This week’s thrive in five is about fasting and time restricted eating
So this week I want to talk a bit about fasting, we’re on the theme of preventative health and this month we’re looking at healthspan. So it’s the idea is to live a healthy life for as long as reasonably possible.
Fasting for longevity
There’s been lots and lots of studies around fasting and it does have benefits for longevity and for overall health. It doesn’t necessarily work for everyone, or at every point in life. So like everything we talk about in health, it is very personal. So the essence of fasting is that you are in complete calorie restriction. So you’re not taking in any calories from food or through drinks or even through supplements. So if you have a fish oil supplement, for example, you are taking in calories. This is basically a black coffee or tea, green tea and / or water protocol. So no milk, no sugar, no sweeteners.
The idea is that you fast for a period of time, giving the body a chance to refresh itself, time for the digestive system to rest. There’s lots of good studies that show the efficacy of this for health, for detoxification of various other things.
Time-restricted fasting or feeding
Now, the protocol that I subscribed to is time restricted feeding and this is the one I’m going to talk about today. There are lots of different fasting protocols. Time restricted feeding is basically about having a fairly large window in which you eat and a fairly large window in which you don’t.
So there are 24 hours in everyone’s day. Fasting recommendations for women is that they may fast for 12 hours and eat within 12 hours. Men can push that a bit further and fast for up to 16 hours and eat within eight hours. However, it does depend on what’s going on your energy requirements and various other things.
Personally, I have dinner and I finished eating at seven in the evening and I won’t eat again until nine or 10 in the morning the following day. So I do push it a little bit longer than 12 hours.
So give that a try, play around with timings and see what works for you, as health is complete personal you need to find your own levels. There are some potential weight management benefits, but predominantly it just gives the digestive system an opportunity to rest. There are very good studies that indicate that this is good for longevity as well. So time-restricted eating or time-restricted feeding do a little bit of research on it. See if it works for you, try it. Don’t push it too hard.
That’s it from me. I’ll talk to you next week.
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