How do I prepare for part-day fasting?
Make sure that you are fasting for a minimum of 12 hours per day to begin with – and if not, consider giving your body time to adapt as you work towards a 16:8 regimen. Also reduce your intake of refined and packaged foods by swapping them for more nutritious options, such as fruit, yoghurt, nuts, seeds and wholegrain crackers. When you eat fewer times over the day to allow for a fasting window, each eating opportunity needs to be thoughtfully considered so that your nutrition requirements are met.
How do I choose the window that suits me?
Firstly, keep it flexible. The people who are most successful at incorporating daily fasting into their lifestyle use the 16:8 rule as a guideline and adjust their fasting times, days and intensities to make it work for them. And since the 16:8 is based on time, your best tool when starting out is your calendar. You can either plan each day as it comes or, even better, plan your week ahead, which I like to do. I prefer to know in advance how many days I will be fasting and where I’ll be on those days, and then I base my mealtimes on what I have going on at work and socially. From there, I weave in exercise, activities and other projects.
What if I don’t need to lose weight?
Intermittent fasting can be a particularly brilliant way of ‘super-charging’ a normal diet and adding some extra health and weight-management benefits. I often see patients in my clinic who are already reasonably healthy, have a good understanding of nutrition and mostly eat a nutritious and healthy diet, but they want to do all they can to maximise their health. Extending their overnight fas t to 16 hours can be a simple way to do just that.
How will it disrupt my social life?
Unlike most diets, the focus is on when to eat, not so much on what you eat. Your fasting and eating window can be at any time of the day you choose, based on your lifestyle and routine. The reason part-day fasting is so user-friendly is because it doesn’t involve: counting calories, measuring food, measuring portion sizes, depriving or restricting yourself (within your eating window) or missing out on social occasions.
What are the gut benefits?
Time and time again, my patients tell me that daily fasting helps to improve their bowel function. Appetite and digestive processes tend to cycle on a daily rhythm, which declines late at night. This well-known gut physiology means we can make certain assumptions about how what we eat and when we eat it impacts our digestion. An animal study showed that when mice were given as much food as they pleased whenever they wanted, this digestive rhythm no longer existed and they were able to eat at times of the day they wouldn’t usually eat. As soon as those same mice began time-restricted feeding, their daily response to the appropriate meal size was restored. Other interesting digestive observations from these studies indicate that time-restricted feeding also created a reduction in the absorption of some simple sugars and bile salts in the body, which might explain one of the benefits of reduced cholesterol levels. AWW
“Fasting can be a brilliant way of supercharging a normal diet and adding some weightmanagement benefits.”