Intermittent Fasting Becoming Mainstream Health Practice
In related news, MSNBC3 recently featured David Zinczenko and Peter Moore, co-authors of yet another book expounding on the health benefits of intermittent fasting:
“Can Americans trim their waistlines by spending less time at the dinner table? In 'The 8-Hour Diet,' best-selling authors David Zinczenko and Peter Moore argue that people can lose weight (and combat our 24-hour eating culture) by only consuming food during a set 8-hour time period.”
This is another version of intermittent fasting, in which you simply restrict your daily eating to a specific window of time. Zinczenko and Moore recommend an eight hour window, which is doable and convenient for most people, but you can restrict it even further — down to six, four, or even two hours, if you want, but you can still reap many of these rewards by limiting your eating to a window of about 8 hours. This means eating only between the hours of 11am until 7pm, as an example. Essentially, this equates to simply skipping breakfast, and making lunch your first meal of the day instead.
In a new diet book, The Fast Diet: Lose Weight, Stay Healthy, and Live Longer with the Simple Secret of Intermittent Fasting, Dr. Michael Mosley1 suggests the best way to lose weight is to eat normally for five days a week, and fast for two. On fasting days, he recommends cutting your food down to ¼ of your normal daily calories, or about 600 calories for men and about 500 for women, along with plenty of water and tea.
Dr. Mosley himself claims to have lost 19 pounds in two months by following this recommendation. I lost about seven pounds when I implemented the approach last year, but the most amazing aspect is not the weight loss, it’s the absence of hunger and sugar cravings once you are fat adapted. Your desire to eat unhealthy foods seems to disappear; at least that was my experience.
I prefer to think of intermittent fasting as a lifestyle rather than a diet. It’s a way of living and eating that can help you live a longer, healthier life. I promoted the health benefits of intermittent fasting well before it hit the mainstream, and have been experimenting with different types of scheduled eating in my own life for the past two years. I currently restrict my eating to a 6-7 hour window each day.
In the featured BBC interview, Dr. Mosley also points out the importance of high-intensity interval training (HIIT) — especially in conjunction with fasting — and how sheer inactivity is actually more detrimental to your health than lack of formal exercise. He recommends getting up every 15-20 minutes if you have a desk job, to avoid the health hazards associated with prolonged sitting. For more helpful tips and recommendations, please see my recent article Sitting Less May be Key for Maximum Longevity.
Now the mainstream is finally starting to catch up on this as well, and proof that it really does work as advertised is becoming increasingly evident as people are trying it out.
