Is Intermittent Fasting Healthy?
One thing is certain in the field of health: what is common wisdom today can easily become “misapplied science” tomorrow. What’s “in” this year may be “out” next year. Often it’s hard to arrive at the right answer.
For example: Oily fish is good for you because the Omega-3′s are so healthy, but oily fish is bad because it can be contaminated with heavy metals, but oily fish is good because recent tests prove it’s not actually very contaminated, but oily fish is bad because the fishing industry paid for those tests…you get my point.
The Fats vs. Carbs argument is another. So when a reader recently asked about regular fasting as a means of maintaining good health, I had to re-evaluate my point of view slightly. What I found surprised me and convinced me to add a new twist to my ongoing health-and-anti-aging regimen. It’s called Intermittent Fasting – or IF.
Twenty years ago, as I was first forming my Primal Health point-of-view (based on a model of how humans evolved), I found it very easy to embrace the concept of “grazing” that seemed to represent the collective conscious of the weight-loss-and-health movement at the time. After all, eating several small meals a day – grazing to maintain even blood sugar and to avoid having your body go into starvation mode and start hoarding gobs of fat – seemed to fit my picture of early humans roaming the plains of Africa foraging for roots, shoots, nuts, berries, grubs and the occasional road-kill leftover from a hyena feast. The explanation that we in the weight-loss business gave the public was that by maintaining this steady supply of protein, fats and carbs throughout the day we would never experience a wild swing in blood sugar due to rapid rises and falls in insulin, therefore we would be less inclined to store fat and more inclined to burn off our existing fat stores. Heaven help us if we skipped breakfast, overate or starved ourselves periodically. That would surely wreak havoc on the delicate hormonal systems keeping us in homeostatic balance.
Well, maybe not.
The truth is, many people have succeeded in losing weight and keeping most of it off using this simple grazing method, which consists of eating 5 or 6 small meals or snacks spread evenly throughout the day, with no single meal exceeding 600 calories and where each meal or snack contains a little protein. This grazing method is the ultimate in portion control: take the 2400 (or more) calories you might otherwise scarf down in 2 meals and simply spread them evenly throughout the day. I think it’s reasonable to project that many more have avoided or postponed getting type 2 diabetes using the same method.
But like many behaviors in the fitness and health world, there comes a point where the benefits decrease and we find ourselves on the dreaded plateau.
The first thing most people will tell you about their attempts at grazing is, while it usually works well if you are diligent, it’s pretty difficult to stick with, since you need to be near a source of quality food every few hours. If you work at home most days as I do, it’s not a problem, but it can make life difficult if you work in an office setting or happen to be a road warrior.
The next common issue is that after a few months of progress, you arrive at a frustrating point where the weight stops coming off, the initial high energy levels decline or you stop building muscle. That makes sense from an evolutionary perspective, since the body is so well-tuned to adapt to any situation – including a perfectly even flow of nutrients. In this case, the body’s reaction to this steady supply of nutrition is to actually decrease insulin sensitivity. It “knows” there will always be food, so it “down-regulates” insulin receptors, and probably down-regulates other metabolic systems as well.
In my Primal Health articles here at MDA, I am always looking at ways we can harness our DNA blueprint to maximize health. I like to see how we can shake things up a little and trick the body into burning more fuel, creating more lean muscle, repairing cell damage and staying injury- and illness-free. So when my 79-year-old buddy Sid at the gym started raving about his weekly 24-hour fast over a year ago, and my friend Art started writing about his own fasting experiences, I decided to look into it further.
The results were surprising and impressive.
Numerous animal and human studies done over the past 15 years suggest that periodic fasting can have dramatic results not only in areas of weight (fat) loss, but in overall health and longevity as well. A recent article in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition gives a great overview of these benefits which include decreases in blood pressure, reduction in oxidative damage to lipids, protein and DNA, improvement in insulin sensitivity and glucose uptake, as well as decreases in fat mass.
How can you argue with results like these? And it all makes sense from an evolutionary perspective, because our predecessors almost certainly went through regular cycles where food was either abundant or very scarce. The body may have established protective mechanisms to adapt to these conditions by sensitizing insulin receptors when it was critical that every bit of food be efficiently used or stored (as in famine), or by desensitizing them when there was a surplus, so the body wouldn’t be overly-burdened by grossly excessive calorie intake.
Beyond insulin sensitivity, it appears that caloric restriction and intermittent fasting may “turn on” certain genes that repair specific tissues that would not otherwise be repaired in times of surplus. One could surmise that this adaptation serves to allow certain cells to live longer (as repaired cells) during famine since it’s energetically less expensive to repair a cell than to divide and create a new one. That might help explain some of the extended longevity seen in animal studies using caloric restriction and/or intermittent fasting (read about here, here, and here). Intermittent fasting has also been shown to reduce spontaneous cancers in animal studies, which could be due to a decrease in oxidative damage or an increase in immune response.
So, what are the practical applications of this research?
It depends. There’s probably no right answer (remember what I said at the beginning!) Art suggests mimicking the experiences of our ancestors, which is to say don’t plan any fast, just surprise your body every once in a while with 24 hours of little or no food. My friend Sid does his fast every Tuesday like clockwork, so he has a light final meal on Monday night and doesn’t eat again until Wednesday breakfast. He does drink water and a little juice on his fasting day. Some fasting programs suggest you take a two-week “cleansing” approach where you eat regularly every other day and fast (or eat 40% of normal) on alternate days for two weeks twice a year.
One thing that is most interesting about the intermittent fasting studies is that slightly overeating on the non-fasting days (to make up for the lack of calories on fast days) yielded similar results, so it wasn’t so much about total calories as it was about the episodic deprivation.
As for me, I’m going to try the once a week deal, but I’ll start by no longer agonizing over a skipped breakfast or late dinner. What I used to think was the end of the world might just be the beginning of a new one!
Let me know of your own fasting experiences.
UPDATE: See this post on Women and Intermittent Fasting.
Further Reading:
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Posted By: Mark Sisson
Woops! Sorry about the typo. Yes I mean Supper (Evening meal).
Mark,
I think you might have to do a more clarifying post. I don’t think IF is meant to be long periods of starvation, and it seems some of the people responding think that is what you mean. People SHOULD eat, but there are benefits to intermittently not eating. I’d love to hear more about what are acceptable intervals and what is just plain starvation.
First I should mention that fasting and starvation are two different things completely. During fasting the body uses Ketones for energy built primarily from fat reserves. During this time the body cleans house…removes any debris and attempts to rebuild any damages that it finds. Starvation only starts after all possible Fat and lastly muscle reserves have been depleted-basically you would look like a walking skeleton with some skin on it before you begin to starve. This takes many months to start for the average size human.
Starvation with an IF lifestyle is impossible in my opinion. IF generally includes eating one day and fasting the other. I practice this lifestyle. I take in vegetables and fruits in liquid form every second day – no solids. I then Dry Fast (no water – no food) the other day for about 36 hours. (Dry fasting only recommend for experienced fasters) In total I go for over half the year without food or water, additionally I do at least two 15 Day water fasts. I maintain a weight of 190 pounds and I am very physically active. If fasting every 2nd day is too difficult then even 1 day a week would be very beneficial to the body and mind. For anyone truly serious about adopting a lifestyle involving fasting then you may wish to visit http://www.fastingconnection.com. This site has fasting MD’s who are very experienced with supervising fasting. It was a great help to me when I was just starting a transition to this lifestyle. Remember… we are not nourished by the amount of food we consume but rather by the amount we assimilate.
I can offer a comment to G’s question about why some of us choose the evening as the eating window. I used eat only during the day but it often proved challenging to refrain from eating at night if hubby was cooking something that smelled fantastic. Not to mention air popped popcorn (one of my weaknesses). As a result I was sure I consumed more calories than I was aiming for.
Since reading this website and trying the reverse – black coffee between 9 and 10, water with lemon all day and breaking my fast with fruit, then easing into a big salad, protein and steamed veggies at night. I have had postive results overall.
In addition, eating at night will allow me to fulfill all my social engagements without having to be so fearful of eating. I am definitely less food obsessed and look forward to eating rather than having it be all about weighing my food and trying to figure out how many calories etc.
I use the 3 days on, 1 day off schedule promoted over at crossfit.com and do a run with some intervals followed by a cf workout.
Thanks so much for this website, Mark!
I have really enjoyed reading all of these very informative posts. I found my way to IF through a diet called The Doctor Johnson’s Up Day Down Day Diet. He suggests eating no more than 500 cals one day, then eat to satisfaction the next. But he had also talked about intermittent fasting, but said that “most” people could not do that, so their goal was to stay under 500 cals. But being the hard headed person I am, I was determined to not be “most” people. I have been fasting every other day for 2 weeks now, and find my fasting days much more pleasurable, than my eating days. I have more energy, better mood, and all around improved perspective on eating, and my relationship with food. I enjoy my ability to eat more intuitively now. I will be following this way of eating the remainder of my life!
This page hasn’t been active for a while, it seems, but still a wealth of information and sharing. After an accident resulting in severe hip injury, I was extra-motivated to lose weight. At 40, I was about 75 pounds over. Factors such as difficulty exercising due to pain and reduced mobility, plus a change in my living situation, led me to what seemed an easy and natural solution: I just stopped eating alone. Sometimes I would eat one or two meals every day, sometimes I would go up to 4 or 5 days fasting. When I do eat, I eat whatever I want. And this ”whatever” has changed, as now I only want to eat healthy foods. I have done up to 15 days water fasting in the past, and find it easy. I’ve lost over 50 pounds in the past 7 months. During periods when I eat ”normally”, I don’t gain weight, but maintain. This is working for me. It’s easy, both physically and psychologically. For most of human history, eating has been a collective activity.
Excellent Jackie! With strong will power and our advancing knowledge one can achieve a level of health that is un-heard of ever. I hope to be dry fasting 3 days and one day eating within this next month. Right now I’m still only 1 day on one off. Definitely I too fell much better on my fasting days. Good luck and stay strong!
I’m interested in starting this diet. Help me out! What does the one day on and one day off consist of? Do I eat anything I want the first day, then on the next day just drink water? HELP!
From some experiments that I have read from the National Library of Medicine it seems you can eat as much as you want on your eating day and still get the health – life extension benefits of fasting. The benefits are much more powerful then caloric restriction and you don’t have to get so skinny. The eating every other day such as 1 day on – one day off extends life generally about 30 – 40 percent an average suggest many experiments. The longer in between eating the longer the life extension. Reason seems to be (my theory) that the huge energy draining process of digestive metabolism and natural toxic properties of food cause what we like to call aging. Think about this: Even Fruits don’t want to die (be eaten) so they have a substance call fructose which is poison for mammals; luckily the fruit has anti-oxidants to protect itself from the poison fructose which also may protect us from the fructose to some degree. The simple method for eating every other day is not counting the hours but simple by sleeps. So Monday you Fast then go to bed and Tuesday morning you can eat all day if you want; then Wednesday Fast again etc. After you do it for a while to get use to it. But if you cheat you have to get use to it all over again. The body seems to get into a rhythm of eating and fasting which actually helps to make it easier. If your new to fasting you can use water on your fasting days; when you get lots of experience you can do dry Fasting (no water) the body obtains water from fat cells and other means but with that you need to know your body well (listen to your body). Dry fasting gives your body total rest from processing external substances forced into it hence making it a bit more powerful then water fasting, but it’s only for experienced fasters. If you want support from the fasting community including an experienced Medical Doctor who supervises Fasting check out http://www.fastingconnection.com. I have a hundred or so forum posts on that site.
Good luck,
Jordan O’Hara
Cure Zone Ltd.
http://www.curezone.ca
“Even Fruits don’t want to die (be eaten) so they have a substance call fructose which is poison for mammals”
This is absurd- the purpose of fruit is to convince animals to eat it, therefore spreading it’s seeds. Fructose attracts mammals VERY strongly, which is why fruits contain it.
Fructose seems to serve both purposes, but let’s not be fooled: it is a metabolic poison in any significant quantity.
According to Michael Pollan, fruit are used by plants to attract eaters (humans, bears, etc.) so that seeds will be distributed and more plants will be produced. Plants bribe us to spread their seed; they don’t know that these days humans usually put seeds and pits in garbage bags.
If fructose was made to poison humans it wouldn’t be a leptin-disruptor as well, since that would incourage us to eat even more fruits. More likely, fructose in wild fruits was only found in small amounts and while your liver doesn’t like it much it would have been better tolerated than in today’s selectively bred fruits.
I have been following an IF diet for about 2 weeks now and i feel great. on the days i go to work and school I fast for 20 hours and eat around 1500 to 1800 kcal in a 4 hour window. I feel completely free from having to plan my day around my meals I now plan my meals around my day. On days i don’t have school or work(the weekend) i follow a paleo grazing diet with one “cheat” meal. The results are amazing, my wieght has gone done and my strength has gone up. I also have no early mourning slump i believe due to my old “larger” breakfast.
Great post!
If anyone wonders if this method is healthy, check out this study saying “Eating less and more than needed on alternate days prolongs life…”
Well, I don’t know whether to believe it or not…what do you think?
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6WN2-4JFGFM7-1&_user=10&_handle=V-WA-A-W-CV-MsSAYWA-UUW-U-AAZUYUBBUZ-AACYBYVAUZ-AWZWYZAYU-CV-U&_fmt=summary&_coverDate=12%2F31%2F2006&_rdoc=3&_orig=browse&_srch=%23toc%236950%232006%23999329997%23624953!&_cdi=6950&view=c&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=96c00cfa4fff7eb7671448500eabcb1e
The link to the study in the previous comment is broken, hope this time it will work
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6WN2-4JFGFM7-1&_user=10&_coverDate=12%2F31%2F2006&_alid=786931884&_rdoc=4&_fmt=high&_orig=search&_cdi=6950&_sort=d&_docanchor=&view=c&_ct=5&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=2fd2849b1bcaae5bbc5fdd2b7ece3983
Jordan, your last comment belies a fundamental misunderstanding of biology –
“Even Fruits don’t want to die (be eaten) so they have a substance call fructose which is poison for mammals; luckily the fruit has anti-oxidants to protect itself from the poison fructose which also may protect us from the fructose to some degree.”
This is ENTIRELY false. Many plants rely on their fruit being eaten by animals to disperse their seeds – the animals eat the fruit and then crap the seeds somewhere far away, where the seeds never would have gotten if it weren’t for the animals. Many seedlings that just fall to the ground beneath the plant may not thrive due to shade from the mother plant. Also, why do you think most fruits are so colorful? You’d think if they didn’t want to be eaten by animals, they’d camouflage themselves in green. They’re colorful to attract the eye of roaming animals.
This is not Entirely false. We’re talking chemical warfare and plants are damn good at it. We only eat the failures. Otherwise they do their best to kill us. Why should it be any other way?
We seem to be in the midst of an “evolutionary arms race”, meaning plants evolve to make us carry their seeds and/or to fend off being gobbled by poisoning us, and we in turn evolve to process those very toxins, or at least to somehow neutralize them. However at this point we are still greatly damaged by fruit toxins – i.e. fructose. Fructose triggers deleterious modification in cells through the glycation process.
It’s all too easy to pick a nice shiny red piece of fruit. Too easy, I would say…
Plant defenses can be classified generally as induced or constitutive. Constitutive defenses are always present in the plant species, while induced defenses are synthesized or mobilized to the site where a plant is injured. There are wide variations in the composition and concentration of constitutive defenses and these range from mechanical defenses to digestibility reducers and toxins. Most external mechanical defenses and large quantitative defenses are constitutive, as they require large amounts of resources to produce and difficult to mobilize.
Induced defenses include secondary metabolic products, as well as morphological and physiological changes. An advantage of inducible, rather than constitutive defenses, is that increased variability increases the effectiveness of the defenses.[11] This advantage comes from the suggestion that if herbivores can choose among different plants and plant tissues, they may avoid eating plants that have both constitutive and induced defenses.
Plants have developed many secondary metabolites involved in plant defense, which are collectively known as antiherbivory compounds and can be classified into three sub-groups: nitrogen compounds (including alkaloids, cyanogenic glycosides and glucosinolates), terpenoids, and phenolics.
Sincerely,
Jordan O’Hara
Cure Zone Ltd.
http://www.curezone.ca
If a plant kills the animals which spread it’s seeds- it will die to. Fruiting plants have a symbiotic relationship with the animals that eat the fruit- not an arms race.
Fructose will not kill or harm mammals in the levels they obtain in the wild. It’s only dangerous when concentrated and making up a large percentage of your diet (like in soft drinks). No wild mammals will get diabetes or insulin intolerance from eating an occasional fruit.
This is a major part of the reason why I prefer to eat as fewer plants as possible, preferably zero.
Do you realize that the bees are responsible for the fruits we eat today?
The bees simply cross-pollinate the pollens onto another flowers, fruit trees etc.
What makes the bees want to cross-pollinate?… Fructose!
I like it simply because I am not FULL all the time. I get bloating pretty easily, and doing this is simple, I get to enjoy good foods and not worry about eating so much AND I feel lighter and only full once a day or every other day.
Very informative post.
I’ve been doing the 24/24 version of intermittent fasting and documenting the progress on my blog:
http://inhumanexperiment.blogspot.com/search/label/intermittent%20fasting
So far everything is going great.
- JLL
Hi Mark,
I learned about IF after reading a few entries on this subject on Dr. Mike Eades blog. I found it intriguing considering the fact that I had begun gaining a lot of weight on my low carb diet. Atkins is a diet that is perfect for me and I didn’t want to give up eating that way even though I had gained all of the weight that I lost and then some. I now fast for 20 hours and eat within a 4 hour window. I also increased my fat intake. The results have been great. My weight is slowly dropping and people are commenting on my weightloss.I wore my size 8 dress on Friday and it fit perfectly. Losing weight without changing the diet, so to speak, is the best part of IF. Eating a higher amount of fats have also been rewarding.I have included coconut oil and pure mct in my diet alsong with magnesium and vitamin D3. I am hypoglycemic ( self diagnosed )and have had no crazy episodes of insulin spikes.I function well during fasting. I do not experience dizziness. Once I had a headache which I blamed on my fasting but recall reading in the Brain Trust Program that headaches may be cause by low magnesium. So instead of ending my fast earlier than planned, I took one of my mag supplements and the pain went away just like I had taken an aspirin.Before I began Atkins, I had some severe joint pain. I felt elderly at the age of 45. But soon after beginning Atkins that pain dissipated considerably. However,I had some residual inflammation in my joints which vanished completely once I included IF. I am sure this is due to the anti-inflammatory properties or IF,LC and coconut oil.I really want to stand up for IF because it works and it is healthy.
I have included IF to my diet for 1 1/2 years now and I have lost nearly all the weight that I regained and I hope to reach 135 lbs in 2009.
Thanks,
Mary
I’d like to add that the reason that I had the guts to IF was that Drs Eades tried it…they didn’t look for human guinea pigs to do it. They did it themselves. I knew that with my healthy low carb wisdom, I too could embark on doing this. And I must say, I have been more sucessful on it than the doctors cuz I stuck to it.
Mary again,
Will it disrupt the desired benefits of fasting if one takes a fish oil or multivitamin supplement? The same goes with a simple cup of green tea.
Will these throw off all the benefits?
No calories, no problem…
Yes, it will disrupt the fasting ‘detox+repair’ mode of the body & you will not have near all the benefits of water fasting. You should only have distilled water.
I have been IFing since Jan 1st, so it’s been 2 weeks. I started at 125 and I haven’t lost any weight yet! I have been fasting all day and eating between 2 and 6pm. I also would out 40 minutes 5 days a week! When should the weight start comming off???
Two weeks? How long did it take to prep for IF? It took at least a month for me to achieve the ability to IF. I don’t really know when the weight began coming off. I can testify, however, that it did come off. I did not starve my body and I gave it the time it needed to adjust to the new feeding schedule.At least that was my determination. I didn’t want to begin anything that I couldn’t continue, indefinitely.Kelly, you cannot begin IF, make it a temporary change and expect it to be a weightloss bullet.When you learned to drive a car, did you drive 85 miles an hour? I would assume the anser is “no”. Don’t expect IF to be any different. If you plan to do IF, you should also plan to do it as a lifetime change. Go slowly. Kelly, I lost 25(ish) lbs. in less than 2 years. I didn’t drop 25 lbs in weeks or months. As a matter of fact there were moments when my weight increased. However, my periods were lighter and shorter.Residual joint pain vanished. I felt lighter even when I had an increase in weight probably because of my increased regularity.
I made IF my friend. As the years go on, I have grown closer to IF. My body is actually responding to exercise and other physical activity. Since nothing was guaranteed, especially weightloss, I didn’t doubt the success. I receive way more than I expected. All I had to do was wait for it to happen.
Jon, I drink coffee with cream and MCT oil in the morning. Vitamin D, krill oil and a b vomplex tablet is also consumed in the morning. No, it does not disrupt the benefits of IF.
I’ve been doing a couple of 36 hour fasts a week since last April. My experience has been that I do better with both energy and losing weight if I really, really keep up my vitamin intake. While I know it’s not “pure” fasting, I do drink a single zip fizz (10 calories) for vitamins on my fast days, and make a point of getting enough water. I have the completely unscientific impression that a body not getting enough vitamins will be more reluctant to let go of it’s energy resources, like fat!
I also drink caffeinated tea with artificial sweetener on fast days. My energy levels, mental and physical were just too low when I water fasted. I’ve lost 30 pounds – and considering my really spotty compliance, that’s a great result!
The way I see it, the eating plan that works for you is the one you can stand to stay on. Obviously, the jury’s still out on whether this does anything to extend my life span, but my only ancestor who I know fasted (one day per week), was also the longest lived.
That’s fantastic how far you’ve come. I have been experimenting with weekly fasts for a month now and have started testing bi-weekly 36 hour ones. I tend to overeat afterward but am learning to manage.
I’m curious what you did to prevent a binge if you ever had the inclination.
Thanks; and I especially liked reading the longevity portion (my theory as well).
Kelly,
IF is a very slow way to lose. It took about 1 year and 8 months to lose 25 ish lbs. It took a few months to lose 5 lbs and it didn’t happen all at once. I did the fasting, taking my eyes off the scale. I began losing 2 lbs here, 5 lbs there until I began getting comments on my weightloss. The onlything I did was implement IF to my low carb diet.
Please keep in mind that caffeine and fasting might not be a preferred mix. The drug Caffeine promotes physiological aging. The fasting organism is trying to repair / detoxify and stop aging damage as quick as it can – so by adding the caffeine drug you may be negatively affecting the health recovery potential of your fast. Additionally the body is not in a true ‘fasting state’ until ‘all’ food / drug is stopped from entering the digestive processes.
I’m aware that it’s not a “perfect” fast, but it’s what I can do, and I think it’s definitely less stressful than trying a more traditional diet. I’ve gone off caffeine long and short term numerous times, and find that I really just like it, and like the alertness. And since my primary goal (for now) is weight loss, I’m satisfied that it’s working out.
I pretty much do just two cups of tea per day, and the aforementioned zip fizz for vitamins. This generally doesn’t provoke the *ahem* lower digestive system response that I get when I break the fast with a 70 calorie V-8.
But here’s something I was pondering last night: We all absorb a certain amount of *stuff* via our skin. Do you think that soaps, lotions, shampoos and hair gels, makeup, etc. also interfere with your recovery potential? I also know people who are very concerned about the amount of chlorine they absorb by showering in chlorinated water.
Jordan I disagree. If you feel like your body is fasting, you are in a fasting state. I am not fasting like a scientist who has done studies on a few subjects. I am fasting like a human who is on a food restricted diet.I consider my fast broken when I eat my first meal of the day. Also there have been studies made that say that caffeine is indeed healthy. If I had to remove all drugs from my body, that would mean that I couldn’t take medecine while fasting.
Sharon, we do absorb things through shampoos and soaps. I try to not obsess too much about that. I can’t afford the wonderful cosmetics at Mother’s Market but I do try and buy some things. I do use coconut oil on my skin and I injest it as well.
This is just my opinion but I get my opinion from things that I have observed.
A lot of changes happen when the body’s energy source is changed. From what I have learned is that the body will not make the ‘physiological switch over’ into a fasting state until all food intake to the stomach has stopped. Many processes then startup such as fatty acids are turned into Ketones, glucose is then no longer the only energy source used by the brain etc. Among the global Fasting community Eating small amounts of food is generally called Under-eating – which can also have many positive effects on life but I wouldn’t call under-eating fasting as that confuses the terminology of things. For example an animal in the wild would not be considered fasting when it is eating small amounts of food.
Hope this helps.
As for trans dermal absorption of substances: Yes many small substances absorb into the skin and into the blood via skin including the substances in your water – depending where you live could be chlorine + chlorine bi-products and maybe fluoride too. The lungs also absorb even more stuff & larger stuff but that’s another story. Hope this helps!
Jordan O’Hara
hey…im use to fasting because im a muslim as ramadan involves fasting without water everyday, these fasts last about 12-16 hours and then food can be eat, what i was thinking of doing was fasting 24 hours a day, and eat at night everyday, is this a good way to do it or not? seein as i will be living off one meal a day at night, roughly a few hours before bed, exercise during the day to lose weight, i will be doing HIIT cardio and strength training, would this work?
I have some days where I eat only one meal at supper time. I am sure that the body can adapt to this on a regular basis.
can anyone help me out?
Yes some plans work on a 24 hour fast. Google “eat stop eat”.