After watching a tv documentry earlier this week (6/aug/2012) titled Eat, Fast, Live Longer - http://youtu.be/Pfna7nV7WaM I've been doing a bit of reading around the net.
I have seen a few other threads around the forums regarding fasting, but these are more the 16/8 kind of fasting, fast for 16 hours eat for 8. But the tv programme I mentioned above dealt with fasting for a full day at a time.
Now 95-100% of you in these forums are more knowlegdable than me where nutrition is concerned, but I'll run over the basics of what the programme was claiming are the benefits of fasting. It's not new science, it's been around for a long time, since the great depression in the USA. During the great depression when peoples food intake dropped, it was expected their life expectancy would also drop. But, the opposite happened, they actually lived longer. Now your prob thinking, suprise suprise, eat less and you live longer. But much more research has been done more recently. High levels of IGF-1 is claimed to be a major risk to our health, with increased risk of cancers such as prostate cancer and heart desease etc. The idea of the intermitant fasting in the studies mentioned during the programme is to reduce the bodys levels of IGF-1 to a more safe level. Aswell as cholesterol and blood sugar.
It has been discovered that intermitant fasting also has a great benefit to the brain. Periods of fasting have actually been shown to stimulate the growth of new brain cells. Also tests in mice have shown it can delay the onset of signs of Alzheimer's in mice that were destined to become victims of the desease by the human equivilant of around 20-30 years.
The presenter visits one perticular scientist who advises him that their trials of intermitant fasting of eating 'what you like' one day, followed by eating only 1 meal of 400-500 calories for women or 500-600 calories for men have been shown to give all these benefits. Decreased levels of IGF-1, lowered bad cholesterol, increased good cholesterol, lowered blood sugar etc. But what they have also found is that on the eat what you like days, you can literally eat what you like. They had 2 groups of people, 1 group ate a low fat diet on the 'feed' days, the other a high fat diet, and the results were the same for both. She says this was a huge suprise as it was expected the low fat diet would yield better results, but it didn't seem to matter. They also expected the subjects to binge and eat 175% of their daily calories on the feed day to make up for only having 25% on the fast day, but this wasn't the case. The subjects would typically only eat 110% of there daily calories on feed days and no more.
The presenter eventually decided to try out a 5 on 2 off kind of diet, where he would eat normally for 5 days and fast (eating only 1 meal) for 2 days. After 5 weeks he had lost over a stone, prety much from what we could tell from the programme was body fat, his cholesterol had significantly lowered, his IGF-1 was significantly lower, and blood sugar also.
If you have time, watch the you tube vid of the tv programme and you'll get a much better idea of it all than from my rambling.
I'd like to get some of your views on this, from a bodybuilding as well as a health perspective. Have any of you tried a diet like this? How would such a diet fit in with doing weight training?
It seems from what I understand of it, that too much protien can be the enemy, raising IGF-1 levels and constantly stimulating new growth. Instead of the body taking time to repair itself. When IGF-1 levels decrease to a safe level, the body focuses much more on repairing itself rather than being flat out growing new cells. But for us, protien is the be all and end all. To build muscle we need as much protien as possible, but from thsi research it would appear that this aproach may well be killing us, or at least significantly rasing the risks of us contracting certain cancers and heart desease etc.
Many of you from the UK may already have watched the tv programme, for those outside watch the vid, its interesting.
Here's an article about the same subject
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j...NlNhjKC8oYPQvw
How would a diet like this work with training also? would training on a fasting day be a good idea, I would expect not. So such a routine would mean training on the 'feed' days. The 5 on 2 off fasting would work better around a workout routine for those who train in the week. How would a decrease in IGF-1 levels effect our ability to grow muscle?
Thanks for reading. Any and all replies appreciated. My appolagies for any miss-quotes etc.
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