The 5:2 Diet: Is It Suitable For Men?

The 5:2 diet has been very popular of late, with everyone from celebrities to your colleagues going on it to shift excess weight, but what does it do for men? Could it help the men of Britain hit their weight-loss target? The success of the 5:2 diet is in its simplicity – you eat normally for five days then fast for two non-consecutive days. On your fasting days, you consume no more than 600 calories (in men; in women, it’s 500 on each day). This might look like two scrambled eggs for breakfast, and an evening meal of lentil stew or a small steak with some roasted vegetables. There is a restriction with your beverages, of course, so you really need to stick to water, herbal tea or avoid milk in your regular tea and coffee to stay within your calorie limits. There’s a theory behind the diet which suggests that early humans would have hunted for food and then feasted followed by a lengthy period where they wouldn’t have had any nutrition. This basic way of looking at food can help us to maintain a healthy weight, without having to avoid our favourite foods most of the week. However, there is limited amount of evidence to suggest that fasting assists with weight loss, prevents cognitive decline or increases your lifespan. There’s also a trap that many people get into which is binge eating on the days where you’re not fasting. Because the rule is that you can eat ‘what you want’ on your normal days, there’s a temptation to take that literally and gorge on sugary snacks and pizzas. Of course, this is still a diet and eating in such a way undoes all of the hard work you do on your fasting days.

 

So how does it work in men? The thinking behind the diet, of course, doesn’t change – as long as you stick to the rules properly, and don’t binge eat on your normal days, you do have the opportunity to lose weight in a relatively short space of time. The concept of intermittent fasting is that it’s easier to incorporate into your everyday life than traditional diets, and that eating a lot less for two days of the week will help you to lose weight. However, if you don’t eat properly and sensibly on your days when you’re not fasting, this plan doesn’t work in reality. If you can’t stick to a healthy diet, within reason, throughout the whole week, the 5:2 diet isn’t the best diet for you in order for you to lose weight. People who find this to be the case would probably be advised to change their existing diet to include less fatty foods – the results would probably be very much the same. As with any diet, you should speak to your GP before making any drastic changes to what you’re eating – this is especially the case with the 5:2 diet as fasting can be risky if you have any health conditions which could be exacerbated by it. It seems that if you’re trying to lose weight, the 5:2 diet only works for some, not all. If your motivation is low, this probably isn’t the best way to shift those extra pounds – in order to see any results, you need to be relatively strict all week, not just on two days, otherwise your hard work will be undone. This is something to consider if you’re trying to find an ‘easy’ way to lose weight.

Categories: 5:2, days, diet, Fasting, fasting days, hard work, Lose weight, normal days, weight, Weight Loss

Intermittent Fasting: The Key to Anti-Aging?

In ancient times, our ancestors were used to dealing with the scarcity of food. Having plenty to eat some days and little on other days was the norm, and did no harm to their wellness and wellbeing. Could it be, however, that intermittent fasting in this way can also have anti-aging effects?

 

This could be the case, as intermittent fasting enhances cellular repair, reduces oxidative stress and seems to be a great way of increasing your lifespan. Food scarcity over many thousands of years appears to have led to our ancestors and, subsequently, us, developing protective mechanisms in their bodies to help them adapt in times when food is scarce.

 

When food is scarce, the cell membranes in our bodies become more sensitive to insulin. This allows fat to be stored effectively and food used effectively too. On the other hand, when food is abundant, the body desensitises the cells to insulin, in order to store fat, and this produces oxidative stress and causes inflammatory conditions in the body. The increased insulin can also lead to increased risk of cancer and enhances cellular division.

 

Now that we have a massive abundance of food sources, the body is constantly receiving signals of surplus. In order to turn on the body’s natural anti-aging mechanism, intermittent fasting can be employed. This turns on the genetic repair mechanisms in the body and enhances the rejuvenation of cells. This process seems to allow certain cells to have a much longer lifetime, perhaps because it is less expensive to repair a cell than it is to break it up and make new cells. This stops the formation of cancer cells.

 

Therefore, new diets such as the 5:2 intermittent fasting diet could have all kinds of fantastic health benefits. As well as losing weight you could reduce your risk of cancer and keep looking younger for longer.

Categories: 5:2, anti aging, body, cells, diet, enhances cellular, Fasting, Food, intermittent, intermittent fasting, oxidative stress

Not as Scary as It Sounds: Why You Should Try Fasting

There are so many diets out there that it’s almost impossible to try them all. Still, you’ve probably had a good go. There’s low-fat, low-calorie, high-protein, low-carb, low-GI – just thinking about them all is enough to do a number on your wellbeing. But maybe weight loss wellness it isn’t a question of what you eat, but at what times you eat. This is according to nutritionist Teresa Boyce, who argues that you do not need to eat as often than you do.

 

Boyce notes, ‘There are many exceptions, such as those suffering with blood sugar disorders, pregnancy, athletes, body builders and people wishing to gain weight. These groups of people have physiological needs for frequent calorie intake, but for the average person there is no need for constant feeding throughout the day. There is buzz in the world of weight loss around a concept called intermittent fasting, which is going for periods of time without food.’ This may seem like a lot of hard work and deprivation, but the truth is you already fast regularly. Every time you sleep, you are fasting, which makes the whole intermittent fasting eating plan seem a lot more manageable.

 

‘There are many variations to intermittent fasting,’ Boyce points out. ‘However all variations have one common theme: consume your calories within a certain time frame within the day (a feeding window) and do not eat anything else outside of those hours.  This gives your body a break from digestion and time to use stored body fat as energy. By having a smaller feeding window in the day you are less likely to snack. You can focus on completely balanced main meals that are going to be more satisfying than constant grazing.’ So, how do you introduce intermittent fasting into your diet? Simply by eating an earlier dinner and a later breakfast, so that you don’t eat anything for 12-14 hours in-between. If you eat your breakfast between 9-10am, lunch between 1-2pm and dinner between 6-7pm, you have a 10-hour feeding window and a 14-hour fast each day.

 

If the hunger pangs hit, don’t worry – you’re not jeopardising your wellness in any way. However, if you do need to curb your appetite, have a cup of green tea or a glass of water. ‘You may be shocked to realise your hunger pains naturally subside,’ says Boyce. ‘Besides, being a little hungry between meals is normal especially if you’re trying to lose weight. Once you establish a new fasting pattern, you may wish to extend the fast to 16 hours a day.’ When having your three meals, make sure they are still nutritionally balanced, providing you with mixed vegetables, fruit, quality protein, good fats and whole grains.

 

Boyce comments, ‘The key to remember is you’re NOT starving yourself; you’re fasting for a period of the day. Make sure your meals are balanced and healthy and don’t graze outside of your balanced meals. When trialling this method you will likely discover you don’t need to eat as often as you currently do, and you will become aware of how much you over eat. Listening to your body and understanding its actual needs is the first step to long-term weight loss and optimum health.’ Plus, it’s not just your waistline you’re helping through intermittent fasting; this eating technique can enhance immunity, boost tissue repair, reduce unhealthy cholesterol levels and lower inflammation. As inflammation is a known risk factor for chronic illness such as diabetes and cardio vascular disease, surely it makes sense to give anything a go that might help to prevent it.

Categories: boyce, Fasting, feeding window, Health Benefits, intermittent, intermittent fasting, meals, nbsp boyce, weight, Weight Loss

Does Eating Before Exercising Help or Hinder Your Health?

Most wellness experts will tell you that you should avoid eating shortly before exercise, as this can harm your performance. The logic goes that eating just before you work out leads to a spike and drop in blood sugar, but is this really as damaging to your wellbeing as people believe? Not according to the New York Times, who recently featured an article busting this fitness dogma as a myth.

 

The New York Times noted that newer research shows that eating before a workout doesn’t necessarily impact your performance. One study, in particular, has shown that cyclists who drank sugary drinks prior to a workout were able to complete a strenuous 20-minute ride with no problems. In fact, other research has demonstrated that if you eat easily-digested carbohydrates before exercise, you may even be able to work out for longer. Still, even with that in mind, there remains a whole wealth of research and logic that strongly dictates you should skip eating before exercise, especially if you’re interested in maximizing your fat-burning potential.

 

When you exercise while fasting, it, in essences, forces your body to shed fat. This is because the fat-burning processes in your body are controlled by your sympathetic nervous system (SNS), which you activate through exercise and lack of food. When you combine the two, therefore, you maximise the efforts of cyclic AMP and AMP Kinases, which are cellular factors and catalysts that force the breakdown of fat and glycogen for energy. For example, one study found that fasting before you do aerobic activity helps you to reduce your body weight and body fat, but eating before a workout only helps you to lose weight, and not fat.

 

Another reason why you should exercise and fast at the same time is that this also yields acute oxidative stress, which, in turn, benefits your muscle. According to fitness expert Ori Hofmekler, acute states of oxidative stress are ‘essential for keeping your muscle machinery tuned. Technically, acute oxidative stress makes your muscle increasingly resilient to oxidative stress; it stimulates glutathione and SOD [superoxide dismutase, the first antioxidant mobilized by your cells for defence] production in your mitochondria along with increased muscular capacity to utilize energy, generate force and resist fatigue. Hence, exercise and fasting help counteract all the main determinants of muscle ageing. But there is something else about exercise and fasting. When combined, they trigger a mechanism that recycles and rejuvenates your brain and muscle tissues.’

 

The mechanism Hofmekler is referring to here is triggering genes and growth factors, which includes brain-derived neurotropic factor (BDNF) and muscle regulatory factors (MRFs). These factors signal your brain’s stem cells and your muscle satellite cells to convert into new neurons and new muscle cells, respectively. Why is that important? Because this means that exercising without eating beforehand may actually help you to keep your brain, neuro-motors and muscle fibres biologically young. More than this, the combined effect of both intermittent fasting and short intense exercise could help you to boost your growth hormones, raise your testosterone level, enhance your cognitive function and even prevent depression.

 

The best way to begin using this technique is to start by exercising before you eat breakfast. When we talk about intermittent fasting, we’re not talking about a cycle of binge eating or starvation, nor are we advising any other extreme form of dieting. Rather, what you’re after here is to time your meals to allow for regular periods of fasting. Some people prefer daily intermittent fasting, while others like to fast a couple of days a week or every other day. However, if you want to do daily intermittent fasting, the length of your fast should be targeted to 16 to 18 hours, or only eating between the hours of 11 am and 7 pm, for example. Basically, this means you can skip breakfast and make lunch your first meal of the day instead.

Categories: acute oxidative, anti-ageing, daily intermittent, eating, exercise, Fasting, intermittent fasting, Muscle, oxidative stress, Weight Loss, york times

Fasting- Does it Really Work?

It’s no great secret that the western world has an obsession with dieting, and it’s wholly understandable. Many of us hold jobs that see us sat in front of a computer 9 hours a day, and these times of economic austerity often mean a costly gym membership cannot be justified as we all begin tightening the purse strings. If we’re finding it increasingly difficult to change our sedentary existence then, predictably, the desire to search for a “quick-fix” dieting solution also rises.

The latest diet to have hit the mainstream is the 5:2, created by Dr Michael Mosley and Mimi Spencer and popularised in the UK by celebrity advocates such as Phillip Schofield. The premise itself is simple: eat normally five days a week and reduce your calorie count to just 600 (for men) or 500 (women) two days a week.

But is this a healthy option? With the wealth of criticism surrounding the king of 20^th century dieting: Atkins, is it only a matter of time before we discover that the 5:2 and other fasting diets are trading weight-loss for another long-term health problem?

Although by no means a scientifically exhaustive assessment, we spoke to two supporters of fasting with differing motivations in order to gain some insight into fasting diets and their efficiency .

Weight Loss

The most obvious benefit of a fasting diet is weight loss, and Robert Failla, a doctor of chiropractic and integrative healthcare is a recent advocate of fasting to lose weight.

“I have done both intermittent fasting and regular fasting. With intermittent fasting you are allowed to eat during an eight hour window but are not allowed to eat in the remaining 16 hours of the day. Seeing that sleep takes a large part of the day this is actually easy to do.”

From a practical perspective you can see why Dr Failla subscribes to this method of dieting, but there are also clear scientifically based weight-loss benefits. Putting your body through a period of fasting will cause your body to go through its reserves of glucose and into a fat-burning or ketogenic state.

For Dr Fallia the weight loss was initially a dramatic one and he lost around 10lbs in a fortnight. Although this has now slowed down to no more than 1lb a week, he has lost a massive 20lbs in just under two months.

Glowing success stories like Dr Failla’s are gold dust to those who profit from the successes of such diet programmes, and Dr Failla was quick to highlight the realities of the diet and diminish the hype:

“The best diet is the one you can follow for life, won’t harm you, and it is also the one that educates you in how to look after yourself.” 

Dr Failla still exercises regularly, has cut sugars and sweeteners out of his diet and eats plenty of fresh fruit, vegetables meat and fish, simply using fasting as a means of keeping the weight off.

Proposed Health Benefits Beyond Weight Loss

American author Susan Schenck sees the benefits of fasting diets as a means of detoxifying the body rather than as simply a means of dropping unwanted body fat.

An advocate of the raw food diet/lifestyle, her book The Live Food Factor

was an IPPY award-winner upon release, and although she fasts several times a year she identifies the limits of a fasting diet:

“I lost weight quickly but fasting also lowers metabolism so it is not the best weight loss strategy to shred the pounds long term. You can only achieve results long term if you keep up with good eating habits.

“I use it mostly for cleansing my body. After a week or so of fasting I could see several dozen precursors to gall stones leave my body (after using a liver flush). Also my skin was very soft, like a young child’s. My body smelled great. My internal organs were much cleaner. My body has more energy left for internal cleaning. Energy that would have normally been used on digestion.”

The fact that Susan, whose diet appears practically toxin free, can attest to toxins leaving the body after fasting, is a strong testimonial for the benefits of fasting as a cleansing practice.

However, Susan’s approach is not without its critics, and many argue that the body’s natural detoxification processes (sweating and the actions of the kidneys, liver and colon) are sufficient. What is most important is limiting the toxins that enter the body in the first place.

To her credit, Susan acknowledges these criticisms and in no way considers fasting as either a “miracle” diet or bodily purifier.

Predictably, we’ve come full circle: although those on fasting diets may reap health and weight loss benefits in the short-term, in the long run it is a change in lifestyle and eating habits that will keep the weight off and garner the greatest improvement in health.

Everyone’s body is different, and although it’s a shame that there’s no instant recipe for weight-loss and good health, there are a range of diets that offer more realistic benefits over a longer time period. The public needs to recognise that fad diets may be great for losing pounds quickly before a wedding or a holiday, but they’re not a realistic health choice in the long run.

Author Bio:

Jamie Waddell is a medical and pharmaceutical writer from London. Having struggled with yo yo dieting in his teens and early twenties he realised that a combination of exercise, reputable weight loss products and a change of lifestyle were the best methods for slimming and weight management.

Categories: calories, Dieting, Fasting

The Overnight Diet: Could You Lose Weight While You Sleep?

While a few studies have noted there’s a link between sleep deprivation and weight gain, alongside other wellbeing concerns, you’d hardly be expected to thing that all you need to look like Kate Moss is a good night’s sleep. However, a buzzed-about new diet, “The Overnight Diet,” claims to help you lose two pounds as you sleep during the first day of the diet.

In a sense, maintaining a healthy sleep schedule does help support a healthy diet because, as it has been proven, a deficit of sleep can lead to increased feelings of hunger and overeating as a result. But does it really work the other way around? Sleep wellness expert Michael Breus, PhD, says, ‘It’s not so much that if you sleep, you will lose weight, but if you are sleep-deprived, meaning that you are not getting enough minutes of sleep or good quality sleep, your metabolism will not function properly.’

But maybe adding a diet aspect to this research could shift the balance. For the weight loss programme, you undertake a fast once a week in which you consume only homemade, protein-rich smoothies. Then you follow this with six days of a low-calorie, protein rich diet. According to the diet’s creator, Caroline Apovian, MD, the director of nutrition and weight management at Boston Medical Centre, ‘That first night, you go to sleep, you sleep your eight hours, you are down two pounds. If you continue to get enough sleep every night, you won’t get those hunger pangs. The hunger pangs come from lack of sleep, which induces the hunger hormone to get secreted from your gut.’

However, this promised two pounds will be water, and not fat. It’s true that water weight loss is an important step toward total weight loss – but it does make the “overnight” promise seem a bit less significant. David L. Katz MD, MPH, FACPM, FACP and director of Yale University’s Prevention Research Centre, commented, ‘I keep waiting for us to get tired of going after the new fad diet. But our appetite for these things is insatiable in the culture. The reason this can work in the short term is that it imposes rules. If you go from undisciplined eating, to any diet no matter what the rules are, chances are you’ll lose some weight. But it’s not a realistic way to live.’

The Overnight Diet: Could You Lose Weight While You Sleep?

Categories: fad, Fasting, Overnight Diet

How to Lose Weight Quickly with Fasting and Diet Changes

You’ve been in that situation; you have a special event coming up soon, and tried on your go-to party dress, only to find that it’s a little to snug for decent wear. Luckily, there are ways that you can lose those extra quickly, and reunite with your favourite dress. All you have to do is pay close attention to a few details and keep your overall wellbeing in mind.

Fasting is a great way to lose weight quickly, especially if it’s done correctly and with the right amount of willpower. Originally developed for religious reasons, fasting has been used as a weight loss method for a number of years in many different cultures. During a fast you are only allowed to drink water and juice, which can be difficult and many people only make it a few days before giving in. However, if you have a hell of a lot of dedication and willpower, you could possibly lose up to 5 pounds on a 3-day fast, and this could be the difference between wearing your favourite dress, and trudging out to buy a new, bigger one.

However, if water and fruit juice seems like an impossible diet to adopt, you can still lose weight quickly by making changes to your existing diet. For example, why not increase the amount of water you drink every day? Drinking at least eight 8oz glasses of water per day is recommended for overall wellness, as well as weight loss. You can also try removing all extra sugar, salt and fat from your diet, and cutting down on snacks and serving sizes. Instead, have five smaller-portioned meals throughout the day.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly of all, implement some type of exercise into your daily routine can help you lose weight quickly. This is because exercise doesn’t just burn calories when you’re performing an activity, but it helps you to burn a higher amount of calories throughout the day. Why don’t you try to increase the amount of time you spend walking, and see what drastic results it can make to the amount of weight you lose?

Google+
How to Lose Weight Quickly with Fasting and Diet Changes

Categories: Diet Changes, Fasting, Quick Weight Loss