Have you read in the media that “Breakfast is not the most important meal of the day after all”?  Have you always believed that skipping breakfast was a bad habit? Well, whilst having breakfast is certainly a healthy habit that gives you the energy you need for a good start of the day, skipping breakfast provides many health benefits, such as improving cardiovascular health and reducing inflammation.

Skipping breakfast is actually a form of intermittent fasting, a style of eating that focuses more on when you eat instead of what you eat, limiting the eating window to a restricted number of hours during the day, with the main objective of losing weight.

Intermittent fasting is what cavemen did: eating when food was available and functioning for many hours and even days until food was available again. Their metabolism was switching from using glucose for fuel to using stored fat easily. This switch happens when all the sugar and glycogen in the body is used up and fatty acids start to be mobilised. This typically happens after 12 hours from cessation of food intake, even if the time needed to start burning fat might vary from 12 to 36 hours, depending on a number of variables, including your energy expenditure during the fast and on how flexible our metabolism is. Cavemen certainly had a very flexible metabolism since they were constantly switching from sugar to fat and vice versa.

Nowadays we rarely, if ever, let our bodies use our stored fat as we tend to eat a meal or snack every time we feel like it! When was the last time you had a gap of at least 16 hours between your meals? Consequently, our bodies are not trained to switch easily to fat burning and it might take us longer than 12-16 hours for the process to happen.

There are a number of intermittent fasting techniques, the most common being:

Alternate-Day Fasting

This requires eating only every other day. On fasting days, some people eat no food at all and others eat a very small amount, typically around 500 calories. On non-fasting calorie days, you can eat normally (but healthily!)

The Warrior Diet

This diet involves eating only fruits and vegetables during the day and then eating one large meal at night.

16/8 Fasting

This is a daily intermittent fasting where you fast for 16 hours every day (or a few days a week) and limit your eating window to eight hours. Most often, this simply involves not eating anything after dinner and skipping breakfast the next morning.

Eat-Stop-Eat

You fast for 24 hours one or two days out of the week when you eat nothing from dinner one day until dinner the next day. On the other days, you should have normal calorie days.

5:2 Diet

For five days of the week, you eat normally. For the remaining two fast days, you restrict your calorific intake to between 500–600 calories.

Restricting your food intake to a limited number of hours during the day or to specific days has shown many benefits - not only for weight loss but for health too. These are the 6 main health benefits of intermittent fasting:

WEIGHT LOSS

Intermittent fasting results in increased fat burning and fast weight loss by forcing your body to use fat stores as fuel.        

IMPROVED BLOOD SUGAR

Intermittent fasting can help the body to better regulate blood sugar by reducing fasting glucose, fasting insulin and insulin resistance in diabetic patients.

HEALTHIER HEART

Fasting can influence several components of heart health such as reducing blood pressure, increasing good HDL cholesterol and decreasing both bad LDL cholesterol and triglyceride levels.

REDUCED INFLAMMATION

Markers of inflammation can be reduced by longer duration of night-time fasting.

BETTER COGNITIVE FUNCTION

Intermittent fasting can enhance cognitive function and protect against changes in memory and learning function.

DECREASED HUNGER

Leptin, the satiety hormone, is produced by the fat cells that help signal when to stop eating. Leptin levels can be lower at night- time during fasting periods.

The benefit of fasting I value the most is the ability to trigger cellular rejuvenation by inducing a process called autophagy. In simpler words, autophagy is a process of cellular ‘housekeeping’, when the body begins to destroy and recycle its own damaged cell parts and proteins, to build new and healthier versions. Autophagy promotes longevity, making you live longer and delaying ageing. This is why it is recommended in anti-aging diets. Isn’t this great news?

However, the old tale ‘no pain, no gain’ is applicable here as autophagy starts in the later stages of a long fast – somewhere around 20 to 24 hours. Whilst this is a long time to go without food, fasting mimicking diets such as PROLON® can help you reach autophagy without literally starving yourself. These diets allow you to eat selected foods that bypass certain food-detecting paths, keeping your body in fasting mode whilst containing your sense of hunger.

Although fasting offers many health benefits, it may not be ideal for everyone and it is not indicated if you suffer from low blood sugar, have a history of eating disorders or are pregnant.

Please do get in touch with me if you would like to know more about PROLON® or if you would like to understand what form of intermittent fasting would be best for you.

Warm wishes.

Roberta