Two Meals a Day Are Ideal. By Dr. Mercola. How many meals a day is ideal? There are many answers to this question, but if you want to optimize your lifespan and decrease your risk for developing chronic degenerative diseases, the answer is becoming very clear. Other less obvious risks are biological changes that result in metabolic dysfunction, subsequent weight gain, and diminished health. In fact, a number of beneficial effects take place when you go for periods of time without eating. Valter Longo,1 director of the Longevity Institute at the University of Southern California, where he studies meal timing and calorie restriction, even three meals a day may be too much. As reported by Time Magazine: 2. They often look only at the short- term effects of increasing meal frequency. While your appetite, metabolism, and blood sugar might at first improve, your system will grow accustomed to your new eating schedule after a month or two. When that happens, your body will start expecting and craving food all day long instead of only around midday or dinnertime. More recently, I have refined my views on skipping breakfast. The key to remember is to only eat within a window of six to eight consecutive hours each day, and avoiding food for at least three hours before bedtime. As long as you restrict your eating to this window, you can choose between having breakfast and lunch, or lunch and dinner, but avoid having both breakfast and dinner. I have recently appreciated that this is another important factor that can help optimize your mitochondrial function and prevent cellular damage from occurring, which I'll review in the next segment. That said, none of this probably applies to normal weight teens or growing children. They likely need three square meals a day unless they're overweight. For kids and teens, the type of food they eat would be a primary consideration. Ideally, all of their meals would revolve around eating REAL FOOD — not processed foods, fast food, and sugary snacks. Drinking plenty of pure water and avoiding sugary beverages is another key consideration. This is due to the way your body produces energy. Many don't realize that your mitochondria are responsible for . Your cells have between 1. Use Intermittent Fasting with 1 of these weight loss plans for rapid weight loss like Sue pictured above . How to do Intermittent Fasting. Intermittent fasting diet for fat loss, muscle gain and health. Articles, research, diet advice, and free guides from IF-expert, Martin Berkhan. Intermittent fasting is quickly becoming know as the way to lose weight. Keep reading to learn how it can help you lose weight and keep it off for good. Intermittent Fasting Beats Traditional Diets and Even Chronic Calorie Restriction for Weight Loss and Other Health Benefits. When you don't have insulin resistance this energy transfer works quite nicely, but when you are insulin resistant or you eat excessively, dysfunctions tend to emerge. These excess electrons leak out and wind up prematurely killing the mitochondria, and then wreak further havoc by damaging your cell membranes and contributing to DNA mutations. Simple: resolve your insulin resistance as soon as you can, and do not eat for AT LEAST three hours before you go to sleep. Personally I stop eating around 4 PM or even earlier and typically go to sleep around five to six hours later. This is one of the reasons why I now believe skipping dinner may be an even better strategy than skipping breakfast. Clearly skipping dinner is more difficult to implement from a social perspective, but it might be a superior biological strategy. Obese participants who . All participants, including the control group, received a weight management consultation on how to improve their diet and exercise. Those who ate three meals a day and drank water prior to each meal lost an average of nearly 9. Those who only pre- loaded once a day, or not at all, lost just over 1. In all, 2. 7 percent of the treatment group who pre- loaded with water lost more than five percent of their body weight, compared to just five percent of the control group. This makes logical sense, as thirst is often misinterpreted as hunger. Drinking water before settling down to eat will also make you feel fuller, so overall this strategy could result in eating less. Interestingly, research. So one reason why calorie restriction may lengthen lifespan appears to be due to the positive effect it has on gut microbiota. Intermittent fasting is a great way to lose weight while maintaining/gaining muscle mass. It creates many of the same benefits as intense exercise on weight loss. I have previously hinted that intermittent fasting sidesteps the issues associated with stubborn body fat. Indeed I rarely find any need for advanced strategies to. Earlier research has demonstrated that calorie restriction helps extend the lifespan of animals by improving insulin sensitivity and inhibiting the m. TOR pathway. This was demonstrated in a 2. Research included in that review, and other published studies, indicate that intermittent fasting can help: Limit inflammation, reduce oxidative stress, and cellular damage Improve circulating glucose Reduce blood pressure Improve metabolic efficiency and body composition, including significant reductions in body weight in obese individuals Reduce LDL and total cholesterol levels Prevent or reverse type 2 diabetes, as well as slow its progression Improve immune function,1. Improve pancreatic function Improve insulin and leptin levels and insulin/leptin sensitivity Reproduce some of the cardiovascular benefits associated with physical exercise Protect against cardiovascular disease Modulate levels of dangerous visceral fat Boost mitochondrial energy efficiency Normalize ghrelin levels, known as . Fasting can raise HGH by as much as 1,3. HGH plays an important part in health, fitness, and slowing the aging process. It's also a fat- burning hormone Lower triglyceride levels and improve other biomarkers of disease Boost production of brain- derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), stimulating the release of new brain cells and triggering brain chemicals that protect against changes associated with Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease. For starters, it's a lot easier to comply with, and compliance is everything. The calorie restriction route is also extremely dependent on high quality nutrition — you want to sacrifice calories without sacrificing any important micronutrients — and this can be another hurdle for many who are unfamiliar with nutrition and what actually constitutes a healthy diet. Most people fail to appreciate that there are many intricate biochemical dynamics that occur that are unaccounted for when you just count . As pointed out by Fight Aging: 1. Thus only the mouse evolves a relatively large plasticity of life span in response to food scarcity. Ancel Keys demonstrated this in the mid- 1. Thirty- six young healthy male volunteers were placed on a 2. They also had to walk for about 4. But instead of resulting in continuous weight loss, at 2. The men became obsessed with food to the exclusion of everything else in their life, and when the calorie restriction ended, they all over- reacted. Within a few weeks, they regained all of the lost weight plus about 1. Other studies have come to similar conclusions. So starvation- type diets may not be ideal for the average person. Your body will tend to shut down various processes in order to survive. For example, by reducing thyroid function, your body will not burn as many calories. On the one hand, calorie restriction promotes beneficial biological changes that tend to extend life; on the other, there are built in mechanisms that when triggered by chronic calorie restriction can trigger other health problems. These are complex issues, and any extreme measure is likely to cause more problems than it solves. The best we can do is come up with some general guidelines that replicate ancestral patterns. In my view, daily intermittent fasting and avoiding eating for a number of hours before bedtime has many advantages over general calorie restriction and other radical diets, while providing many of the same benefits with a minimum of risk. It's important to recognize that, with few exceptions, you cannot burn body fat if you have other fuel available, and if you're supplying your body with carbohydrates every few hours, your body has no need to dive into your fat stores. When you apply intermittent fasting you not only avoid this but also will typically decrease your food costs and increase your health. If you're not insulin resistant, intermittent fasting is not as crucial, but may still be beneficial. If you're among the minority of Americans who do not struggle with insulin resistance, then my general recommendation is to simply avoid eating at least three hours before bedtime. That automatically allows you to . To that, I would add avoiding sitting, engaging in non- exercise movement throughout the day, and getting regular exercise. Exercise will not produce significant weight loss without addressing your diet, but when done in combination it can be significantly beneficial. Popular Ways to do Intermittent Fasting. Intermittent fasting has been very trendy in recent years. It is claimed to cause weight loss, improve metabolic health and perhaps even extend lifespan. Not surprisingly given the popularity, several different types/methods of intermittent fasting have been devised. All of them can be effective, but which one fits best will depend on the individual. Here are 6 popular ways to do intermittent fasting. The 1. 6/8 Method: Fast for 1. The 1. 6/8 Method involves fasting every day for 1. Within the eating window, you can fit in 2, 3 or more meals. This method is also known as the Leangains protocol, and was popularized by fitness expert Martin Berkhan. Doing this method of fasting can actually be as simple as not eating anything after dinner, and skipping breakfast. For example, if you finish your last meal at 8 pm and then don’t eat until 1. It is generally recommended that women only fast 1. For people who get hungry in the morning and like to eat breakfast, then this can be hard to get used to at first. However, many breakfast skippers actually instinctively eat this way. You can drink water, coffee and other non- caloric beverages during the fast, and this can help reduce hunger levels. It is very important to eat mostly healthy foods during your eating window. This won’t work if you eat lots of junk food or excessive amounts of calories. I personally find this to be the most “natural” way to do intermittent fasting. I eat this way myself and find it to be 1. I eat a low- carb diet, so my appetite is blunted somewhat. I simply do not feel hungry until around 1 pm in the afternoon. Then I eat my last meal around 6- 9 pm, so I end up fasting for 1. Bottom Line: The 1. On each day, you restrict your eating to an 8- 1. The 5: 2 Diet: Fast for 2 days per week. The 5: 2 diet involves eating normally 5 days of the week, while restricting calories to 5. This diet is also called the Fast diet, and was popularized by British journalist and doctor Michael Mosley. On the fasting days, it is recommended that women eat 5. For example, you might eat normally on all days except Mondays and Thursdays, where you eat two small meals (2. As critics correctly point out, there are no studies testing the 5: 2 diet itself, but there are plenty of studies on the benefits of intermittent fasting. Bottom Line: The 5: 2 diet, or the Fast diet, involves eating 5. Eat- Stop- Eat: Do a 2. Eat- Stop- Eat involves a 2. This method was popularized by fitness expert Brad Pilon, and has been quite popular for a few years. By fasting from dinner one day, to dinner the next, this amounts to a 2. For example, if you finish dinner on Monday at 7 pm, and don’t eat until dinner the next day at 7 pm, then you’ve just done a full 2. You can also fast from breakfast to breakfast, or lunch to lunch. The end result is the same. Water, coffee and other non- caloric beverages are allowed during the fast, but no solid food. If you are doing this to lose weight, then it is very important that you eat normally during the eating periods. As in, eat the same amount of food as if you hadn’t been fasting at all. The problem with this method is that a full 2. However, you don’t need to go all- in right away, starting with 1. I’ve personally done this a few times. I found the first part of the fast very easy, but in the last few hours I did become ravenously hungry. I needed to apply some serious self- discipline to finish the full 2. Bottom Line: Eat- Stop- Eat is an intermittent fasting program with one or two 2. Alternate- Day Fasting: Fast every other day. Alternate- Day fasting means fasting every other day. There are several different versions of this. Some of them allow about 5. Many of the lab studies showing health benefits of intermittent fasting used some version of this. A full fast every other day seems rather extreme, so I do not recommend this for beginners. With this method, you will be going to bed very hungry several times per week, which is not very pleasant and probably unsustainable in the long- term. Bottom Line: Alternate- day fasting means fasting every other day, either by not eating anything or only eating a few hundred calories. The Warrior Diet: Fast during the day, eat a huge meal at night. The Warrior Diet was popularized by fitness expert Ori Hofmekler. It involves eating small amounts of raw fruits and vegetables during the day, then eating one huge meal at night. Basically, you “fast” all day and “feast” at night within a 4 hour eating window. The Warrior Diet was one of the first popular “diets” to include a form of intermittent fasting. This diet also emphasizes food choices that are quite similar to a paleo diet – whole, unprocessed foods that resemble what they looked like in nature. Bottom Line: The Warrior Diet is about eating only small amounts of vegetables and fruits during the day, then eating one huge meal at night. Spontaneous Meal Skipping: Skip meals when convenient. You don’t actually need to follow a structured intermittent fasting plan to reap some of the benefits. Another option is to simply skip meals from time to time, when you don’t feel hungry or are too busy to cook and eat. It is a myth that people need to eat every few hours or they will hit “starvation mode” or lose muscle. The human body is well equipped to handle long periods of famine, let alone missing one or two meals from time to time. So if you’re really not hungry one day, skip breakfast and just eat a healthy lunch and dinner. Or if you’re travelling somewhere and can’t find anything you want to eat, do a short fast. Skipping 1 or 2 meals when you feel so inclined is basically a spontaneous intermittent fast. Just make sure to eat healthy foods at the other meals. Bottom Line: Another more “natural” way to do intermittent fasting is to simply skip 1 or 2 meals when you don’t feel hungry or don’t have time to eat. Take Home Message. There are a lot of people getting great results with some of these methods. That being said, if you’re already happy with your health and don’t see much room for improvement, then feel free to safely ignore all of this. Intermittent fasting is not for everyone. It is not something that anyone needs to do, it is just another tool in the toolbox that can be useful for some people. Some also believe that it may not be as beneficial for women as men, and it may also be a poor choice for people who are prone to eating disorders. If you decide to try this out, then keep in mind that you need to eat healthy as well. It is not possible to binge on junk foods during the eating periods and expect to lose weight and improve health. Calories still count, and food quality is still absolutely crucial. For more details on intermittent fasting, read this: Intermittent Fasting 1. The Ultimate Beginner’s Guide.
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