An easy way to fast frequently is to just skip breakfast everyday. Then you automatically get a 16+ hour fast and keep your eating to a short window during the day. This helps kick in autophagy [1], a process whereby our cells repair themselves; a garbage collector for our body if you will. This is most likely the process the scientists are observing as slowed down aging. It's not really a foreign topic as there's 397 published papers on autophagy on PubMed. No fancy hyphenated diet products needed.
I used to think this but then I read a few studies showing larger breakfast breaking the overnight fast result in better blood sugar/insulin/body fat scores.
In comparison to intermittent fasting, chronic fasting/starvation everyday like you're doing is probably not good for your body. It responds by keeping more bodyfat to last you through your 16 hr window, giving you a belly and raising your insulin when you start eating.
Agree! There's also a BBC documentary on intermittent fasting. The idea is to eat just normally 5 days a week, and then two days a week you eat 500 calories if you are a woman, or 600 calories, if you are a man - pretty optimal routine for modern lifestyle :)
I've been doing this for quite a while and it works great for me. It's 1:30PM here and all I've had so far:
1. a cup of milked tea in the morning
2. a chicken salad for lunch
My dinner will be slightly heavier (usually low carb) and will be before 8:00pm. Throw in 2 more cups of tea and that's my day.
It took me a very gradual tapering off of caloric intake lasting over a year to get to a point where I can do this without actually feeling hungry. My body weight is constant (so I know I'm not at a deficit) and I take vitamin supplements (to cover the proportional loss of micro-nutrient due to cutting down on food).
Once a week I have a pig-out day when I usually drink a lot of beer and eat steak, pork chops or something along those lines.
Vitamin supplements are generally in a form that is more difficult to absorb; for long-term health, I'd consider including foods with high vitamin content.
That's exactly what I've been doing for more than a year, including the pig-out day! I lost more than 15 kg 10 months and now my BMI is constant too. I don't need vitamin supplements though and i drink more coffee than tea :)
I have skipped breakfast for the last 10 years of my life (not anymore though), and I would hardly call it fasting. I tend to just compensate it later with lunch and dinner. In fact it's less healthy according to the "many small meals instead of a few big ones" theory.
Me too! I used to burn like a factory. Big meals including breakfast, snacks all day, weighed 140 lbs. Then I started gaining, so I cut out snacks until after lunch. Then until after 2:30. Then altogether. Then I cut out breakfast. Nowadays I sometimes skip dinner too.
Ultimately I expect to be eating a slice of bread at 1:00 and exist on oxygen otherwise.
Most of this and related studies seem to tie back to insulin one way or the other (the article mentioned IGF1, many of the autophagy studies mention the process only happening with low insulin levels eg http://www.cell.com/cell-metabolism/abstract/S1550-4131(10)0...). It would stand to reason managing meal glygemic index would be important (naturally fasting lowers insulin, presumably so would low glygemic index diets)
So, I tend to skip dinner as it lets me sleep through the parts where I'm hungry :p
My real question is why would breakfast be optimal? Dinner for me would typically be a bigger meal and at a time when I'm most inactive (and will be for another 10-12 hours)
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autophagy