Ep. 201 - Metabolic & health effects of intermittent fasting | 5:2 Diet, ADF & Time Restricted Eating: Which is better for fat loss? | How food timing affects health, improving blood work, & weight loss | Does fasting cause more hunger? | Nutrisense CGM
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In today’s episode, Dr. Scott and Tommy delves into the metabolic effects of intermittent fasting, examining various fasting methods like alternate day fasting, modified fasting, and time-restricted feeding. While alternate day fasting may lead to weight loss and improved metabolism, it can cause intense hunger on fasting days. Modified fasting and time-restricted feeding show promise for weight loss and metabolic benefits, particularly when aligned with circadian rhythms. Additionally, it underscores the importance of sleep quality in metabolism and overall health, with poor sleep contributing to insulin resistance, obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular risks.
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Article Links
https://www.clinicalnutritionjournal.com/article/S0261-5614(16)00102-3/fulltext
https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/full/10.1146/annurev-nutr-071816-064634
Fasting For Life Ep. 201 Transcript
Hello. I'm Dr. Scott Watier.
And I'm Tommy Welling.
And you're
listening to the Fasting for Life podcast.
This podcast is about using fasting
as a tool to regain
your health, achieve ultimate wellness,
and live the life you truly deserve.
Each episode is a short conversation
on a single topic
with immediate, actionable steps.
We cover everything from fat loss
and health and wellness
to the science of lifestyle design.
We started fasting for life
because of how fasting has transformed
our lives and we hope to share the tools
that we have learned along the way.
Hey everyone,
welcome to the Fasting for Life podcast.
My name is Dr. Scott Watier and I'm here.
As always, my good friend and colleague,
Tommy Welling.
Good afternoon to you, sir.
Hey, Scott, how are you doing?
Fantastic, my friend.
Excited for today's conversation.
We're going to talk big picture of the
metabolic effects of intermittent fasting.
This was an annual review of nutrition
in 37 from 2017.
I'm actually surprised
we haven't done this episode before
for this article before.
So excited to talk through
some of those different groups and types
of fasting that they looked at.
Really cool stuff coming your way.
If you're new to the podcast,
I want to welcome you in.
Thank you for giving us a shot.
Appreciate you listening.
And our goal each and every episode
is to give you one or two
actionable things that you can put into
your day to day life.
Starting now, we want to help you adopt
a fasting lifestyle, lose the weight,
get healthy, and really, as it did for you
and I, Tommy gave us our lifes back.
Hence the fasting life name had.
One of you are new
and you want to hear more about our story
and why we come to you week in, week out
if you are a long term listener.
Thank you. As always.
We want to give a shout out
to one of our five star fans.
Obviously, the five star reviews
are a favorite kind of thing.
Yes, that we are grateful
if you take the time to do that,
because that tells the podcast world
that we're doing a good thing
and that we're continuing
to bring you value,
which we will do each and every week.
So Tami, let's do a shout out
and we'll get into the metabolic effects
of intermittent fasting.
Yeah, thank you.
Yeah, I'm assuming that's 59
and done like done with the yo
yo dieting and the the weight loss
rollercoaster what you make of everyone.
But I like Yeah, yeah yeah.
I'm taking some some liberties here for
sure but he or she said new to fasting.
I'm loving the technical breakdown
of information on this podcast.
Thank you.
I've been doing it for seven weeks
and learning all that I can.
I've tried it fast beyond 24 hours,
but I haven't tried that as of yet.
But I've lost £14
and enjoying the journey.
Wow, that's incredible. Great work.
Thanks for all you do.
You're very welcome.
And thank you for taking the time
to leave that review and keep going.
Keep pushing.
You have more great results
ahead of you for sure.
One of the cool things about that
that I love is £14 down, right
just starting
and so many people listening me back
in the day doing the old eat less
move more macro calorie
extra cardiac
and yeah track and all that stuff.
I feel like £14 I'm fat like what the heck
did you just stop eating for 14 days?
Like, how did you get there?
So I loved that she gave the perspective.
Nothing beyond 24 hours at this point,
right? Yeah.
All right. Yeah. So, huh?
Because we don't typically recommend
longer extended fast
if your goal is sustainable
weight loss, there are benefits to longer
extended fasting windows.
Should our position on
this has changed. Right.
But the cool thing is that connection
point and I need to know this
because I just asked you, hey,
you want to shout out today?
You like. Yeah, great honor here.
I didn't even look.
But the studies that we're going to
look at are in this metabolic effects
of intermittent fasting are all studies
that looked at windows
even much shorter than that,
and they still had benefits.
So nice.
Most folks come to fasting
not for its healing properties
but for the weight loss effects. Right?
So sure, they do go hand-in-hand.
So I want to dive into this.
Tell me and the objective of this review
on metabolic effects
of intermittent fasting,
you head to the show notes
and get the link as well.
It provides
an overview of the IRF regimens
and summarizes
the evidence on the health benefits.
So we're just talking about weight
loss, right, versus the overall health
benefits of fasting and discusses
some of the physiological mechanisms
by which I might lead
to improved health outcomes.
So they went pretty broad here
using PubMed terms, meaning
intermittent fasting, fasting, time
restricted feeding and food timing.
And it was really cool
that they broke it down into modified
fasting
regimens, their promotion on weight loss
and the potential next step on that,
which would be the improvement
of metabolic health.
So we've done
I mean, if you listen to the podcast,
you can go back, we've done
the majority of episodes are typically
around some form of research article
or conversation around an outcome
from a research article or the application
of those inside
of our groups and challenges and whatnot,
their own personal lives.
But there were the hypothesis
that eating patterns that reduce
or eliminate nighttime eating
and prolonged nightly fasting may result
in sustained improvements in human health,
which is we want that.
We want you to unplug from the matrix.
We want you to know
that your health is in your control.
And if you've been struggling
to lose the weight,
your labs are off and you're on the path.
Diabetes and blood sugar
and cardiovascular disease
and your family and friends
and parents are dealing with it, right?
Yeah, you have a choice.
So these regimens that they look at
are hypothesized
influence, metabolic regulation
via circadian biology,
the gut biome, modifiable lifestyle
behaviors such as sleep and stress.
And we talk about all of that.
So I really feel like this is like,
what does that alchemy term, the magnum
opus, Opus Magnum, like the big man.
I'm so bad.
I'm sorry.
You give me your It's almost like
the Holy Grail and I'll go now.
Hold on.
You're going to be like,
Yeah, okay, this is the go ahead.
What do you get, Magnum Opus?
Well, yeah, Yeah. Magnum Opus.
Yeah. I figured you had to, right?
Yeah.
Yeah. No, that's okay. So,
you know, when I.
When I think about the term, like,
I love the title of this
because it says metabolic effects, right?
Because I know for me personally,
I was hesitant, if not scared
or fearful of intermittent fasting
because I knew I had a significant amount
of weight to lose, but I didn't want to,
quote unquote destroy my metabolism.
I didn't want to have a negative effect
on my metabolism.
So when we think about metabolism
or metabolic effects,
I want to keep in mind big picture,
it encompasses so
many interrelated systems within the body.
And so when you think metabolism
or metabolic affect,
think immune response, your ability
to heal, fight or prevent sickness,
energy, sleep your stress and stress
response, your overall mood,
reproductive hormones, libido
and even ability to bear children
are all related
to your overall metabolism,
your efficiency of your metabolism,
and how well it's working.
So it's not necessarily
just about the number on the scale.
It's about a whole lot
more more than that.
So keep that in mind
as we kind of go through this article.
Yeah, and it's interesting
because I love that, you know, as
we're sitting here in four years at 2023,
for a little bit longer,
for a little bit,
I just got used to writing 2023
and now we're going to be
they say, you know,
if you looked back in October of 2016,
this this article was in 2017.
If you just diet fasting, intermittent
alternate day had more than 210,000 hits.
Right.
But in contrast,
there was a shortage of evidence based
support for intermittent fasting
that can be used to generate
recommendations
for public health practice.
Yeah.
So now since then,
there have been dozens to hundreds.
We can't get to them all,
but we have different research databases
that we look at to see
what the most recent
we're going to do
and one that just came out a few days ago,
right when we were recording this,
we tried to get it.
We couldn't get into it.
It wasn't even released yet.
We're like, Man, all right,
We have the pre proof like,
so there's so many more.
There's now fasting studies in women
and different, you know, population
healthy weight obese various protocols
conditions and protocols.
Right. So yeah since this statement
there is a ton more of science
to back up the benefit.
And one of the things
that we typically say is,
you know, fasting
can adapt to any lifestyle.
It doesn't you can be vegan, vegetarian,
carnivore, pescatarian doesn't matter.
You can believe in
a whole host of different things
when it comes to dietary advice,
Assassin is one of those things that can
be applied to anything in between.
So, you know,
the way it seemed in the public now
compared to what it is then, and they were
saying like diet recommendations back
then related to intermittent fasting
and intermittent caloric restriction.
You know,
there was a book published back then.
It was really the fast diet, right.
You know, restricting energy
intake severely for two days a week.
But eating normally during the rest
of the week, guess what it turned into?
Decided to diet.
Yeah, right.
So there's this this
this advancement of the clinical studies
and what we're seeing
and now that we've taken
and personally done it
but also taken thousands of people
through the challenge framework
and formula and tens of thousands
of downloads of our blueprint of fasting
for fat loss, which is the free PDF.
You can grab that in the show
notes as well.
It was that human studies were largely
limited to observational studies
like religious fasting, like Ramadan,
but that's not the case anymore.
We find a Ramadan study now we're like,
Oh, interesting.
Haven't seen one of those
in a while, right?
Because that's all that
that they used to be back in the day.
And now they're
they're having more proactive.
These are the protocols
and we're setting them up and actually
looking at the effects of one versus
the other, which is which is really cool.
We usually do
still find some things where we go, Well,
if we set up that study,
we do it a little bit differently.
But we can
we can only take what we can find.
We accept any and all donations
to the Right to Life Research Fund.
Yes. All right.
I'm kidding.
Going just give us a five star view
or we get that.
Yeah. So.
Yeah, right.
So when we look at this
and we see some alternate day fasting,
we see some modified modified ads
and we start looking at the regimens.
It's interesting
to see where there's kind of come from,
but they're looking for things
like visceral, fat,
like leptin, resistance and,
you know, adiponectin we have all these
different outcome measures.
So they're basically like scraping
through all of the available research back
then from six years ago to work on, on
kind of comparing them against each other.
So, so you,
you find some various kind of protocols.
Some are using, you know, a modified ADF
where you bring in a mini meal.
Some of them had, you know,
just a full fasting window,
some of them were eight hour
evening window, some of them were six.
But the important thing to note
is we start looking at a study
that's comparing studies.
You're looking for trends overall.
Can we identify some trends?
Can we look to see that one protocol
looks a little bit better than another?
Or do we see that as we shrink
the eating window that maybe there's
a beneficial effect in something
that we're looking to improve or,
you know,
are the arrows moving in the direction
that not that we would like to see, but
that would would make sense intuitively,
at least in a certain patient population.
So are we looking at normal weight
or are we looking at overweight or obese?
We tend to see different results
in those groups.
And we've gone through some some studies
that that actually were know,
just looking at normal weight individuals,
which does get pretty interesting
because now you're kind of separating
the health effects from the weight.
The weight seems to definitely be a drag
on our health overall.
But it gets really interesting
when the patient population
doesn't really have a weight to lose, too.
So just a few things to consider.
Yeah,
I love that last part, especially if you
if there if you're in the camp
that intermittent fasting is not helpful.
Right.
Oh, it's the same as calorie restriction.
Sure.
Camp In some of those studies you had said
jokingly prepping for this episode.
Yeah.
If I was trying to discount
the effects of intermittent fasting,
I would have set up the study
exactly that way.
Meaning a ten hour eating window
in a population that didn't have any wait
times. Right.
So they can actually.
I saw no effect here.
Yeah, of course not.
Right.
Three weeks,
three days long and sample size and eight.
For the purpose of this review,
the health outcomes of interest
are changes in weight
and in metabolic parameters
associated with type two diabetes,
cardiovascular disease and cancers.
So three of the top reasons for all cause
mortality, three of the reasons
why people die.
It's like, Oh crap.
Okay, well,
I think we need to look at this
a little bit differently
or maybe apply it to our lives
a little bit differently.
So we're going to look at some mechanisms
with human health to the circadian rhythm
or circadian biology,
the gut biome, and that self admittedly
not an area that we focus a lot on,
but we'll just share the results,
not our area that we I feel that's above
my pay grade, as I like to say, right.
I don't have that level of clearance.
There's not something we focus on.
Yeah, it's classified.
Yeah,
I don't know, but I'm in a black wrapper.
I'm really dating myself here.
But the cool thing, this last category is
the third one that I really like
is modifiable lifestyle behaviors
such as diet activity and sleep.
So we're going to talk about sleep today.
So here, let's just go
start to go through some of them
because you really framed out
well the different variations.
And we're not going to go into each of
these studies that they pulled out.
But we'll talk,
first of all, alternate day fasting.
This is not a tool
that we use a lot inside of our coaching
and it involves eating
full at the bottom, nutrition one day
and then a fasting day the following day,
and then the modified version
is where you would have a
what they call a mini meal,
which is a 500 calorie meal for women
and a 600 calorie meal for men.
We would prefer to see them being protein
based.
That's our spin on it
because we see a lot more hunger satiation
and things like that
because one of the side,
one of the things that they say
after looking at the foreign invention
studies in some of the rodent studies
and some of the the human studies,
when they look at the outcomes for AIDS,
there was one thing that really stood out
and it said there is hold on,
let me find it here.
I just lost.
OSTER It appears alternative fasting
appeared to result
in weight loss as well as reductions
in glucose and insulin concentration.
Right. Bing, bing, bing.
And in the three studies
evaluating, however, this fasting regimen
may not be practical because it leads
to intense hunger on fasting days.
Mm hmm.
Interesting to say what's 2016?
Let's talk about the modified
alternate day fasting regimens.
And when we describe minimal right
resulted in reduced weight with reductions
ranging from 3.2%
all the way up to 8% in a 12 week period.
Right.
So just I mean, that's
a big percent change for sure.
But there was mixed evidence
in some other metabolic markers.
But I want to discount
that first part, Tommy,
because there's another study
that we found
and it's interesting,
this came out in 2016.
Mm hmm. Right.
That completely disputes this.
Yeah, as far as as far as the hunger
signals and how that works within AIDS,
how I'm going to eat the whole buffet
the next day. Right.
Yeah.
No, no, not Yeah,
That's not going to be a lot of fun.
But, you know, if I came off of a vacation
or a more indulgent kind of, you know,
time of life or, hey,
maybe I was just gaining weight,
and then all of a sudden, one day,
I just go, okay, everything's changing.
Tomorrow, that might be the time where
if I just jump right into an AVF
at that point, then I could feel some
intense hunger, some some frustration.
Might be hard to make it through that next
full day of fasting, for sure.
So we don't know exactly how these people
were kind of prep going into that.
But, you know, there's a reason why
we put intention behind, you know, those
kind of things without just jumping
straight into into a longer fast.
But yeah, yeah.
So I think we're going with that
because ADF
this is the study that counteracts this.
It was 60 person
study, eight week ADF protocol, right?
So we talked about this where there was
you can do modify.
So if you're just thinking about this man,
I've never done a 24 hour fast
to the point of 59 and done right with you
the we got
it was you know,
I've never done longer than 24.
Well if you do a true ADF,
you're pushing into the 38
to 40 plus range, right?
Oh my gosh.
I'm going to be starving.
I'm going to eat like Ponderosa here.
I come to movies or, you know,
I don't know what else. What?
I'll write the Golden Corral. Go. Yeah.
They're all regional.
Yeah, right.
So I think ponderous is a northeast thing.
So hold it against philosophy.
Either way, none of them
would be a good idea at that point.
I'm just going to say that as a blanket.
Yeah, right.
Thank you.
I didn't know if that was clear.
So what they found
was in this eight weeks,
the body weight decreased visceral fat
mass decreased fat, free mass, decreased
resting metabolic rate
came down about 28 calories a day,
which if you've lost the weight,
there was a drop in the bucket.
Yeah. 8% of their body weight.
Yeah, that's great, right?
Fasting leptin and insulin decreased
while a you see we did a whole episode
on this area under the curve.
Ghrelin levels increased.
So ghrelin is the ground or I'm hungry.
Right.
Well, ghrelin will naturally increase
because it's a mechanical response
to an empty stomach.
So it's not one of the other four types
of hunger.
It's a physical metabolic
response, it's a mechanical response.
There's the emotional hunger,
the time based hunger,
and then the physical hunger.
So from other categories of hunger.
So the interesting thing was, despite
these changes, there was no increase
in subjective hunger
by the end of the study.
Furthermore, fullness in p
y, which is in the cytokine,
there's another one closest in college
to to kind of take
those fullness and y hormones increased.
So there is an absence of a compensatory
increase
in hunger in conjunction with an increase
in sensations of fullness.
So contrary to what this first
this article that we found saying
that appears to be great
for all these things. However.
Hmm. People
say that they're hungrier
and it's like not exactly.
Yeah. So that's an urgent part.
It might even start off that way.
And then quickly kind of kind of
come down, you know, And then by your.
Hey, the first time I did it,
I didn't break my fast in such a way
that it helped with the hunger.
But hey, you know, the next time I do it,
probably going to do something
a little bit better, too, you know?
And then a few days into
it might be a little bit less hungry.
So not feeling
you're not fearing the ravenous nature of
like when you go to break your fast,
which can be part of the like Oh, okay.
Let me just let me just start eating,
you know,
and then you kind of just go at it
a little too fast.
And here we have the buffet effect
and then I'm not feeling well after that.
Right. Well, here's the caveat, too.
And they say this in the article and then
similarly almost contradict themselves.
One caveat of the ADF research
was that normal weight adults
three out of the four studies were normal
weight adults and 16
so very small size
sample size in a non overweight note
non metabolically
potentially disrupted individual.
So it says at the very end noted
participants reported considerable hunger.
Yeah.
Where's your fat cells, Where's
your other energy, Where's your ketones.
Right. Like right.
Yeah of course.
So then they go on to say
whoever reports on extreme
hunger while fasting indicate
this may not be a feasible
public health intervention,
while the other study says opposite
is the complete opposite.
So this is one of the things.
What's the best
fasting schedule for me? Oh, what's it?
I don't know.
You need to play around with that.
Everybody's a little bit different, right?
So that's kind of
anything else is an idea of timing.
Yeah, just,
you know, one of the thing would be.
Yeah, just,
just to further your previous point,
if you had 20 extra
pounds around your midsection,
those hunger cues might have balanced out
even a little bit faster
because as you start to actually be able
to tap into those rather than your body
just going, okay, well,
not really sure what to burn now
because I got no food coming in and
I don't really have extra fat source too.
So if you're if you're coming to it
and you're using AIDS
during a fat loss phase,
then those hunger cues
might have a chance to balance
even a little bit faster.
Yeah.
So the next category they went into
was the modified fasting regimens.
And this is more of like a52 diet, right?
Where normal and the medium
intake on five days and then two days of
of 20 to 25% restriction.
So that's not really fasting like
fasting,
alternating reduced calorie. Yeah.
So it's like it's
kind of like the modified ADF
where you get about 500 to 600 calories,
Right.
Yeah.
So interestingly,
they looked at a bunch of my studies,
but when we look at the
the nine trials in humans,
of the nine studies,
only one instituted exercise.
So there wasn't a really hunger
stimulated by exercise component.
Seven of the nine reported
statistically significant weight loss
right as well as three of the six
fanciness efficient decreases
in fasting insulin and some found 1 to 3
looks like three here
found reduces in fasting glucose.
There was also studies that showed these
same studies improvements
in LDL, triglycerides, improvements,
inflammatory markers, C-reactive protein,
wow factor adiponectin, leptin, breve,
derived atrophic factor, etc.
etc. etc.
even without a whole bunch of fasting.
So but some compartmentalization
of of eating times on a consistent basis.
So this wasn't just about the scale,
right?
These studies, this
this was ranging from 1.1 all the way
up to 6.5 mean weight loss exercise
included not included 20 to 25% on certain
days, other days not right.
So there was a lot
more flexibility in this.
And this is why we like to say this,
and we've kind of been moving in
this direction is a single facet of any
length is better than no fast.
Yeah, 1,000%.
Just don't throw the baby out
with the bathwater.
If you Right, right.
Set a timer, check a box,
get a win. Right.
It's actually one of the reasons
why I don't love five two
because I feel like if you
if you put those Yeah,
if you put those two days
next to each other then it could be like
almost a full week when I felt like
I was kind of off fasting in a little bit.
Right.
And then I got a sprint back on. Yeah.
And where am I reps coming from?
And I can
some of the habits are actually
just being off and off fasting, whereas
we like the, the opposite side of that,
which would be more of adapting
it as a, as a lifestyle
where I'm not judging myself
on the necessarily the length of my fasts.
Like I'm, I'm not going to live and die
by that by the length of my next fast,
but I'd much rather set a 14 hour
fasting timer than no fasting timer,
and then just kind of see
where the results might fall.
The next category that they looked
at was the time restricted feeding.
And this is
this one's more of a broad category
because they looked at 13 studies,
fasting intervals
ranging from 12 to 21 hours
in different rodent models
and in different human models,
human studies as well.
All the rodent
fasting regimens were in male mice.
I really to talk about that
because it's like, okay, maybe.
Right.
But when they looked at four for this,
which is interesting,
is when they looked at the human studies,
human trials, and since then
there's been dozens and dozens more
that would fit this category.
Oh yeah.
Two of the cross-over studies
found significant reductions in weight.
fasting interval of 11 hours.
Let's just pause there for 11 hours.
Don't eat from 8 to 7.
All right.
Come on. 2.1% weight loss.
Okay.
I mean, it's better than 0%.
Sure, right?
Another crossover study report of 4.1%
weight
loss, effect of consuming a single meal
in the afternoon
for each day for eight weeks
without calorie restriction.
And they compared it with an ISO
caloric diet consumed as three meals
per day, meaning, oh, that's the same
same amount of calories, right?
No calorie restriction.
The one meal per day condition reductions
in glucose, improvements in LDL and HDL.
Although hunger was reported
higher in the morning,
the fasting regimen was considered
acceptable
because there were no mean changes
of measurements of tension, depression,
anger, vigor, fatigue or confusion.
So this is the is fasting dangerous?
No, no.
You're not going to like
your blood sugar is not going to drop low
and you're going to faint, Right.
Or you're going to lose focus
and of a momentary pause of dementia.
Right.
Like, yeah, blood
sugar, hypoglycemia is very rare.
Unless you have some type
of pancreatic tumor or you're on blood
sugar lowering medications
because you're a diabetic.
Right.
There might be a couple of small
caveats out there, but the long term
metabolic benefits with eating or not
eating breakfast, that is the research
really showed that there's benefit
to playing around with where
you put your meal timings in your windows.
And that's something
that we talk about a lot
because the individual ness of this
and how your body responds, right?
So we like to say that a 24 hour fast day
or 36 hour fast
once a week is not going to be the same
as the next time you do a 36 hour fast.
Oh, 100%, yeah.
But one of the really cool things
is there's a few different outcomes here
with regard to weight.
But even when the weight was okay,
I want to say quote unquote,
only 2%, 2.1% weight loss.
There were countless benefits happening
underneath the hood right there
that you didn't necessarily know.
And especially if you're it's not like
you can get like tap into
what your LDL or HDL is on
kind of a day to day basis.
You don't know what it is
like in real time.
But at the same time,
if the scales aren't necessarily moving,
it's just another encouragement point.
There is countless fasting research done
that shows
all kinds of benefit that you don't
you don't really pick up on the scale.
And if those benefits are happening
and your your health is is improving
even when the scales not,
that's a really good thing
and it's a reason
to keep going with fasting.
But sometimes we look to the scale
and that if that's our only point of
feedback, it can feel like, Oh, well,
I guess this isn't working right now.
And so maybe that pushes you away from it.
But yeah,
that's the exact opposite of what we want.
The variability
here is something I want to talk about
and I want to mention nutrition again,
because I just signed up for another
six months.
I had done six months, did some
some guinea pig testing on myself,
did some caffeine.
And the last thing we're going to talk
about is sleep out of this
this metabolic article that we found
and this was a huge thing
that I'm currently working on
and the CGM with nutrition is I know for
the next six months
is going to be another needle mover
because last time I was doing more
about the blood sugar response.
But the amazing thing about nutrition
is it combines cutting edge
tech and human expertise, right?
Yeah.
So you can see how your body responds
to different food
and exercise
and stress and sleep in real time.
So you can pair the CGM,
which is the biosensor that you wear.
It's a little thing
you stick on the back of your arm.
It doesn't hurt at all.
My wife was scared to death
when she did it.
I was, Oh, come on then she did.
And she's like, Wait, that's it.
I didn't feel it. Yeah.
All right, so you get there.
Expert
dietician guidance as well, and nutrition.
I just got an email time.
I forgot to tell you this.
They're going to be doing
expert guidance, a dietitian guidance
for the length of your subscription.
So however long you sign up, it's
not just one month
now they're going to be pairing
someone with you,
which was instrumental for me when I first
started years ago, using this before
Common because I was like,
How do I interpret these results?
Like data can be overwhelming, right?
So these expert dietitians,
they were so helpful, asked
about supplements and stress and sleep,
and that's what we're going to talk about
sleep in just a second.
So I highly recommend if you are looking
at an individual approach
like I've been doing fasting, I've been
I feel like every time I eat this,
I feel this way or I sleep some mass or
every time I work out I get more hungry.
And some of the stuff we've talked about
in the lifestyle diet category,
which is the third category
that we're going to get into
now that I really like, because it's
that lifestyle adaptation piece.
The CGM allows you
to see real time on your app.
In real time. What did I do?
What's the result?
How am I feeling?
Does this make sense right now?
Should I do it again?
Should I do it again? Right?
So the 36 hour fast this time versus
next time could be different.
And you'll have you'll have
a better understanding as to why
and then you'll make better decisions.
So the benefits
and the outcomes for the newer sense
members is the weight loss energy,
stable energy, better sleep, understanding
how their fasting journey,
how your fasting journey
is different than mine,
how we got results was different.
We used the same tools.
We just apply them a little differently.
So head to the show notes Nutrition start
IO forward slash fasting for life.
We've officially partnered with them.
Incredible company,
great customer support.
Yeah, I can't believe. Well,
you know what I am?
I am glad because even I need a coach.
We need coaches, right?
I think a whole life
I'm sure that I get dietician guidance
for the next six months,
so I can't wait for the sensor to show up.
I can't. We put it on because now my.
All right,
now I'm going to be focusing on my sleep.
So how did the shownotes nutrition
start io forward slash fasting for life?
All right, Tommy, last conversation
we're going to have
today
is about the circadian biology, right?
So we're going to be looking at this week
feeding cycle versus
the sleep fasting cycle.
And if you want to know more about the gut
microbiome and how metabolism
and blood sugar and how all of that is
is affected with fasting,
feel free to grab the link
and go down that rabbit hole,
as we mentioned,
not an area that we focus on
and I don't want to speak
about my pay grade, but the time of day
plays a major part
in integrating metabolism and energetics,
as well as physiological indices
such as hormonal secretion,
physical coordination and sleep
and we know, Tommy, one night of poor
sleep 30%
dysregulation of your metabolic ability
to process glucose and glycogen.
Yeah it shows up as an increase
in insulin resistance the next day.
The very next day. Immediate.
Yeah. We're not talking 3 hours of sleep.
We're talking if you go from 7 to 6
or 6 to 45 and a half.
Yeah, not this big.
We're talking like an hour difference.
Go to bed an hour earlier. Right.
It's crazy.
Yeah.
Because how we intuitively think about it
is that the sleep
like our recovery is going
to be proportion to the amount of sleep.
So we think, okay, if it's just
if it's 2 hours less, then maybe
that would be a 25% reduction in recovery.
But what we really see is the fact that
there are certain parts of our sleep cycle
that start from the evening time
and then go all through the sleep cycle.
And if we miss one of those checkpoints
the whole rest of the cycle
is actually thrown off.
So there are certain parts
of the efficiency of our sleep
where just a 25% reduction
in the amount of time can actually be up
to an 80% reduction in the amount
of rejuvenation or the amount of hormone
release that comes out
at a very specific time during the cycle.
And it will take at least a day,
another night's of good rest
to actually make up for that.
So if you feel like you're doing
everything right, but still the needles
don't seem to be moving,
look at your sleep, because it's actually
a very, very under examined
part of this process and part of overall
metabolic health and efficiency.
So if we just go through,
you know, a wake feeding cycle, right?
So you wake up at 6 a.m., rise in blood
pressure, melatonin secretion stops.
Testosterone is the highest, highest.
You're awake.
You're you're moving
into the most awake. And
what's the word I'm looking for?
Yeah, like neurologically active.
Yeah. An energy burning part of your day.
Yeah.
So you've got, like, a lytic metabolism
in the muscle.
You've got, like, biogenesis
and fat breakdown, you've got adiponectin
production, insulin secretion, you know,
all the gut stuff taking place, right,
in terms of your glycogen, cholesterol,
bile, acid and synthesis, digestion, etc..
And then you kind of hit the, the,
the mid-afternoon and in the mid-afternoon
for me
is the greatest time you know, three or
four or 5:00 is when I like to work out.
I feel the strongest.
You get high blood pressure.
How do your body temperature rises,
Cholesterol elevates in the evening,
which is one of the reasons why we have,
you know,
if you want to really move your labs
and decrease your insulin resistance
and increase your instance
and 70 moving your meals
earlier in the evening, melatonin starts
and then you sleep, right?
And then during sleep,
you've got your liver active, right?
Burning the glycogen,
storing the extra energy.
If you have it hopefully burning
and recovering
your fat, you've got more lipid
catabolism right back in the day,
if I had a poor night's sleep,
I knew the scale will go up the next day
like I could.
I would have bet millions of dollars on it
because I knew at the time, right?
Yeah.
And then your muscle goes
through oxidative metabolism.
So when we're talking about sleep
and hunger and fasting, it was interesting
to see some of their conclusions
that reported, you know, nighttime
eating is associated with reduced
sleep duration and poor sleep quality.
Having 100% go to bed,
that can directly lead to insulin
resistance and increased risk of obesity,
diabetes and cardiovascular disease.
It's a direct relationship.
One night of poor
sleep, 30% decrease in your body's ability
to handle and process energy the next day,
even if it fits your macros,
even if it fits your calorie count,
if it's even if we don't.
Yeah.
And I'm talking to to myself 20 years ago
when I was tracking them,
but then I was still getting to the point.
Yeah, my night sleep sucked.
I woke up today
and I was like, Oh, I'm so hungry.
Yeah, but like,
how many times did I have a later meal
that I would have been much better off
just skipping that meal.
But I was like, Well,
the calories are fine,
so the scale will be fine.
The scale wasn't fine.
I didn't feel fine, my rest wasn't fine,
nothing was fine about it.
But I was putting this over.
I was over stressing the machinery
right into the sleep cycle.
And then it messed with the whole
the whole rejuvenation process.
Hey, woop. If you're listening,
we'd love to partner with you.
I've been loyal customer for multiple
years, forced into it by my wife.
I have a kitty sticker.
You can't see this
because it's a Oh, yeah, it's nice. Nice.
Yeah, I have a little oh, a cherry sticker
right now that I get that.
I don't know why it's still there.
It's been there for months, dude.
Cold plunger showers. Pool.
Yeah. Golf. Just workouts.
It's still there. Yeah. Daughter loves it.
It's a tank. Whoop. Rustling.
So specifically eating meals
at abnormal circadian times.
Right?
Late at night, especially snacking
can also disrupt that circadian rhythm.
So when I started going down my path
of getting healthy again,
even though I was doing
a lot of the things right macros
working out,
tracking all of those different types
of things, my stress,
my sleep were completely out of whack.
So I would skip breakfast often.
I would crash in the mid-afternoon,
I would rely on caffeine.
We tested
and we thought it was my adrenals.
My adrenals were fine.
It was my melatonin
production was crap, tried melatonin.
That was only a short term solution.
Like it was crazy until a CGM and Dr.
Fong and your guidance of Hey,
have you tried consistently fasting?
And I'm like,
why do some intermittent fasting coquito
And you know, it didn't really work,
but this sleep component
is so incredibly helpful because that is
when your body rest and recovers.
Yeah, it's true.
I didn't want to see it either
because I'm one of the best doctor I know.
I'll sleep when I'm dead.
I can pull an all nighter,
you know, all that kind of stuff. So.
So just seeing that can be a little tough.
But I'll say that the other thing
that that got you a lot of
those results were was the consistency.
Because, you know,
really it's almost cliche, right?
But, you know, oh, what's the pill system?
Oh, how did you do it?
I just did it when I didn't want to.
And I'm not saying were perfect.
Right, Right.
I don't even have a glass house.
I'm just naked in the works.
Right? Like,
I just you can see everything.
I had nothing to hide, right?
Like, not even throwing
stones from a glass house. I'm just.
Yeah, right. Yeah. Yeah.
Hopefully you don't know.
You seem to have that problem, but
this is a PG 13 podcast just right now.
It's so funny, right?
So it's just
when you think about it, like,
you know, it's just crazy,
the different perspective shift.
Yeah, because you have to to realize, Hey,
you know what?
Probably there are probably
it's not just one thing that I need
to like start working on
or get a little bit better at.
It's probably going to be multifaceted.
It doesn't mean
I have to get everything right
all at once or all today,
or it has to all be perfect.
But probably eventually I might a point
where
I just don't feel like I'm
moving the needle anymore.
Okay, well, maybe it's time to come back
and take a look
at some of these other factors,
like like the sleep or,
you know, what my fasting schedule is
and all these kind of things
that work together
towards my metabolic effects.
Absolutely. And that's
kind of the takeaway of today's episode.
So if sleep's your thing, work on it,
if stress is your thing, work on it,
if consistency is your thing, work on it.
The beauty of what we just talked about
is that there's so much variability
in the effectiveness of fasting.
It can be applied to any situation
wherever you are.
You don't need special meal plans
and shopping lists and diet strategies
and couch it like, right, You can
literally do it anywhere, any time.
And that's the power of fasting.
So takeaway today me, I would say from
my side of things is pick one thing.
If you're looking for guidance,
head to the show notes.
Grab the blueprint of fasting for fat
loss to the show notes, click
the link to come join us in the Facebook,
the Fasting for life Facebook community.
Go to the next challenge.
Yeah, jump in the next challenge.
Right. Like engage.
Go grab the CGM, do it.
I recommend
doing it for a few months minimum
because you're gonna get some really cool
data.
And it's not just for diabetics, it's for
this this health and wellness for sure.
But we want you to take an action
that fits
where you are and doesn't create
a gap from like, Oh, I got £50 to lose.
Where do I start?
Take a step. A step.
Pick one of the things we said today, take
a step if anything resonated with you.
That's the takeaway from me. Time. There
you go. Just do it.
Take that step. Don't delay. Do it now.
Love it and love it. Amen.
Thank you for the conversation.
Appreciate it, as always.
On a slip there and we'll talk to you
next week.
Yeah, thank you. Bye.
So you've heard today's episode and
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