Fasting helps your body fight off disease

TIMe- ReSTRICTeD eating is something I strongly recommend you try as part of my Fast 800 diet. While this might sound intimidating if you’ve never done it, that’s exactly what you’re already doing when you’re asleep at night.

It’s simply a matter of extending the time when you are not eating.

Time-restricted eating (TRe) is different from intermittent fasting, which is the basis of the 5:2 part of the Fast 800 — where you fast (eat 800 calories) for two days and then eat normally on the other five.

TRe complements this, and is about reducing the amount of time in a day you spend eating. It is based on pioneering research by Professor Satchin Panda at the Salk Institute in California, who has shown that going 12 or even 14 hours without food gives your body valuable ‘ down time’ from the work of eating and digesting.

This respite enables your body to unlock powerful repair mechanisms and there is now good evidence to show it can make it easier to lose weight — and also help your body ward off diseases such as cancer.

My wife, Clare, and I normally try to do 14:10, which means we are fasting for 14 hours and then eating within a ten-hour window.

To do that we aim to finish eating by 7pm and not eat anything else until breakfast, which we normally have around 9am.

Prof Panda told me he and his family finish their evening meal by 6pm and don’t eat again until 8am.

He suggests you try to do this at least four to five days a week. If you prefer a slightly later evening meal, he recommends stopping eating at least two hours before bed, particularly if you suffer from insomnia or heartburn. So what is going on? Studies show that, after time, restricted eating encourages your body to begin autophagy, a form of cellular housekeeping where dead or diseased cells are removed from the body, reducing your chances of developing some chronic diseases.

Autophagy also provides the building blocks for cell renewal and can destroy viruses and bacteria after an infection.

Time-restricted eating also has the effect of encouraging your body to ‘ flip the metabolic switch’ and begin using fat from your fat stores to burn as fuel.

This is good for boosting weight loss — particularly as the first fat stores to be drained are those containing the most dangerous type of fat, the visceral fat that sits in our gut and clogs organs such as the liver and pancreas.

It’s this type of metabolically active fat that is associated with raised cholesterol and blood sugar levels — and there is evidence that a longer period of overnight fasting can reduce both these, as well as markers of chronic inflammation, which in turn is linked to heart disease and cancer. In a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) in 2016, women with early stage breast cancer who fasted for longer than 13 hours overnight not only lost significantly more weight than those who fasted for less but they also had a reduced risk of cancer recurrence.

The study, involving 2,413 overweight women, who had just completed their initial cancer treatment, found that those who left 13 hours or longer in between their evening meal and breakfast were 36 per cent less likely to have a recurrence of their cancer after five years.

A study by Dutch scientists at Leiden university in 2015 found that short- term calorie restriction, done for a few days before and after chemotherapy, appeared to enhance the effectiveness of chemotherapy by protecting healthy cells from damage caused by the drugs.

This echoes the work of ageing expert Professor Valter Longo, of the university of Southern California, about the benefits of short-term fasting.

This is based on the way chemotherapy drugs work, by targeting cells that are rapidly dividing and growing.

If you deprive healthy cells of their normal level of nutrients for a few days by short-term calorie restriction, they will stop growing so fast, which helps protect them from the chemotherapy drugs.

But cancer cells don’t obey conventional rules, so they will continue to multiply rapidly, making them more susceptible to being destroyed by the chemotherapy drugs.

It also means that the patient is likely to experience fewer sideeffects. Patients should not consider fasting on chemotherapy without speaking to their healthcare provider — but there are many other reasons to adopt time-restricted eating.

Although you may be tempted to have a late dinner followed by a late breakfast, the strongest evidence for the benefits comes from people who move their evening meal earlier.

Food eaten late at night seems to be particularly bad for us because it interferes with our body clocks and all kinds of processes, including sleep and digestion.