Boost Your Keto with Intermittent Fasting

This post is a follow up from my previous "Intro To Keto" that has generated a lot of views. There are many of you who have tried ketogenic diet with a lot of success in losing weight and gaining control of insulin resistance, inflammation, and even Type 2 Diabetes. Kudos to your efforts and improved health! The key to healing often comes from within!

To keep you moving along the keto-adaptation continuum, we need to discuss intermittent fasting.

Remember that fasting is what a keto diet mimicks, so actually resting the gut with extended hours of no eating will accentuate your efforts and get you over humps to weight loss or blood sugar control.

Disclaimer: Those who shouldn't fast except under the close supervision of a physician are the following people:

1. Pregnant or nursing mothers

2. Diabetic patients

3. Infants and Children

4. Those people who have suffered from eating disorders such as anorexia or bulemia

Fasting defined

In biochemistry, the first lessons you learn are about the metabolic pathways that the body utilizes to metabolize food for energy. Those metabolic pathways are broken down into two large categories:  "fasted" and "fed."

"Fasted" just means no food is immediately available for energy production by the body. To survive, the body has to look inward for an energy supply. It will first burn through stored sugar called glycogen that is stored in the liver and muscles. Then, it will burn up its fat reserves. Only after extremely prolonged periods, the body will break down the muscles for energy.

If you've been doing keto for more than 3 days, you've already accomplished burning through glycogen and now you're down to fat. Voila! KETOSIS!

If you're a patient of mine, you will recall I discuss with you that when you want to lose weight or control insulin resistance & Type 2 Diabetes, we need to utilize ketosis to put you in a low insulin state. High insulin levels keep your fat in storage. We need to create an environment where insulin's counter hormone, glucagon, can become dominant and call out fat from storage as a fuel supply. Fasting is when that scenario predominantly occurs.

"But Dr. Lydia, I've never fasted a day in my life!" you say. Not so, my friend. Every night you fast. Every night your body utilizes glucagon to keep your blood sugars stable. We know this because normal folks wake up in the morning alive. Your body has been doing homeostasis with hormones all night long and chances are good (unless you're a diabetic patient on insulin) you didn't wake up with symptoms of hypoglycemia last night.

Our first meal of the day we call "breakfast" for a reason: you're breaking your overnight fast when you eat that first meal of the day!

So, what is intermittent fasting?

Intermittent fasting is what you do overnight, just for extended hours. It's our body's down-time where everything is on auto-pilot and the cellular "street cleaners" come out to work. You've heard from your grandma and mother that "the body heals itself when you sleep." That's correct! For our purposes, we'll focus on the insulin, blood sugar, fat burning and autophagy benefits of extending that overnight fasted state.

Remember this equation as we're discussing intermittent fasting:

Fasting + ketosis = enhanced ketosis + autophagy

Benefits of enhancing ketosis you inherently understand by now: MORE FAT BURN!

When you extend times that you're not putting energy into the body, you'll burn up more of the stored energy in fat.

"Ha!" you say. "This goes against conventional wisdom. We're told to eat 3 meals/day and two snacks. Small, frequent meals stoke your metabolism. Even diabetic educators say so."

My answer: How's that working for you?

Have you lost any weight?

Did you lose weight with keto then go back to eating 3 squares and 2 snacks of the Standard American Diet of high carb, low fat food only to gain it all back again, plus some?

If this is your story, lean in a little closer and hear me say, "FASTING IS YOUR FRIEND!"

We seem to be averse to letting ourselves go without food in this country. However, God created us to fast. Our ancient ancestors and most folks around the world today DON'T EAT 3 MEALS PER DAY PLUS SNACKS! They also don't deal with any of the "diseases of civilization" (thank you, Dr. Adam Nally): obesity, type 2 diabetes, coronary artery disease, hypertension, chronic kidney disease, Alzheimer's dementia, MS, fibromyalgia, the list goes on and on. As a matter of fact, Native Americans, Australian Aborigines and Native Africans didn't suffer from "diseases of civilization" until we introduced all of our high carb eats into their diets in the last 100 years

Native Aborigines then…

Aborigines now

Let me say it again, "FASTING IS YOUR FRIEND!" It is primal, healthful and the key to beating fat.

So, how do you do it?

Intermittent fasting couldn't be easier.

All you have to do is start one day by pushing your breakfast later into the morning. I started by eating breakfast one day per week at 0900 instead of 0800.

Next, you want to do that extended fast more days of the week. I started by doing the later breakfast time 3 days/week on Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

If this feels good, then shorten your window of eating. This is where those intermittent fasting ratios come into play. The most common is a 16:8 fast. This means you fast 16 hours and eat 8 hours of your day.

So, for a 09:00 eating start you'd eat up until 17:00 (5 p.m.) then stop.

Do the ratio of your choice 3 days/week and adjust the times of the day to suit your personal and family needs. I am adamant that families need to eat together at least once/day, which is critical for relationship. I am also adamant that women, particularly menstruating women, not go > 16 hours/day without eating.  Extending your fast longer than this can screw up ovulation and your periods.

Finally, try doing your intermittent fasting most, if not all, days of the week. Adjust your eating times & amounts so that you're not starving by the end of your eating window. If you're too hungry, you'll over-consume calories which can lead to FAT DEPOSITION. Why? Because that's what the body does with too many calories: it makes fat!

A word on autophagy

In 2016, Japanese cell biologist Yoshinori Ohsumi won the Nobel Prize for physiology and medicine for his discovery of the "autophagosome." Autophagosomes are like trash bags inside cells for the collection of cellular debris. Inside them are enzymes and chemicals that break the trash down into re-usable parts that can be used for cellular rejuvenation. Autophagosomes become very large when cells are starved and stressed and give rise to a process called "autophagy." Autophagy is when strong cells do internal clean up and weak cells are induced to die. This is good news! Ohsumi's research, as well as the more than 5,000 scientific papers that have come behind his work, show that when cells don't have adequate time to clean up or die off, chronic diseases can occur. The most commonly researched ones are Alzheimer's dementia and Type 2 Diabetes. Autophagy is also protective against infection and cancer.

Overeating in developed countries stymies autophagy and is likely a reason for all of the diseases of modern civilization. If we make a concerted effort to stop eating as much,  I bet we'll see a decrease in disease and an increase in health all across the developed world!

To fasting, my friends!

Dr. Lydia