A BEGINNER'S GUIDE TO POPULAR METHODS, THEIR BENEFITS & HEALTH CONSIDERATIONS
There’s a lot of talk around about fasting right now. Maybe your colleague is on the intermittent fasting buzz and is waiting until 11am to have her breakfast. Or your friend has pushed back your Sunday brunch plans because she’s not actually eating ANYTHING this weekend.
There are many different ways to go about fasting, but the effects can be really beneficial if you choose a method that you know you’ll actually be able to stick to. Here are the basics you need to know about this diet and lifestyle phenomenon before you get started.
WHAT IS FASTING?
“Fasting is literally the act of going without food or any liquids with calories for an extended time. While a traditional diet focuses on what you eat, fasting diets focus on when you eat and don’t eat!” says Kaytee Boyd, integrative nutritionist and founder of The Boyd Clinic in Auckland.
“Fasting has been an integral part of a healthy human diet for 99 percent of our evolution on earth, which was then sustained by major religions and in the past 50 years replaced by patterns of uninterrupted, daily food intake. So, we are really going back to what we used to do.”
WHAT ARE SOME OF THE DIFFERENT TYPES OF FASTING?
There are a number of fasts you can choose from depending on your lifestyle, experience with fasting and how much time you want to dedicate to it. Here are a few of the most common types.
Time Restricted Eating / Feeding (TRE / TRF) involves a daily pattern of eating during a window of 8 – 12 hours, meaning outside that window, you don’t consume food.
Intermittent Fasting (IF) is done regularly, with 1 to 3 days of fasting non-consecutively per week. An example of an IF fast would be, breakfast at 11am, lunch around 3 or 4pm and dinner at 7pm which equates to 16 hours of the day in a fasted state, with an 8-hour window of eating. There are also some types of IF that may allow small portions of low calorie foods during the fasting period.
Prolonged fasting (PF) involves four or more consecutive days of fasting and only water is allowed to be consumed.
Longevity Fasting Diet (LFD) is where five days are spent mimicking a fast. “This is a five-day, highly specialised protocol that means there are meals on each day with a certain carbohydrate, fat and protein make-up, leading the body to believe it is, in actual fact, fasting,” explains Kaytee.
WHAT ARE THE BENEFITS OF FASTING?
Where intermittent fasting is concerned, a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine showed that “evidence is accumulating that eating in a 6-hour period and fasting for 18 hours can trigger a metabolic switch from glucose-based to ketone-based energy, with increased stress resistance, increased longevity, and a decreased incidence of diseases, including cancer and obesity.” (Rafael de Cabo, Ph.D., and Mark P. Mattson, Ph.D.)
As for LFD, which is Kaytee’s specialty, she says “if I could bottle the health benefits of LFD and fasting in general and sell it as a pill, I would be a zillionaire!” Such benefits include, better clarity and thinking, weight loss, improvement in skin condition, improvement in indicators of cardiovascular disease, reduced erectile dysfunction, protection against fatty liver, lower pancreatic fat, reduction in gut permeability (leaky gut) and a reduction in chronic fatigue symptoms – to name just a few.
She adds: “One of my specialties is cancer and we have noticed dramatic reduction in side-effects while undergoing chemotherapy and radiation, from less hair loss to reduced nausea. Profoundly so.”
ARE THERE ANY CONTRADICTIONS WHICH MEAN SOMEONE MAY NOT BE ABLE TO PARTICIPATE IN A FAST?
While fasting is considered a safe practise, it’s important to be aware of factors which may determine you to be unsuitable – either in the long or short term. For the LFD, these include pregnant and/or breastfeeding women, people with signs of a current infection for example a fever, cough or diarrhoea, those who are underweight, malnourished or have experienced a protein deficiency, and people who suffer from an eating disorder such as anorexia.
These contraindications extend to other fasting types too, and anyone with a chronic disease or concerns about whether fasting is the right path for them should seek medical advice before starting any program.
You can read more about Kaytee Boyd at The Boyd Clinic, located in Auckland’s North Shore here: www.theboydclinic.co.nz
