Lately there has been a big interest in fasting, restricting carbohydrate and generally I am seeing a huge amount of people restricting calories.
The concept is that by changing the feeding window, or reducing carbohydrates, you can trick the body into fat burning
I certainly went down this road, researching the deep, dark holes of intermittent fasting in 2010. Unfortunately, this didn’t end so well.
Food frequency and balanced meals are perhaps one of the easiest way to regulate blood sugar, and hence stress.
Through increased food frequency and balancing macronutrients (alongside breathing and meditation), we can down-regulate stress-responses such as chronically elevated cortisol and get out of a hyper cortisol and hyper-adrenaline state.
On the contrary, through fasting we up-regulate this stress response, which can lead to a ton of issues.
“When people try to lose weight by fasting, what happens – for a day or so, their cortisol is still high and their metabolic rate is still high, so what they are living on is a “meat diet,” as they use their muscles, fat and thymus gland [for fuel]. And since we would eat ourselves up in 2-3 weeks if we were to do this, our metabolic rate slows drastically under the influence of these free amino acids liberated from our tissues. And those turn the thyroid hormone off. The falling blood sugar and the rising free amino acids and free fatty acids turn our metabolic rate down. Then we could get along on a very low calorie intake, but this slows down reproductive function, brain function, everything…. Fasting turns off the livers ability to detoxify, so you are also exposing yourself to increased toxins rather than decrease. It may give the intestine a break, but harms the liver.” – Ray Peat, PhD.
As usual, there is more than meets the eye. Fasting can give the intestine a short term break, but with significant downsides in other areas. When we work with food frequency and balancing our meals, we can restore thyroid function and increase metabolism.
From here, if we want to, we can work on things like body composition in a sustainable way.
