July 29, 2024 • 14 mins
In this episode, Dr. Paul Anderson answers common questions about intermittent fasting (IF) and its potential benefits for health and wellness. He covers:
- What is Intermittent Fasting?: Explanation of the different types of intermittent fasting, such as the 16/8 method, 5:2 approach, and alternate-day fasting.
- Health Benefits: Discussion on the various benefits of IF, including weight loss, improved metabolic health, enhanced cognitive function, and longevity.
- How to Start: Practical tips for beginning an intermittent fasting routine, including how to choose the right fasting method for your lifestyle and goals.
- What to Eat: Guidance on what to eat during eating windows to maximize the benefits of intermittent fasting, focusing on nutrient-dense, whole foods.
- Common Challenges: Addressing common difficulties faced when starting intermittent fasting, such as hunger, fatigue, and social situations, with strategies to overcome them.
- Who Should Avoid IF?: Identifying groups of people who should avoid intermittent fasting or approach it with caution, including those with certain medical conditions, pregnant or breastfeeding women, and individuals with a history of eating disorders.
- Intermittent Fasting and Exercise: How to incorporate physical activity into an intermittent fasting regimen, including the best times to exercise and how to fuel workouts.
- Hydration and Supplements: Importance of staying hydrated during fasting periods and the role of supplements to support overall health.
- Integrating IF into a Balanced Lifestyle: Tips for maintaining a balanced lifestyle while practicing intermittent fasting, ensuring it complements other healthy habits.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Good day, and welcome to Medicine Health with doctor Paul Anderson.
It's me, I'm doctor Paul and Here we are doing
some questions and answers from you folks out there in
internet land that I collect over time. And the next
topic that I got a lot of questions about is
intermittent fasting. And so, first off, because we're going to
(00:24):
talk about a health related topic, I'm not giving any
medical advice. I'm giving background information. You should make any
healthcare decisions with your healthcare providers, and that is not
somebody who's on YouTube or on the radio. That would
be your actual medical providers. Other ways to find all
of the media outlets doctornow dot com, drnow dot com,
(00:45):
and we got links to just about everything on there.
We're on all the pod burners, we're on YouTube, directly
on CTR radio, and we livestream this to Facebook and
if you do like it, please do like, share, subscribe,
and do notifications. That's a lot of times the only
way people figure out that we put new content out.
But intermittent fasting, let's dive into this here. So the
(01:08):
first thing is a big question, you know, what is
it and how is it different from fasting just fasting
fasting well, as the name indicates, it is fasting, that's
a second word, and intermittent literally means it's scheduled fasting.
So a normal fast, if there is such a thing,
(01:34):
is any time where you are restricting the food that
goes into your body. So you probably have had to
take a blood test and you tell you have to
be fasting for the blood test. It could be eight hours,
ten hours, twelve hours for a fast. Usually one of
those time periods, maybe a longer one for certain types
of tests. But then there's a therapeutic fast you might do,
(01:56):
and that may be as long as it needs to be,
So it could be twenty four hours. It could be
from you know, sundown the day before till sundown the
following day, so roughly again twenty four hours. It could
be for two days, three days, be seven days. Okay. Now,
normally when you're doing longer, even a twenty four hour fast,
(02:20):
the thing that you want to keep in mind is,
in most instances and certainly medically speaking, it's recommended that
you still drink water. Now, there are people that do
dry fasting. If you're going to do any type of fasting,
work with a healthcare provider who knows about fasting, because
you can get yourself in trouble. I always recommended non
(02:44):
dry fasting, so water so that you stay hydrated, especially
the longer you're fasting. The other thing is that your body,
you know, the longer you fast, you're going to be
you know, moving stuff through and we're going to have
some positive benefits for detoxifying and stuff we're going to
talk about in a minute. So you need to remember that.
The other reason to stay hydrated is hydration. Not only
(03:06):
you know, keeps your blood volume up, but it helps
to move water through the system, which often is where
a lot of nutrients go in cells and how a
lot of toxins leave the cells. So the better hydrated
we are, the more we move the good stuff in
and we move the bad stuff out. Now, what about
(03:26):
intermittent fasting That usually is somewhere from twelve hours up
to a longer amount of time less than twenty four hours.
The idea behind it generally is that you're going to
have this period of time that is intermittently fasting, and
then you're going to be eating the rest of the time,
(03:46):
hence the intermittent nature. Usually it's the same time period
every day, just for scheduled purposes. So something to consider
as you look at intermittent fasting, and there's a ton
of information, a lot of talking heads about it, and
a lot of research, is that the benefits appear to
(04:08):
start somewhere between twelve and thirteen hours, and then if
you go a little bit longer, theoretically you might get
more benefits. Now a version of intermittent fasting, people will
call and this is on you know, on the online
a lot one meal a day or OMAD, and so
(04:29):
that's basically where the person is picking a meal. So
it's oftentimes it's you know, dinner or the evening meal,
but it really can be anywhere and then the rest
of the day they're just drinking water. Some people do this.
We use intermittent fasting a lot with chronically ill people
and with cancer patients, and many times it's not appropriate
(04:54):
to do one meal a day with a very you know,
maybe medically unstable person or a frail person or whatever,
but they can do a twelve or thirteen hour intermittent fast.
And so when we're giving advice about diet and intervening
for your chronic illness or your cancer. The base of
our recommendation start actually with a brief intermittent fast and
(05:18):
so what's it doing for us? Well, there's kind of
two sides to the coin with intermittent fasting. One is scientifically,
we know that after your body has gone without food
and water doesn't count. Like I said, it actually helps
if there's water and hydration in there. But if you
go without food at about twelve to thirteen hours, you
(05:41):
start to do this sell house cleaning called autophagi or atophagy,
depending on what side of the country it seems like
you come on. So atophagy or autophagi is essentially sell
house cleaning. And so what triggers that is break from
food and then again yes, we've got enough water going
(06:04):
through to make the processes go. Now, in addition to
this cellular cleaning process, which is very very helpful in
healing and resetting a lot of stuff, etc. You get
other benefits through intermittent fasting, one of which is that
you're during the fasting time period your insulin triggering. Your
(06:26):
insulin levels will start to become more level. That's very
good because as levels of insulin are predictable and of
a normal level, we have less inflammation. If our insulin
is bouncing around all day and we're snacking and eating
(06:48):
and snacking and eating, we're going to have these fluctuations
in insulin that might overshoot the mark and create inflammation.
So you can get a number of benefits from intermittent
fasting now in the human data on it, of which
we're getting more now, which is really nice. What we
(07:08):
see is things such as breast cancer patients who are
survivors were followed over a period I believe of five years,
and the only change they made in their diet was
one group, the control group, just ate their normal diet
whatever they wanted. The study group was told, eat your
(07:33):
normal diet, eat whatever you want, but don't eat for
thirteen hours a day, and I'll tell you how we
do that. But what happened was that they had one
third less reoccurrence of the breast cancer during that five
year I believe it was period in the group that
they didn't change their diet, they just restricted the time
(07:55):
that they were doing it to thirteen hours off. So
it's this whole thing of signs in your body where
our bodies, you know, developed over time, when certainly if
you go back prior, you know, to the modern era,
humans did not have reliable food sources, and we may
have feast and famine, or we may have you know,
one meal a day, we may have other stuff going
(08:17):
on just because of the availability of food. Well, in
modern times we have the other problem where we have
no in availability of food for the most part, and
so our body is constantly metabolizing in the in the
full setting, okay, in the in the fed setting, and
so that means that a lot of this house cleaning
(08:38):
doesn't happen. I was talking about this with my father.
He passed away, but he was in his later nineties,
and I was telling him the idea and I was
telling him the health benefits. He was a retired physician.
And then he smiled and he says, yeah, he says,
I remember during the Depression, we did a lot of
(08:59):
internet and fasting. He says, maybe that's why I live
to be so old. And I thought it was hilarious,
but it probably had something to do with it. So,
you know, it wasn't that long ago where we had
to do this just because we were out of food,
and so it is a thing now. Again, this is
not medical advice. You can do any kind of fasting,
please work with a fasting oriented or trained healthcare provider.
(09:24):
But what we would tell people would be, Okay, you
sleep during the night. You're not eating while you're sleeping
in most cases, right, you can eat, drink all the
water you want, just don't eat food. So let's say,
for the sake of argument, you're sleeping between seven and
nine hours. You say you got eight hours of sleep time. Well,
the next thing that you can do then to get
(09:47):
to the thirteen hours is just to add another five
hours bumper on each side of the sleep, to stop
eating dinner at a certain point every night. That plus
your eight hours and maybe a little bit of bumper
time in the morning, drink water during and you got
your thirteen hours. And so a lot of people would
(10:08):
still be doing three meals a day, they would just
have them adjusted around. A lot of people did two
meals a day, and it depends a little bit on
their other needs that they had going on. So it
can be done very effectively. Now I've done it, a
lot of experimented with a lot of these different types
of fasting and intermittent fasting, and another thing that can happen,
(10:28):
especially if you're also doing physical movement and working out.
Intermittent fasting can modulate your insulin inflammation and also it
can help to trigger some weight loss too, so some
people will do it for that as well. Interestingly, say
with our cancer patients who didn't need to lose any weight,
we want not to lose weight. As long as they
(10:48):
got sufficient clark intake and the other things we're doing
during the day, they didn't tend to lose weight. Tends
to mostly happen with folks who need to lose weight.
So that's the big picture on in mint fasting. Now,
most of the side effects, whether it was headaches, dizziness,
stomach pain, all that in my case and in most
(11:09):
of my patients cases was due to dehydration. So if
I just drank more water, headache would go away, dizzeyness
would go away, stomach ache would go away. And so
most people can do that now if they really were afraid,
I just have them to start with, you know, don't
eat an hour before you go to bed, sleep those
seven eight nine hours and wait for an hour before
(11:32):
you start to eat in the morning, and then and
then move out from there. You can do it in
baby steps. Or increments, So it's important to keep in
mind that that's also you know, you don't have to
go from eating you know, you know, sixteen eighteen hours
of the day to you know whatever. You can step
into it a little bit at a time. Now, certainly,
(11:55):
if you're used to fasting and you're used to fastening
for longer periods of time, you're already going to kind
of have those tools. But a lot of us don't
do that. So again, remember big thing hydration cures most
intermittent fasting side effect. The one other caution that you
have to work with, which again, certainly, if you're going
(12:18):
to be doing intermittent fasting, like I said, you need
to be working with a health care provider does fasting.
But if you have blood sugar irregularities, for example, you
may or may not be able to intermit and fast,
depending on what type of blood sugar problems they are. Now,
if you're type two diabetic and you've got your diet
(12:38):
under control during the day, generally they don't have any problem.
They can work up to, say a thirteen hour intermittent fast.
Type one diabetic is going to be a little bit
more dicey, and you really need to work with whoever
is managing your insulin around that, because that is a
whole different kettle of fish. So if you're anywhere in
the diabetic spectrum, again, when you're meeting with a health
(12:59):
care provider who does fasting work, make sure that they
know what you're taking for your blood sugger issues, what
kind of blood suger issues you have, and they're probably
going to be very conservative and step into that very slowly.
But intermitt fasting can be an incredible tool. It can
(13:19):
augment almost anything else that you do with your diet
and exercise and all the other things. And another thing
that I think is really cool is I'm doing a
presentation in I don't know, very very soon here and
they asked me to go into things that don't cost
(13:42):
extra money for chronic illness therapies or things that can
are very economical. And one of the things that we
do go into there is intermittent fasting because it is
a way long term to help with chronic illness. Well,
we're out of time for this and so we will
be back for some more questions. But I'm doctor Paul
(14:04):
with Medicine Health, and I'll see you in the next
Segment
Good day, and welcome to Medicine Health with doctor Paul Anderson.
It's me, I'm doctor Paul and Here we are doing
some questions and answers from you folks out there in
internet land that I collect over time. And the next
topic that I got a lot of questions about is
intermittent fasting. And so, first off, because we're going to
(00:24):
talk about a health related topic, I'm not giving any
medical advice. I'm giving background information. You should make any
healthcare decisions with your healthcare providers, and that is not
somebody who's on YouTube or on the radio. That would
be your actual medical providers. Other ways to find all
of the media outlets doctornow dot com, drnow dot com,
(00:45):
and we got links to just about everything on there.
We're on all the pod burners, we're on YouTube, directly
on CTR radio, and we livestream this to Facebook and
if you do like it, please do like, share, subscribe,
and do notifications. That's a lot of times the only
way people figure out that we put new content out.
But intermittent fasting, let's dive into this here. So the
(01:08):
first thing is a big question, you know, what is
it and how is it different from fasting just fasting
fasting well, as the name indicates, it is fasting, that's
a second word, and intermittent literally means it's scheduled fasting.
So a normal fast, if there is such a thing,
(01:34):
is any time where you are restricting the food that
goes into your body. So you probably have had to
take a blood test and you tell you have to
be fasting for the blood test. It could be eight hours,
ten hours, twelve hours for a fast. Usually one of
those time periods, maybe a longer one for certain types
of tests. But then there's a therapeutic fast you might do,
(01:56):
and that may be as long as it needs to be,
So it could be twenty four hours. It could be
from you know, sundown the day before till sundown the
following day, so roughly again twenty four hours. It could
be for two days, three days, be seven days. Okay. Now,
normally when you're doing longer, even a twenty four hour fast,
(02:20):
the thing that you want to keep in mind is,
in most instances and certainly medically speaking, it's recommended that
you still drink water. Now, there are people that do
dry fasting. If you're going to do any type of fasting,
work with a healthcare provider who knows about fasting, because
you can get yourself in trouble. I always recommended non
(02:44):
dry fasting, so water so that you stay hydrated, especially
the longer you're fasting. The other thing is that your body,
you know, the longer you fast, you're going to be
you know, moving stuff through and we're going to have
some positive benefits for detoxifying and stuff we're going to
talk about in a minute. So you need to remember that.
The other reason to stay hydrated is hydration. Not only
(03:06):
you know, keeps your blood volume up, but it helps
to move water through the system, which often is where
a lot of nutrients go in cells and how a
lot of toxins leave the cells. So the better hydrated
we are, the more we move the good stuff in
and we move the bad stuff out. Now, what about
(03:26):
intermittent fasting That usually is somewhere from twelve hours up
to a longer amount of time less than twenty four hours.
The idea behind it generally is that you're going to
have this period of time that is intermittently fasting, and
then you're going to be eating the rest of the time,
(03:46):
hence the intermittent nature. Usually it's the same time period
every day, just for scheduled purposes. So something to consider
as you look at intermittent fasting, and there's a ton
of information, a lot of talking heads about it, and
a lot of research, is that the benefits appear to
(04:08):
start somewhere between twelve and thirteen hours, and then if
you go a little bit longer, theoretically you might get
more benefits. Now a version of intermittent fasting, people will
call and this is on you know, on the online
a lot one meal a day or OMAD, and so
(04:29):
that's basically where the person is picking a meal. So
it's oftentimes it's you know, dinner or the evening meal,
but it really can be anywhere and then the rest
of the day they're just drinking water. Some people do this.
We use intermittent fasting a lot with chronically ill people
and with cancer patients, and many times it's not appropriate
(04:54):
to do one meal a day with a very you know,
maybe medically unstable person or a frail person or whatever,
but they can do a twelve or thirteen hour intermittent fast.
And so when we're giving advice about diet and intervening
for your chronic illness or your cancer. The base of
our recommendation start actually with a brief intermittent fast and
(05:18):
so what's it doing for us? Well, there's kind of
two sides to the coin with intermittent fasting. One is scientifically,
we know that after your body has gone without food
and water doesn't count. Like I said, it actually helps
if there's water and hydration in there. But if you
go without food at about twelve to thirteen hours, you
(05:41):
start to do this sell house cleaning called autophagi or atophagy,
depending on what side of the country it seems like
you come on. So atophagy or autophagi is essentially sell
house cleaning. And so what triggers that is break from
food and then again yes, we've got enough water going
(06:04):
through to make the processes go. Now, in addition to
this cellular cleaning process, which is very very helpful in
healing and resetting a lot of stuff, etc. You get
other benefits through intermittent fasting, one of which is that
you're during the fasting time period your insulin triggering. Your
(06:26):
insulin levels will start to become more level. That's very
good because as levels of insulin are predictable and of
a normal level, we have less inflammation. If our insulin
is bouncing around all day and we're snacking and eating
(06:48):
and snacking and eating, we're going to have these fluctuations
in insulin that might overshoot the mark and create inflammation.
So you can get a number of benefits from intermittent
fasting now in the human data on it, of which
we're getting more now, which is really nice. What we
(07:08):
see is things such as breast cancer patients who are
survivors were followed over a period I believe of five years,
and the only change they made in their diet was
one group, the control group, just ate their normal diet
whatever they wanted. The study group was told, eat your
(07:33):
normal diet, eat whatever you want, but don't eat for
thirteen hours a day, and I'll tell you how we
do that. But what happened was that they had one
third less reoccurrence of the breast cancer during that five
year I believe it was period in the group that
they didn't change their diet, they just restricted the time
(07:55):
that they were doing it to thirteen hours off. So
it's this whole thing of signs in your body where
our bodies, you know, developed over time, when certainly if
you go back prior, you know, to the modern era,
humans did not have reliable food sources, and we may
have feast and famine, or we may have you know,
one meal a day, we may have other stuff going
(08:17):
on just because of the availability of food. Well, in
modern times we have the other problem where we have
no in availability of food for the most part, and
so our body is constantly metabolizing in the in the
full setting, okay, in the in the fed setting, and
so that means that a lot of this house cleaning
(08:38):
doesn't happen. I was talking about this with my father.
He passed away, but he was in his later nineties,
and I was telling him the idea and I was
telling him the health benefits. He was a retired physician.
And then he smiled and he says, yeah, he says,
I remember during the Depression, we did a lot of
(08:59):
internet and fasting. He says, maybe that's why I live
to be so old. And I thought it was hilarious,
but it probably had something to do with it. So,
you know, it wasn't that long ago where we had
to do this just because we were out of food,
and so it is a thing now. Again, this is
not medical advice. You can do any kind of fasting,
please work with a fasting oriented or trained healthcare provider.
(09:24):
But what we would tell people would be, Okay, you
sleep during the night. You're not eating while you're sleeping
in most cases, right, you can eat, drink all the
water you want, just don't eat food. So let's say,
for the sake of argument, you're sleeping between seven and
nine hours. You say you got eight hours of sleep time. Well,
the next thing that you can do then to get
(09:47):
to the thirteen hours is just to add another five
hours bumper on each side of the sleep, to stop
eating dinner at a certain point every night. That plus
your eight hours and maybe a little bit of bumper
time in the morning, drink water during and you got
your thirteen hours. And so a lot of people would
(10:08):
still be doing three meals a day, they would just
have them adjusted around. A lot of people did two
meals a day, and it depends a little bit on
their other needs that they had going on. So it
can be done very effectively. Now I've done it, a
lot of experimented with a lot of these different types
of fasting and intermittent fasting, and another thing that can happen,
(10:28):
especially if you're also doing physical movement and working out.
Intermittent fasting can modulate your insulin inflammation and also it
can help to trigger some weight loss too, so some
people will do it for that as well. Interestingly, say
with our cancer patients who didn't need to lose any weight,
we want not to lose weight. As long as they
(10:48):
got sufficient clark intake and the other things we're doing
during the day, they didn't tend to lose weight. Tends
to mostly happen with folks who need to lose weight.
So that's the big picture on in mint fasting. Now,
most of the side effects, whether it was headaches, dizziness,
stomach pain, all that in my case and in most
(11:09):
of my patients cases was due to dehydration. So if
I just drank more water, headache would go away, dizzeyness
would go away, stomach ache would go away. And so
most people can do that now if they really were afraid,
I just have them to start with, you know, don't
eat an hour before you go to bed, sleep those
seven eight nine hours and wait for an hour before
(11:32):
you start to eat in the morning, and then and
then move out from there. You can do it in
baby steps. Or increments, So it's important to keep in
mind that that's also you know, you don't have to
go from eating you know, you know, sixteen eighteen hours
of the day to you know whatever. You can step
into it a little bit at a time. Now, certainly,
(11:55):
if you're used to fasting and you're used to fastening
for longer periods of time, you're already going to kind
of have those tools. But a lot of us don't
do that. So again, remember big thing hydration cures most
intermittent fasting side effect. The one other caution that you
have to work with, which again, certainly, if you're going
(12:18):
to be doing intermittent fasting, like I said, you need
to be working with a health care provider does fasting.
But if you have blood sugar irregularities, for example, you
may or may not be able to intermit and fast,
depending on what type of blood sugar problems they are. Now,
if you're type two diabetic and you've got your diet
(12:38):
under control during the day, generally they don't have any problem.
They can work up to, say a thirteen hour intermittent fast.
Type one diabetic is going to be a little bit
more dicey, and you really need to work with whoever
is managing your insulin around that, because that is a
whole different kettle of fish. So if you're anywhere in
the diabetic spectrum, again, when you're meeting with a health
(12:59):
care provider who does fasting work, make sure that they
know what you're taking for your blood sugger issues, what
kind of blood suger issues you have, and they're probably
going to be very conservative and step into that very slowly.
But intermitt fasting can be an incredible tool. It can
(13:19):
augment almost anything else that you do with your diet
and exercise and all the other things. And another thing
that I think is really cool is I'm doing a
presentation in I don't know, very very soon here and
they asked me to go into things that don't cost
(13:42):
extra money for chronic illness therapies or things that can
are very economical. And one of the things that we
do go into there is intermittent fasting because it is
a way long term to help with chronic illness. Well,
we're out of time for this and so we will
be back for some more questions. But I'm doctor Paul
(14:04):
with Medicine Health, and I'll see you in the next
Segment
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