In fact, 16:8 appears to have been extremely effective for
me, though I need more experience to know for sure.
The 16:18 diet, really a regimen rather than a diet,
stipulates that one fasts for 16 hours straight and then can eat only within
the remaining 8-hour window.
Here’s the personal context.
When I reached my mid-‘70s, lab tests began to show high blood
sugar – something I’d never experienced in the previous seven decades. I responded
with a rigorous low-carb/no-sugar diet and got it back to normal. Then I backed
off just a bit and it went up again. This cycle repeated one more time. At that
point I concluded truly radical action was needed and decided to try the 16:8
diet.
The decision wasn’t all that hard. Research on the 16:8 diet
to date is slender but positive (see link below). However, these modest results need to be
considered in the larger frame --research pointing to the benefits of fasting
is overwhelming. If the principal conclusion from this fairly large body of knowledge
is that the human system needs some rest from the constant processing of food,
then logic suggests that 16:8 is potentially a good choice. Certainly, it
sounded more appealing to me than the other regimen of current interest, which
is alternate day fasting and eating (or some variation that includes full days
with no food).
My choice of “eating window” was about noon to 8 pm. My
major meal had been breakfast, so this was hard, but I also like alcohol in the
evening and, because it counts as food, I didn’t want to give it up.
To my surprise, the morning fasting wasn’t that hard. I’m
allowed to drink black coffee and I do. The coffee suppresses appetite for a
few hours and I find ways to be busy in the last few hours as a distraction,
mostly this means physically busy as in going for a walk or to the gym.
The studies on the 16:8 diet have been ones where people ate
what they wanted, but that didn’t make sense to me. So I maintained my rigorous
low-carb/no-sugar diet. About the only thing I did that was imprudent was drink
beer, which has some carbs and a lot of calories. I should add that I have been
and remained very active physically – I do 45 minutes of fast moving work with weight
machines at the gym about every other day and on a typical day I ride an
exercise bike or walk for multiple miles (often both). And, because I live in a
four-story townhouse, I constantly climb lots of stairs.
After nearly three months, here are the results:
1)
The blood sugar numbers went back to normal (and
I lost about 16 pounds although I was not overweight).
2)
The cholesterol levels showed as normal.
This second point deserves some emphasis. Despite decades of
both statins and a very low-fat diet, my cholesterol had never been
lower than “high.”
Why might a regimen like 16:8, when accompanied by a
low-fat, low-carb diet, work? A reasonable answer is that it comports better than
the normal regimen/diet with the way the human biological system developed and
evolved. Food for early humans was typically in short supply, so our ancestors’
bodies optimized for periods of scarcity. Also, in the hunter-gatherer
societies which comprise most of our existence as a species, the need to search
continuously for nutrients would have made it impractical to stop to eat during
the day – morning and evening meals would have been normal. Parenthetically, I’ll
observe that perhaps the best explanation for the current obesity epidemic is that
our adaptations for scarcity become negatives when food consumption is high. And,
of course, we have no adaptation for too much food.
Obviously, any study with n=1 doesn’t deserve much respect. It
is interesting, though, and I’ll continue the regimen. I really have to. As I
mentioned to a friend, the good news is that the 16:8 worked very well. The bad
news is that the fasting was the only thing I did differently so I have to keep
at it.
Here's a usefull link- https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/intermittent-fasting-surprising-update-2018062914156
