a man named Satchidananda Panda, who is a regulatory biologist at the Salk Institute. What he and his team did was to divide a bunch of mice into different groups and record the results after one hundred days of testing. 

"Animals in two of the groups dined on high-fat, high-calorie chow. Half of them were allowed to eat whenever they wanted, and nibbled on and off throughout the night and day. The other mice had access to food only for eight hours at night, when they were most active."

In human terms this would probably mean no snacking as you watch TV before bed. Not even a glass of warm milk. I would think that drinking water might be OK, but they did not mention whether that would be effective or not. And, as I think about it, the word "fast" means no food and no drink. So if a person were hardline about it, it really means to fast before bed. No food. No drink. No thing in the mouth before bed. If you were not "hardline" then maybe drinking water would be OK. A person would have to test it out to see what works for them.

This quote from the article really perked up my attention:  "The difference was astonishing. Even though they ate a high-fat diet, the mice who wrapped up their eating day early and were forced to fast for 16 hours were lean — almost as lean as mice in a control group who ate regular chow. But the mice who noshed on high-fat chow around the clock became obese, even though they consumed the same amount of fat and calories as their counterparts on the time-restricted diet."

It was not the quality or the quantity of the food. It was not the timing of the meals that made the difference. It was the fasting every night that made the difference. WoW!  If you notice, it also said the two groups both ate the same amount of fat and calories (and it was also labeled "high-fat", too) so the fasting mice were not deprived of food during their eating time. They were not on a low-fat diet. I don't know if they were on a low-carb diet. It appears they had plenty to eat and a short time to do it. It sounds like their meals might have been larger because that is, logically, the only way you could consume exactly the same amount of food in a shorter period of time.

It seems that bodies must need time to digest, and metabolize the food we eat. It appears that if we eat without giving our bodies enough fasting time to use the food properly, we are just clogging up the works and slowing things down. Like digestion. Like metabolism. Like hormones. Like weight.

Not much was said about the control group of mice -- the ones who remained healthy on lower fat food. I don't know if they were given food with no restrictions or not. I suppose if I read the original article I could find that out. I don't know if that information is vital to my purposes.

Miss Healy went on to say: "Extra weight wasn't their only problem. The obese mice developed high cholesterol, high blood sugar, fatty liver disease and metabolic problems. The mice who ate fatty food but were forced to fast showed hardly any signs of inflammation or liver disease, and their cholesterol and blood sugar levels were virtually indistinguishable from those of mice who ate regular chow. When put on an exercise wheel, they showed the most endurance and the best motor control of all the animals in the study."

She quoted Mr. Panda as having said: "The results of daily fasting were "phenomenal."

I tell you what, that daily fast sounds good to me. I realize it will take some discipline in the beginning to cut off the late night meals and I don't really know how that will go but I want to try it out. I have also thought about my exercise days when I really seem to need to eat afterwards. I will have to make sure my exercise periods are timed so that I can eat afterwards and still stop eating at the right time to accomplish my weight loss and health goals.

I am really excited about this because, frankly, I have been fussing and adjusting the content, the quality, and the quantity of food for ever and no longer losing weight. I was about at my wits end. If making this one change, while continuing to eat what I now do, will make the difference, then I am all for it.

So this is the next step for me. I'll be letting you know what my plan is and how it goes as I go along.

Be back soon,

Marcia