Last week a patient asked me why I hadn’t written an article on intermittent fasting. I was amazed, because it has been a mainstay of my lifestyle for years now. I feel like I have written about it many times, but maybe I have never actually come out and named it by name. Possibly this is because I started doing it before it was given that name.
As I have written before, I have been doing fasts of varying lengths since I was 18 years old. I got interested in the whole idea while I was in high school. I had a subscription to Scientific American and they ran an article on research on the impact of complete calorie deprivation on people. The research was very positive and I resolved to try it out for myself as soon as I headed off to college at UC Davis the next year. My first fast was a water only fast for 2 weeks. I was amazed how easy it was once I got past the first couple days.
I find now, 46 years later, that getting up the motivation for complete water fasts has gotten much harder. The benefits are still there, but I no longer feel that complete water fasts are as effective as other protocols, like my green fast. If you have a gut load of bad bacteria, then a complete fast might starve the bad guys out as part of a larger guided gut bug removal program. But for most people we want to heal a damaged gut and support a rebuilding of the good guy microbes in the gut. At the same time we want to detoxify the body by giving the liver uninterrupted time to focus on getting rid of the poisons in the system. It can’t do this if food is present because its first priority is to process any food entering the system.
This is where intermittent fasting comes into the picture. It takes about 8 hours from the end of your last meal of the day for your liver to be finished up with processing the food from that meal. Then it can switch over to detoxing the system and dumping the poisons through the bile into the colon for elimination via the bowel. Because of the shear massive load of toxic substances entering our body through our air, water, food, and through the skin, our liver is overloaded with work to do. It needs lots of time to do this job as well as all the vital nutrients and cofactors it uses to break down the poisons for elimination.
The purpose of intermittent fasting is to give the liver sufficient time to do this job by fasting between dinner and breakfast for longer than usual. Normally we go 10 to 12 hours without eating every night. This only leaves 2 to 4 hours for detoxification. We really need at least 8 or more hours to make a dent on our toxic burden. One way we can do this is with what has come to be termed a 16/8 protocol. An example might be to finish your dinner by 6:30 in the evening and then not eat breakfast until 10:30 the next morning. Coffee or tea in the early morning is fine as no digestion or liver time is needed with this. No consumption of proteins, carbs, sugars, or fats is made until 10:30. This leaves the liver a full 8 hours to break down poisons and dump them after the 8 hours of food processing it does between 6:30 pm and 2:30 am.
This is really quite doable. My 87-year-old mother does a 16/8 eating schedule every day. It is part of why she is able to be so constantly busy running the garden club in Colfax (which actually means doing all the weeding in the garden beds downtown.) That is just one of the clubs she is in, not to mention all her church activities.
You can set any 16-hour time per day without food to get the liver to step into detox mode. Vitamins and other supplements won’t disturb the processing, and neither will most medications. Technically fiber should not bother it either in case you wanted to take a fiber only shake or eat a nice bowl of steamed greens. They are just like taking vitamins. But consuming anything your liver has to process will shut down the detoxification pathways.
The nice thing about a simple 16/8 eating protocol is that it does not have anything to do with what you eat, only when you eat. You can reap significant health benefits without changing your diet at all. Of course eating healthy vegetables and proteins, and leaving out the processed foods, grains, seed oils, and sugars will do even better for your health. But just your timing for your foods all by itself can have powerful impacts on your health by decreasing the poisons filling up your system.
So give it a try and see how you feel. If it is not for you because you have a fragile blood sugar metabolism, you will know right away and all you have to do is eat to rebalance your blood sugar. I find in my practice only about 5% of people have this issue. Those people need to gradually switch over to a fat burning based metabolism instead of their totally sugar burning metabolism they are stuck with now.
So give intermittent fasting a try. It is really good for you.