VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
Hey guys, Dr. Lawrence here. If you missed our previous video on Prepping for a Fast with a Low Carbohydrate Diet check it out!
Today we are going to talk about the second strategy I use in helping people have a successful fast, and that is implementing intermittent fasting or time restricted eating. Our last video talked about a low carbohydrate diet to successfully reduce hunger, improve satiation, and allow us to prep for a fast better. Intermittent fasting and time restrictive eating takes that to the next step. I have also found that most people can more successfully intermittent fast if they're on a low carbohydrate diet.
So what does time restricted eating or intermittent fasting even mean? It kind of depends on who you speak to. Right now we'll use the terms slightly interchangeably, but let me explain to you what it means at the core: It means narrowing the window that we eat every single day. [For example] we will fast for 12, 14, or 16 hours and then only eat for maybe eight hours during that day if we do a 16 hour fast. To give you a real world example, it would be like eating dinner and then not eating again after dinner, going to bed, waking up the next morning, not having breakfast, having lunch around noon or 1 o'clock pm, and then having dinner again around 6 or 7 o'clock pm. That narrows our eating window to about 6 hours and our fasting window to about 18 hours.
That is what this idea of intermittent fasting really means; however, jumping into a 16-8 intermittent fast is not right for everybody. That can actually be really challenging for some folks—especially if they have a large degree of hunger or they may have some blood sugar regulation issues. So we might need to start out a little bit easier: that might be with a 12-hour window. So, after dinner, finish eating at 7 o'clock , next they'll go to bed, not eat after that, wake up the next morning, and have breakfast at 7:00. They've successfully completed a 12-hour and intermittent fast, and now the next 12 hours they'll eat as they desire—ideally following a low carbohydrate diet as we mentioned in the first video.
That said, one of the goals I usually set for my patients is to be able to work towards a 16 hour fast, 8 hour feeding window. The great thing about this is that, generally speaking, our hunger hormones in the morning are relatively low and a lot of people, even without trying too hard, can skip breakfast pretty easily. The other benefit is that during this 8 hour window you can eat however much, and whenever you want. So there's no calorie restriction whatsoever, in fact, as long as we're following a low carbohydrate diet, this is an ideal time to eat until you're full. Following those previous rules.
You can see how intermittent fasting is naturally the next and step at growing our fasting practice: we've started with a low carbohydrate diet to reduce hunger and improve satiation; we've now narrowed our window of eating to around 8 hours during the day; we're going to get further drops of insulin, better blood sugar regulation during this time, and in fact, we're actually going to increase fat burning. For some people, this step alone can be an incredibly powerful tool for helping reverse their diabetes, helping reverse PCOS, helping reverse obesity, and they may not necessarily need to take deeper steps in the fasting. However, once someone can intermittent fast on a routine basis pretty successfully, most of the time they're looking for that next challenge, and that's why we're gonna dive deeper into the extended fast in the next video.
I get this question a lot as well: “Don't I need to eat breakfast? Isn't it the most important meal of the day?” No, and I think you'll be surprised at how easily you can let that meal slide without finding that you miss it much at all. There is, however, some interesting research on entering fasting and when we should time that feasting or that eating window. Generally speaking, most of my patients do it in the afternoon. They find it pretty easy to skip breakfast. Hunger hormones are pretty low at that time, and they might have a cup of coffee that rides them through the morning—they'll have lunch, and then they'll have dinner. Dinner tends to be a little bit more of a social meal, so it kind of fits into our social framework of the day where it makes a lot of sense. Not a lot of people like to go to bed hungry, and so with that, having our eight hour feasting window in the afternoon and evening generally works for a lot of folks.
There is, however, some research showing that we may actually get even better glycemic control, blood sugar control, and weight regulation if we shift that window to the morning—meaning our meals are breakfast and lunch, and we fast during dinner time. I have a couple of patients doing this, but they tend to find it's a little challenging socially—and remember: the reason why we're doing this is not to sit and starve. The reason we're doing this is not to be hungry and miserable. We're doing this to implement a sustainable, therapeutic tool in our life regardless of what we are challenged with. So we need to find ways that it's going to fit with our life, and there's no real right or wrong way to do a fast.
To recap, our first video was about “Why should I [fast] and what can it do for me?” Our second video introduced why emphasizing a low carbohydrate diet is going to be helpful in having a successful fast. Today we talked about implementing intermittent fasting, or time restrictive eating, by narrowing the time window during the day in which we eat so that we can get even more aggressive blood sugar, insulin control, and weight control. This is the first step in dipping our toe in the shallow end of the pool of more aggressive fasting strategies. So I'll encourage you to start following the advice in the low carbohydrate diet video, starting to implement some intermittent fasting, and see how it is for you.
Leave us some comments about how it's going for you. if you have any questions about it please leave it in the comments, and I'm happy to answer those. I look forward to you tuning in for our next video on more aggressive duration fasts.