IF (intermittent Fasting) as people refer to it today is a misinterpretation. Skipping breakfast is not IF. It is time resticted feeding and doing it at the least optimal time. Eating within a smaller window is proven to have benefits but those benefits are better ustilized when you eat according to the natural circadian clock that we have been eveolved to follow. Light and dark cycles. Our insulin sensitivity is highest in the morning. We better absorb nutrients and see a dramatic increase in the ability to metabolize food if we at this time. As the day grows on we become more and more insulin resistant and prone to store fat rather than use it. This makes evolutionary sense as we would have spent long dark hours in caves waiting for light to come so we could go hunt again. Our lean ancestors would have needed to store extra fat daily for the long nightly fast. They would not have had much stored body fat on a regular basis as we do today.
Actual IF is fasting for a complete day or number of days then eating for a number of days. Intermittent fasting. If you just skip a meal that is not anything other than the normal everyday fast that people do anyway.
I believe in time resticted feeding done at the right time. I also believe IF can be used as a tool for healing certain things like insulin resitance but it has a dangerous side that people do not know about. If you don’t understand it and don’t fuel for it approapriately you can land in the hospital. I have several case studies showing this. It is often mistaken for ketoacidosis but is actually metabolic acidosis due to dehydration and electrolyte depletion. There are ketones present in low levels so they incorrectly call it ketoacidosis. Fasting is also not sustainable for weight loss unless you keep upping the length and frequency of the fasts and that, like caloric restriction is not going to work long term. This will all come to light in the next few years when all these long term fasters start gaining all their weight back. This is the experience I have had in myself when fasting extensively for a full year and it is the experience I have seen in my clients.
Keto ON!
Coach Jack
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Ok, I hold my hand up – I’m a TRE who skips breakfast – my window tends to be 13:00 to 20:00. I get from this that I would potentially do better eating breakfast, lunch then maybe a light snack late afternoon. Say 10:00 to 17:00 window?
From what I know from the snake diet you’re eating window is way too big it should be minutes
The snake diet is nonsense. Fasting is a fad and it will die off soon enough. One of the first the the “Snake Diet Wizard” says is 48 hour fasts are crucial. Even the guru of fasting, Dr. Jason Fung, rarely fasts his patients longer than 36 hours. Fasting works ok for some and not at all for others. With the couple thousand people I have worked with directly very few of them see long term success with fasting. The only way you get sustained results, even for those that it does not cause them major issues, is to keep extending the length of the fasts. At first 24 hours is great then it stops doing anything. Then 36 works for awhile and stops doing anything. You have to keep doing longer and longer fasts to see any benefit. This is not sustainable and will crash and burn just like caloric restriction.
There is no need to gobble down all your food in minutes. Once food that stimulates insulin hits your stomach it starts an insulin response that lasts on average 120 minutes. Wether you gobble down all your food in minutes or an hour you will have a window of roughly 120 minutes of high insulin. The longer meal may extend that window by 10-15 minutes but that is not anything that is going to have any impact overall. Once that window is up you are back to a state of basal insulin and fat can be used for fuel.
The snake diet is pure snake oil.
We are mostly controlled by a circadian rhythm that is activated by light and dark cycles. We have a cortisol spike in the morning that is activated by sunlight hitting the eyes primarily and secondarily by waking and moving.
As the day goes on that cortisol level gets lower and lower. Eating to this cortisol level means a better insulin sensitivity and a better weight management. Ideally we want to eat breakfast as our largest meal and dinner our smallest meal. If you are going to skip a meal it should always be dinner. There is plenty of evidence showing this to be the case.
Read this article:
https://commonsenseketogenics.com/breakfast-is-and-always-has-been-the-most-important-meal-of-the-day-our-parents-knew-this-without-science-but-here-is-some-for-you/
and this one:
https://commonsenseketogenics.com/if-you-want-to-fast-do-it-the-best-possible-way-dont-fight-cortisol/
Dear Admin, As you mentioned circadian rhythm in the comment above, are you an advocate of managing sun exposure, such as getting early morning sun light, using full spectrum light bulbs, and/or watching the sun-set for health benefits/fat loss? Also, any thoughts on now to tweak the Ketogenic diet to help reduce high blood pressure? Thanks! John R.
Spending time in the sun is beneficial. Wether full spectrum light or watching the sunset has any impact is unknown and unproven. Would it have any effect on weight loss? Negligible I am sure. The keto diet in and of itself will lower blood pressure if done right. Also getting adequate sodium and potassium will lower it.
Dear Admin, Thank you for your quick and detailed answer. I will take the liberty of asking another. Any thoughts on how effective one can follow a Common Sense Vegan Keto diet? I see that a wide variety of vegetables are recommended, (and many are not), and that the protein recommendations are less than other diet recommendations. Perhaps adding the less inflammatory nuts such as macadamias, walnuts and Brazil nuts would do the trick? Thanks! John R.
It is possible. I don’t advise it. I think it would be incredibly restrictive and hard to get adequate Amino acids. I am doing an experiment now with a raw vegan non keto diet and I am finding it hard to get protein even when no limiting carbs. I can’t see it possible unless you start eating soy or protein powders that are full of lectins.
Dear Jack, Thank you for your response. Good luck with the raw vegan non keto diet. I am sure the resulting will be interesting 🙂 Thanks! John R.