The Twelve Days of Gheorghemas: Day Two

On the second day of Gheorghemas, Big Gheorghe gave to me

Two Stones of Weight Loss (Your Mileage May Vary)

and Running Gags with Quatro Kitties

An OBX Dave Joint

Y’all come to this site for health advice like guys go to strip clubs for the cheeseburgers. However, I thought as we all move toward and past the half-century mark, anything that might provide help is worth a look.

Dieting and weight loss was a $78-billion industry in the U.S., pre-pandemic, and the global market for weight loss products and services is expected to hit $255 billion in 2021. There are dozens of diets – high-fat, high-carb, low-fat, low-carb, vegan, paleo, ketogenic, Atkins, Mediterranean. Many require people to drastically alter what they eat and force metabolic changes to achieve desired results. Some market their own foods for their programs at hefty sums, such as Weight Watchers, Nutri System, Jenny Craig, Slim Fast, Herbalife.

One program, however, does nothing like that, and may in fact save money. That’s because it doesn’t target *what* people eat, but *when* they eat. It’s known as intermittent fasting, and it’s a daily or weekly practice that confines people’s eating to a specific time frame. The most common and effective is what’s called the 16:8 program. An eight-hour window in which people eat, and a 16-hour cycle in which they eat nothing.

The science is, essentially, if people go from Pop Tarts to popcorn, eating and snacking during their waking hours, the body is constantly in some state of digestion and storing leftovers. It limits the ability to maintain and cleanse itself. Researchers and scientists point out that our hunter-gatherer ancestors sometimes went days without food and functioned quite well. Agriculture made food more plentiful, and more recently grocery stores and Waffle House make food available 24/7, often to the body’s detriment.

After going hours without food, the body exhausts its sugar store and instead burns fat. Enzymes that would be involved in digestion are instead focused on breaking down toxins. The liver also gets involved, converting non-carbohydrate materials such as lactate, amino acids and fats into glucose energy. Fasting also puts the body under mild stress, causing cells to become stronger, much like muscles and the cardiovascular system from exercise.

According to a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine, intermittent fasting results in weight loss, it lowers blood pressure and resting heart rate and levels blood sugar. It can help stave off type 2 diabetes and heart disease. In areas of thinking and memory, working memory in animals and verbal memory in humans improved. In young men, it helped prevent obesity and resulted in fat loss, while maintaining muscle mass.

An intermittent fasting program doesn’t dictate what people eat, but implied is that they eat reasonably and reasonably well. Don’t binge mozzarella sticks or Doritos, but again it’s not prohibited. Lean meat, veggies, fruits, nuts, whole grains. A couple of meals, or maybe one big meal and smaller munches throughout the eating period. Whatever works. 

Ideally, people are asleep for 7-8 hours during the fasting portion, so there are eight or nine hours when awake with no food. During that time, people are permitted to drink zero-calorie beverages, such as water, tea and black coffee, which provides some semblance of fullness before and after the eating period. The most common eating windows are 11 a.m.-7 p.m., or noon to 8 p.m., but again it’s up to the individual. There’s also an alternative fasting regimen known as 5:2, in which people eat normally five days a week, but the other two they’re limited to one 500-600-calorie meal and the aforementioned drinks.

“Fasting” is probably too extreme a term for the program. It’s not prison hunger strike-level, or Ramadan-style fasting where people ingest nothing from dawn to sunset for 30 days. It’s more like scheduled eating and abstaining. But “fasting” is more fashionable shorthand, and in a fat-ass society of abundance, anything within the same area code as real sacrifice is ripe for overly dramatic verbiage.

All diets or body change programs require some discipline. Kids and family meal times, and irregular work schedules might make fasting a challenge. The holidays aren’t the easiest time to implement a restricted eating program, with parties and get-togethers. Researchers say it takes the body two-to-four weeks to adjust to the change. Some folks get cranky going without food in the early stages of the program, but nutritionists and dieticians say that if they get past the transition period they begin to feel better and are more likely to stick with it.

Or, folks could just practice moderation, exercise and get proper sleep. But where’s the fun in that?