I humbly disagree.Originally Posted by Jordan Feigenbaum
Daily intermittent fasting has many health benefits, including the following:
1. Enables the burning of fat. Studies demonstrate that intermittent fasting decreases body fat, LDL cholesterol, and triacylglycerol concentrations. A great advantage of intermittent fasting is that it enables the body to maximize its fat-burning abilities fifteen hours per day. When done correctly, according to Maimonides’s prescriptions, your daily fast should begin three to four hours before bedtime and end three to six hours after awakening. This schedule takes advantage of the body’s natural hormonal daily cycle of fat-burning hormones kicking in at night, when people normally sleep and lack energy originating from food in the intestinal tract. Accustoming yourself to daily fasts and building them up to fifteen to sixteen hours per day trains you to stretch out the daily fat-burning window. When glycogen (sugar) stores are low, the body speeds up fat burning in attempt to prevent using up all the sugar reserves. The longer the fast, the lower the glycogen stores, and the faster the body burns fat. Yet maintaining the eight-hour window for daily food consumption avoids the harm of going too long without food, as prolonged fasting weakens the body, slows metabolism, and consumes muscle for sustenance.
2. Lowers blood pressure. Studies demonstrate that intermittent fasting lowers blood pressure.
3. Avoids bad digestion. Sleep inhibits digestion, as digestion is dependent on blood flow and body movement, which are greatly reduced during sleep. Food that is eaten too late does not get digested properly and can cause toxic reactions and gases. And digestive acids linger for hours in the same spot. Sleeping on an empty stomach avoids these harmful effects. Therefore, beginning one’s daily intermittent fast a few hours before bedtime has the advantage of protecting the digestive system.
4. Enables deep sleep and secretion of HGH. Digestion inhibits sleep. When the digestive tract and the liver are required to work to process food, they demand higher blood concentration, pressure, and flow, thereby disrupting the rest of the cardiovascular system. Failing to have deep sleep inhibits the secretion of HGH—human growth hormone. In contrast, if you sleep on an empty stomach, the digestive tract, liver, and cardiovascular systems can rest, and the body can benefit from deeper sleep and maximal secretion of HGH, which contributes to revitalizing our bodies at night. HGH is lypolytic (stimulates the burning of visceral fats for energy) and also triggers the release of insulin-like growth factor (IGF-1), which is a primary mediator of muscle repair and growth. Artificial HGH treatment has negligible benefits aside from fat loss; however, the use of a synthetic form of growth-hormone-releasing hormone (GHRH), which stimulates the body’s natural release of HGH, yields significant benefits. It restores normal HGH pulsation and amplitude, increasing IGF-1 to upper physiologic ranges; selectively reduces abdominal visceral adipose tissue, cIMT, CRP, and triglycerides; and improves cognitive function in older persons. (Increased values of cIMT carotid intima-media thickness [the thickness of the inner two layers of the carotid artery—the intima and media], and high-sensitivity C-reactive protein CRP [a marker of inflammation that predicts incident myocardial infarction, stroke, peripheral arterial disease, and sudden cardiac death among healthy individuals with no history of cardiovascular disease, and recurrent events and death in patients with acute or stable coronary syndromes]—are predictors of acute coronary events).
5. Avoids inhibition of HGH by avoiding insulin secretion at night. When you eat late-night meals that include carbohydrates, it causes your body to secrete insulin. Insulin inhibits the secretion of HGH and inhibits the beneficial effects of whatever HGH is secreted. By going to sleep on an empty stomach, we enable our bodies to secrete and fully utilize the incredible revitalizing benefits of HGH.
6. Avoids the ills of hyperinsulinemia. In a study by the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, two groups of mice were compared; one group was allowed to eat twenty-four hours a day, and the other group ate the same type of food, with the same caloric intake, but the group’s eating was restricted to an eight-hour period with sixteen hours per day of involuntary fasting. The intermittent-fasting mice showed improved insulin sensitivity (protection from hyperinsulinemia) and were protected from obesity.
The above study on mice doesn’t prove that intermittent fasting would help hyperinsulinemia in humans; however, a small study on eight healthy men who fasted for twenty-hour intervals every other day for two weeks, while eating enough to maintain their body weight, demonstrates that the intermittent fasting improved insulin sensitivity in humans.
A similar study of eight men and eight women fasting on alternate days for three weeks also demonstrates improved insulin sensitivity and weight loss; however, the researchers concluded that the participants’ perpetual hunger on the fasting days made it too difficult to adapt to as a lifestyle. Unlike the difficult twenty-four-hour fasts of this study, gradually adjusting to the Maimonides method of daily, sixteen-hour overnight fasts is not too difficult to adapt to as a lifestyle. Surprisingly, the reduced appetite that becomes habituated with daily intermittent fasting is often more comfortable than dealing with uncontrollable constant urges.
Another six-month study of 107 obese women compares the effects of intermittent energy restriction to continuous energy restriction and concludes that “intermittent energy restriction is more effective in reducing hyperinsulinemia.”
Intermittent fasting of more than twelve hours is guaranteed to deplete glycogen reserves in the liver (also in the muscle to a lesser extent) such that those tissues will be prepared to respond quickly to insulin, absorbing sugar from the blood. As catabolic hormones are at their daily peak shortly after awakening, those hormones oppose insulin and cause insulin resistance. Waiting for breakfast until those hormones subside will enable the body to respond well to insulin when breaking the fast with one’s first meal of the day. By avoiding the pitfalls of hyperinsulinemia, you avoid the onset of hunger pangs, overeating, and the conversion of carbohydrates to excess body fat.
7. Enables control of total daily caloric intake. For people suffering from obesity, having more hours in the day to eat means more hours to struggle with temptations and maintain control. Habituating oneself to limit the window of eating makes it easier to control daily caloric intake.
8. Enables detoxification. While digesting food, the body accumulates toxins. When the digestive tract rests, the body removes them. However, the detoxifying process requires a lot of time, because on the cellular level, the anabolic processes of utilizing the digested nutrients goes on for hours after the initial digestion of the food. The body can manage some detoxifying processes virtually all the time, but the effectiveness increases as the length of the fast increases. The main benefits of detoxification occur in the last three to four hours of the daily overnight fast of fourteen to sixteen hours.
9. Intensifies autophagy. Intermittent fasting also intensifies the body’s natural process of autophagy , —the controlled destruction of damaged organelles within a cell, which has been shown to have anti-aging effects —and is required to maintain muscle mass.
10. Prolongs life. With all these health benefits, intermittent fasting should lead to a healthier and longer life. Studies on mice clearly demonstrate that intermittent fasting lengthens life.
