Proof That Intermittent Fasting Works and Caloric Restriction Doesn’t
Eat Breakfast Like a King and Supper Like a Pauper is Done Too!
This study appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Association on Friday, October 27, 2023. The participants had obesity and type 2 diabetes They were mostly black and Hispanic with an average age of 55. The study lasted for six months.
The patients were divided into three groups—intermittent fasting, caloric restriction, and control or no intervention. The intermittent fasting group had no food restrictions other than consuming all of their calories between noon and 8 pm. No caloric intake was allowed the other 16 hours of the day. The caloric restriction group was asked to reduce their food intake to less than 25% of their baseline energy needs. They worked with a dietician to achieve these requirements.
The control group did not change anything and of course they did not lose weight, but the caloric restriction group didn’t lose weight either. The intermittent fasting group lost 3.56% of their body weight or just over 7 pounds in 6 months for a person who weighed 200 pounds. That would be 14 pounds in a year and that matters. They also improved their glucose control by changing their eating habits.
This evidence matches up with personal and family experience. As I have told you, I weighed 307 pounds and have lost 70 pounds. I have been doing intermittent fasting for over a year and that has made my weight control easier. I am 76 years old and still able to lose weight. My brother-in-law is 71 years old and he has a strong family history of heart disease and diabetes. His coronary artery calcium score was high over 10 years ago and so we knew that his risk of heart attack was high. He has lost about 70 pounds and he has kept it off too. He is very careful about eating a low carb diet. On that regimen, he lost 8-9 pounds over a year. When he added intermittent fasting to his low carb diet, he lost 20 pounds in 6 months. His father died suddenly of a heart attack at age 64. His brother was very heavy with type 2 diabetes and chronic kidney disease. He died at 66, but Dan is 71 and he does some farming. He is fully functional. He can load a trailer full of watermelons in July in South Carolina. He has been very faithful about using optimal medical therapy. He had some limiting symptoms that interfered with his very active lifestyle and had a stent, but after that he has completely resumed all activities as you can see from today’s picture. He has not symptoms at all.
How can we explain the benefits of intermittent fasting? Up until about 10,000 years ago all humans were nomadic hunter-gatherers. We ate when we found food. We ate whole, real food. The carbohydrates were fruits, berries, vegetables, and nuts. We had not begun to farm and grow grains. In terms of evolution, ten thousand years is a blink of the eye. Ten thousand years is nothing and we evolved to take advantage of food when we had it and store fat until we found food again. The habit of eating three meals a day is a product of European prosperity and it leads many of us to eat when we are not hungry. I am never hungry in the morning so intermittent fasting is very easy for me. Intermittent fasting fits with the way we evolved over tens of thousands of years.
Too much abdominal fat increases your rate of aging and developing chronic illness as much as smoking. Losing abdominal fat definitely improves your health but the way you lose weight also matters. There are two master metabolic genetic switches that are critical to human development, aging, and chronic disease. The mechanistic target of rapamycin (mTOR) coordinates food supply with growth in the fetus and child. It is like a dimmer switch for a lamp. The more the child eats the faster it grows. mTOR is linked to another master metabolic genetic switch called AMPK. When food is very abundant mTOR activity is very high and AMPK activity is very low. AMPK is the survival switch. When there is no food AMPK mobilizes calories from fat stores and muscle to provide enough energy so that the child survives until food is available again. mTOR is important for normal growth and development but it is involved in causing faster aging and developing multiple chronic illnesses including artery disease and cancer later in life. Eating switches on mTOR and switches off AMPK. If you eat all day, mTOR is always on and AMPK is always off to make you age faster and get sick sooner. When you are not eating, AMPK is maximized and mTOR is minimized. Once you have extra abdominal weight, the fat itself is making hormones that increase oxidant production to activate mTOR and deactivate AMPK. Intermittent fasting switches on AMPK and switches off mTOR to slow aging and delay chronic disease development. It helps you remain fully active like my brother-in-law Dan.
Many of us struggle with our weight and increased abdominal fat makes us age quicker and develop chronic illnesses more rapidly. Intermittent fasting coupled with eating real whole food and limiting carbs is the path to losing one to three pounds a month. It is the path to slower aging and being able to function at a high level like my brother-in law. You don’t need medication that costs a thousand dollars a month. That is not a permanent answer. You will gain weight when you stop it. Change your family food culture and have much less trouble with diabetes and heart disease.
I am all for intermittent fasting in theory. But I wake up hungry - AND AM THIN, definitely don't want to lose weight - so I am all for intermittent fasting FOR OTHER PEOPLE. (I know there are many health benefits.)
Yup! We have decades of objective measurable functional data to support this claim. People with insulin resistance and diabetes benefit from intermittent fasting for reduced harmful effects of insulin and belly fat to their organs, particularly to their livers, kidneys, and hearts. Their immune system’s performance also improves.