WSJ artice on fasting

[www.wsj.com]

For the record, I usually eat one meal a day. It's usually late at night for me, although the article advises against that. My reason is that I have a very slow metabolism and if I were to eat at mid-day I would feel bloated and tired for the next 12 hours. I prefer to let the vagal response help me sleep.

I exercise late morning to noon, always in a completely fasted state. It's no problem at all.

Unfortunately, you need a subscription to read the article. WSJ doesn't even give a few free readings per month like most newspapers do.

Funny, it did for me. I’ll see if I can grab the text.

Quote
wolfpack
[www.wsj.com]

For the record, I usually eat one meal a day. It's usually late at night for me, although the article advises against that. My reason is that I have a very slow metabolism and if I were to eat at mid-day I would feel bloated and tired for the next 12 hours. I prefer to let the vagal response help me sleep.

Circadian Rhythm expert, Satchin Panda of the Salk Institute is a big proponent of compressed eating windows. He agrees that an early window is optimal, however he has stated that a compressed eating window at any time of the day is better than a non compressed eating window. In this search you will find podcasts & talks <[www.google.com] He also has a book, <[www.amazon.com] I gave his book out to various friends last Christmas and one told me in April that implementing some of Panda's suggestions had solved many health issues for her. Some of Panda's interviews: STEMTALK <[www.ihmc.us] Rhonda Patrick's interviews: <[www.foundmyfitness.com]

Sleep expert, Matthew Walker, at UC Berkley, would strongly encourage a large gap between eating and sleep. Primarily because digestion inhibits the "garbage collection" and cleansing that occurs during sleep. He's also done a bunch of podcasts and has a book. Here is a search <[www.google.com] His multipart interview with Peter Attia <[peterattiamd.com] and his book: <[www.amazon.com]

I've eaten one meal a day for many years, but try to have it end at least 3 hours before bed. One friend told me he'd been trying to do a 16:8 eating schedule (8 hour eating window). He found out that skipping dinner was much more satisfactory than skipping breakfast for him.

I used to do several fasts a year. I remember feeling so good on days 3 & 4. I didn’t do a pure fast. The fast I did I guess would be considered a fad. The fast I did was the apple fast where that would be al I would consume. Apples, water and pure apple juice. Days 3&4 consisted of mostly water. I would also eat an apple if I desired something to chew on.

I’ve had a hard time fasting the past couple of years. If I get through the first day I’m lucky. I get headaches and generally miserable. I don’t know what’s changed. I’m. Not nearly as active as I was back then.

Quote
rocketritch
I used to do several fasts a year. I remember feeling so good on days 3 & 4. I didn’t do a pure fast. The fast I did I guess would be considered a fad. The fast I did was the apple fast where that would be al I would consume. Apples, water and pure apple juice. Days 3&4 consisted of mostly water. I would also eat an apple if I desired something to chew on.

I’ve had a hard time fasting the past couple of years. If I get through the first day I’m lucky. I get headaches and generally miserable. I don’t know what’s changed. I’m. Not nearly as active as I was back then.

Sounds like "keto flu" to me. Sometimes athletes, can experience post exercise ketosis. Hence in your earlier days, if you were exercising harder, you could have been generating ketones and thereby keeping these pathways activated. So when you went on your fast, ketones were generated and you felt fine. Here is an old paper, one of the authors is Tim Noakes, author of "The Lore of Running." <[www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov]

Keto flu can be caused by both lack of brain glucose as well as electrolyte disturbance (this can be a risk period for an afibber). When one fasts (or goes on an ultra low carb diet), insulin levels drop. This signals the kidneys to excrete sodium (conversely high insulin levels signal the kidneys to conserve sodium). Sometimes the sodium excretion can be dramatic enough the body will also excrete potassium to maintain relative balance. Electrolyte supplementation, including sodium, can ward off these issues at times.

When one is fully keto adapted,these pathways are fully upregulated and the body acts like a "Prius" running on whatever fuel is most plentiful. I've been keto adapted for about 10 years, though with a relatively high carb (for keto) diet of 100-200 gm of carb/day.. In fact I've been intentionally spiking my glucose dailly for about 3 months and my serum betahydroxybuterate is usually between 1.0-2.5 mmol/L on a morning test, with glucose in the 70's (mg/dL -4's mmol/L). This is a fairly high level given the level of starchy carbs I consume. If I water fast, my glucose will drop in three days into the 50's (mg/dL -3's mmol/L) and ketones will climb to >4.0mmol/L I also have no negative consequences from fasting. Two years ago, I did 19 five days water fasts in 8 months, while maintaining a stable weight from the start of one fasting cycle to the next. I've done all kinds of exercise fasted for multiple days - rock climbing all day at 7,000', skiing the steeps off piste all day plus my normal body weight and HIIT exercise.

This may be of help to some:

Dropbox Link to PDF of WSJ Article

or try:

This sharing link

--Lance

The Fasting Cure Is No Fad
New research is showing the profound benefits—for weight, longevity and fighting disease—of eating only during limited hours

By Andreas Michalsen
Aug. 1, 2019 12:21 pm ET
Fasting is one of the biggest weight-loss trends to arise in recent years. Endorsed by A-list celebrities and the subject of a spate of best-selling books, it was the eighth most-Googled diet in America in 2018.

But fasting shouldn’t be dismissed as just another fad. At the Charité University Hospital in Berlin, I’ve employed what’s called intermittent fasting, or time-restricted eating, to help patients with an array of chronic conditions. These include diabetes, high blood pressure, rheumatism and bowel diseases, as well as pain syndromes such as migraines and osteoarthritis.

There are different ways to go about it, but I advise patients to omit either dinner or breakfast, so that they don’t ingest any food for at least 14 hours at a stretch. That makes lunch the most important meal of the day. It also reduces the time spent each day processing food and lengthens the period devoted to cleansing and restoring the body’s cells, both of which have positive health effects.

Adopting this technique is not as difficult as it may seem. If you sleep from 11 p.m. to 7 a.m., you’ve already fasted for eight hours. Now you only need another six. It’s healthy to avoid eating late in the evening to let your body burn energy from food rather than store it, so if you eat dinner by 7 p.m., that’s another four hours. For breakfast, you can limit yourself to coffee or tea (maybe with a small piece of fruit) and make lunch your first proper meal. By that time, you’re clearly beyond the 14 hours and don’t need to restrain yourself: You can eat until you are full.

Scientific evidence for the glory of breakfast is scarce. Instead, we should skip it and eat lunch like kings.
The biologist Satchidananda Panda at California’s Salk Institute showed the possibilities of this approach in a 2012 report in the journal Cell Metabolism. He fed a group of mice a high-fat diet around the clock for 18 weeks; they developed fatty livers, pancreatic disease and diabetes. Another group was fed the exact same number of calories a day, but all during an eight-hour span. Surprisingly, the second group stayed slimmer and healthier for much longer.

There is a logic to it. When we eat, our body releases insulin. That disrupts the process of autophagy (from the Greek, meaning “self-devouring”), by which cells deconstruct old, damaged components in order to release energy and build new molecules. Autophagy helps to counteract the aging of cells and builds immunity. Fasts stimulate autophagy and allow the full molecular process to take place, as a team led by Frank Madeo at the University of Graz in Austria found in 2017.


Fasting also can contribute to brain health and happiness. The neurobiologist Mark Mattson, who retired this year from the National Institutes of Health, has demonstrated in experiments for two decades that nerve growth factors contribute significantly to brain health and positive mood. He also found that fasting, restricting calories and exercising spur distinct increases in the best-known nerve growth factor, BDNF.

MORE ESSAYS
The Ecstatic Chaos of Woodstock August 3, 2019
Hard Questions in Syria About the Civilian Toll of U.S. Strategy August 2, 2019
Why We Should Like Facebook’s Cryptocurrency July 26, 2019
Race Remains the Great Unresolved Issue July 19, 2019
Test animals in Dr. Mattson’s laboratory that fasted intermittently even showed a significantly lower risk of developing Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis and Alzheimer’s, though those results would have to be clearly confirmed in large human studies to reach any firm conclusion.

All of this presents a question: If we should generally eat only two meals a day, which meal is it best to skip? Many of us have heard the saying: “Eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince and supper like a pauper.” Scientific evidence for the glory of breakfast is scarce, however, and realistically, it’s easier to sustain skipping breakfast than skipping dinner.

Instead of breakfast, we should eat lunch like kings. A rich lunch beats a robust dinner. A U.K.-led study published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition in 2016 showed that among 69 women, those who consumed most of their calories at lunch shed 3.3 pounds more in 12 weeks than those who ate a bigger dinner. After all, it’s around lunchtime that the body requires the greatest amount of energy for keeping its body temperature up. Less energy thus passes into our fat reserves.

Fasting overcomes an instinctive need in a way that gives us physical and mental strength.
Researchers are increasingly probing the optimal timing of meals, duration of fasting and the various potential health effects. Scientists at the University of Padua have found, for instance, that young, healthy athletes fasting for 16 hours benefited from metabolic changes over eight weeks compared with their peers. The regimen lowered the levels of inflammatory factors in their blood and factors accelerating the aging process, including insulin.

Fasting might even be effective in preventing the recurrence of cancer, as suggested by initial results of an epidemiological study conducted by researchers at the University of California at San Diego, published in 2016 in the journal JAMA Oncology. Among 2,400 women with early-stage breast cancer who provided information on their eating rhythm, roughly 400 suffered from new tumors within seven years. But women who fasted for 13 hours nightly had 26% less risk of recurrence than the control group. One possible reason was suggested in data summarized last year from a decade of animal experiments by Valter Longo and a team at the University of Southern California: Cancer cells are less able than normal cells to survive a lack of sugar.

As a practice, fasting is more than simply restricting calories or nutrients. For many people, it is also a spiritual experience. Over the course of our lives, we encounter many kinds of deficiency, whether of money, success or affection. Fasting is a conscious renunciation, a controlled exercise in deprivation. That’s why successful fasting increases self-efficacy—we overcome an instinctive need in a way that gives us physical and mental strength. In his novel “Siddhartha,” Hermann Hesse describes this wonderfully: “Nothing is performed by demons; there are no demons. Anyone can perform magic. Anyone can reach his goals if he can think, if he can wait, if he can fast.”

—Dr. Michalsen is a professor at Berlin’s Charité University Medical Center. This essay is adapted from his new book, “The Nature Cure: A Doctor’s Guide to the Science of Natural Medicine,” which Viking will publish on Aug. 6.

Thanks for the copies of the article, Lance and GG.

Thanks for the info George. I would have never considered the keto side of things. I need to read over your post a couple times t make sure I catch everything.
Back when I was fasting was back before my first ablation and several years following. Thats also back when I was racing and doing big miles on the bike year round. I could head out to do super long rides with little food on board. Also the fasting had zero effect on my performance.
The past several years due to trying to get my haert sorted has taken its toll on my fitness as well as my "T" situation. I have an appointment set for that in a coupem weeks. There is a doctor local to me that also works with low T but I'm concerned as he owns a gym and I see the guys that hang out there. I don't want to get juiced up I want to feel normal again.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/03/2019 12:39PM by rocketritch.

Quote
rocketritch
Thanks for the info George. I would have never considered the keto side of things. I need to read over your post a couple times t make sure I catch everything.
Back when I was fasting was back before my first ablation and several years following. Thats also back when I was racing and doing big miles on the bike year round. I could head out to do super long rides with little food on board. Also the fasting had zero effect on my performance.
The past several years due to trying to get my haert sorted has taken its toll on my fitness as well as my "T" situation. I have an appointment set for that in a coupem weeks. There is a doctor local to me that also works with low T but I'm concerned as he owns a gym and I see the guys that hang out there. I don't want to get juiced up I want to feel normal again.

I have a friend who lived near Joshua Tree National Park (moved recently to San Luis Obispo). A former Marine infantry officer, now prosecutor, he was a big single speed mountain biker. He would measure ketones and I recall he could get his ketones pretty high after a 3 hour ride (I don't recall exact numbers but in the 2-4mmol/L range). He wasn't eating keto at the time.

Yes, thanks to those who were able to grab the text. When I went back, it wouldn’t let me in. Very frustrating.