All my life I have been health conscious. When I was five years old I was devouring bowls of spinach, encouraged by my mom telling me it would make me strong like Popeye. I used to run around telling people I was going to be in the Olympics when I grew up. That didn’t quite pan out for me, but the intentions were there. As I grew older I would have push up competitions with my other two brothers and my father, determined to win. And I always did. High school came and I enrolled in weight training courses as much as I was allowed. I kept up with health and nutrition articles from sources like Men’s Health and Details magazine. These days I have been opened up to a variety of other resources from people who are up to date in the latest studies in health and fitness. I will continue to share more of these sources as they become relevant in my future posts
For right now, I want to share I dieting approach that was brought to my attention a few months ago. Upon discovering this I have been fascinated with the idea and have been practicing it on a daily basis since then. The name of the game is Intermittient Fasting and the team is lead by a captain by the name of Martin Berkhan. I will try to keep this post basic and simple but for anyone who reads this and has any interest in learning more, I urge you to check out his website at www.leangains.com. Another big guy on this topic is Dr. John Berardi at www.precisionnutrition.com. He has a FREE ebook you can download on intermittent fasting that tells more about it and his personal experiences with it. This book is extremely insightful for anyone who is going to attempt this approach and only takes an hour or two to read cover to cover. This diet has become extremely popular in the past year or two, especially among bodybuilders and celebrities. Even Hugh Jackman used it for his Wolverine role! http://omg.yahoo.com/blogs/celeb-news/hugh-jackman-reveals-takes-lot-chicken-become-wolverine-223632622.html .
Basically, the concept of this diet in to go for periods of fasting (only consuming non calories liquids i.e. coffee, tea, water, diet soda) followed by shorter periods of eating. Most of you are sitting back in your chairs thinking to yourself “of course you will lose weight, you’re starving yourself!”. Keep reading..
People have fasted for thousands of years. Some people do this intentionally for religious reasons, and some unintentionally at times when they are unable find food. Everyone naturally fasts while they sleep. If you eat dinner at 7 pm and then wake up and eat breakfast at 8, you fasted for 13 hours without even thinking of it. Your body needs this break from digesting foods for a variety of reason. Your body cleanses itself from the toxins and pollutants consumed though the environment and processed foods. It allows your body to balance out your hormone levels, lowers blood lipid levels (cholesterol), and lower your blood glucose levels.
All these things are extremely important for anyone looking to lose weight. Lowering your blood glucose a key factor, because it then increases you insulin sensitivity. And when losing weight, insulin will be your best friend. In short, insulin is a protein that is secreted by your pancreas in response to glycogen (from carbohydrates and sugars). The insulin removes the glycogen from your blood and stores them in the glycogen stores in your muscles and liver. Your body uses the glycogen in these stores for energy for your organs and muscle movements. These stores are limited though, and if you over consume glycogen your body will then use fat cells for storage. Once your glycogen stores get too depleted your body has to move to other sources of energy and oxidized fat to use. Since your brain can’t run on these fatty acids your liver produces ketones for it to use, and your body is now in a state of Ketosis( I will fully cover the ketogenic diet and ketosis very soon in another posts).
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| After a few weeks of fasting |
Personally, I have really enjoyed this diet. I have never had much of an appetite in the mornings anyhow, and ate just because I heard that it will “jumpstart” your metabolism (bullshit). After eating breakfast I would feel hungry only an hour or two afterwards. This is common for many people and the reason for this is thought to be due to ghrelin stimulation (an amino acid that stimulates hunger, and is found in the tissues of organs such as the stomach and intestines). I have found that if I skip breakfast I don’t get hungry until much later in the day. The normal routine for intermittent fasting (IF) is the 16:8 approach (16 hours of fasting and 8 hours of feeding) though many people also do 20:4 as well as 24 and 36 hour fasts once or twice a week. Personally have done each type of fasting and found that a daily 16:8 approach works well for me. Most days I don’t even realize and I go to the 20:4 approach without even thinking about it. I have done up to a 48 hour fast which I wouldn’t recommend doing too often. However, it is extremely liberating doing these longer fasts as you get a much better knowledge of how your body works and what REAL hunger feels like compared to psychological hunger. I have definitely seen changes in my body over the past few months that I haven’t seen from my approach prior that consisted of doing lots of cardio and eating many small meals including complex carbs. The thing about this approach is that even if you consume the same amount of calories you normally would each day, there are still health benefits from the period without food where your body can remove the toxins that cause inflammation in your body and increases insulin sensitivity so when you do ingest carbs they are used as energy and not stored as fat. I’ll tell you what, I have never been able to see veins in my abs, and now that I can I ain’t goin’ back!
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| Before IF when I was doing a lot of cardio and eating 6 times a day |
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