Over 50 Fitness For Skiing Adventures: Benefits of fasting for active people goes beyond weight loss

Saturday, September 15, 2018

Benefits of fasting for active people goes beyond weight loss

Although intermittent fasting starting making news in 2016 and really became popular in 2017, researchers began considering the effectiveness of fasting a decade earlier. Dr. Mark Mattson has studied in the connection between nutrition and diseases such as Alzheimers for quite a while. He is the chief of the Laboratory of Neurosciences at the National Institute of Aging and Professor at Johns Hopkins. His research influenced Dr. Michael Moseley, who did a BBC documentary in 2012 about the benefits of intermittent fasting.

I became more curious about Mattson after reading Kyle Boelte's May 2017 article in Outside Online entitled "What I Learned from a Year of Intermittent Fasting." Boelte is an active man in his 30s who does not need to worry about losing weight. However, he tried fasting to address issues that were compromising the quality of his life. The subtitle for the article is "It won't solve all your health problems, but it might make your life a bit better." In Nov 2017, he wrote a followup article entitled "How to Start Fasting: A beginner's guide to the burgeoning nutrition trend" that is also a good read. It's the best introduction I've found so far for active people willing to experiment with fasting.

"I settled on the 16-hour fast, where I’d limit eating to an eight-hour window every day. As Mattson explains, the liver stores glucose (the body’s main energy source when you are regularly eating carbohydrates) for about ten to 12 hours after a meal. When you fast for more than 12 hours, your body switches from glucose metabolism to fat metabolism, which leads to a bunch of positive adaptive cellular stress responses. So, if you fast for 16 hours each day, you’re receiving the benefits of those adaptive responses without limiting your total caloric intake."