Alternate Day Fasting - The Basics

a new form of fasting that isn't really new it's actually old but it might be just for you in fact it just so happens to be what I've naturally been doing for a really long time it's called alternate day fasting now if you watch a lot of my videos you know that I generally don't recommend fasting every single day I usually recommend every other day well it just turns out this has a name alternate day fasting and it's what's been used in the scientific community in the research world for years and years and years with lots and lots of evidence so I'll break down what it is the science behind it what you need to know about it and then I'll even give you some sample days so you can go ahead and get started on your very own embracing this style of fasting hey I want to make sure you hit that red subscribe button and they make sure you hit that Bell icon to turn on notifications so you always always see my videos now those of you that watch my videos a lot know that I don't recommend fasting every day so what do you do well you fast every other day so what alternate day fasting is essentially instead of doing like 16 hours every day you go slightly longer more aggressive kinds of fasts every other day so Monday may be all fast all day and maybe eat a small dinner and then Tuesday I won't fast at all then Wednesday I'll fast again and do just that alternate day fasting but on the days that you eat you eat what is called ad libitum where you just eat whatever you want or however much you want I don't necessarily follow that I'm pretty strict about it but the point is a lot of the evidence show is that you can be very flexible on your eating days and then be strict on your non eating days on your fasting days so let's dive into the research let's dive into the breakdown so you know if it's for you and then we'll get to the samples so this first study was published in the journal Obesity science and practice okay and it took a look at 28 studies it was a meta-analysis okay and it took a look at groups that had done alternate day fasting versus groups that had done just general caloric restriction obviously alternate day fasting at the end of the week your calories going to be reduced but they wanted to compare it to just steadily decreasing calories well at the end of these studies they found they concluded that on average people that did alternate day fasting ended up losing 3.3 kilograms or of fat than the other group so you lose a lot more fat now the other thing they also preserved a lot more in the way of muscle mass now of course we also have to add to the fact that people were a lot more compliant it was easier to stick to okay it's actually a lot easier to stick to fasting for one whole day and then having total flexibility another then it is too fast every single day for a shorter period of time it's been found that people just like to be able to turn that switch on or off eating or not eating but that's not the cool study I want to talk about another study that really breaks down what I think is important and that is the level of ketones that are in your blood when you are fasting hey I've got news for you it doesn't matter whether you follow a keto diet or not if you enjoy intermittent fasting and you get benefits from fasting it means that you are saturating your body with ketones okay that is one of the benefits of fasting in the first place is the fact that you were producing ketones so I don't care if you break your fast and you go and you eat a burrito with a bunch of beans and rice the period in which you are fasting you have ketones and those ketones are doing a lot of the magic of the fast in the first place so this study is really cool so this study was published in the journal Cell Metabolism took a look at 60 people okay now these people were divided into two groups an alternate day fasting group or another group that could just kind of just follow their normal eating pattern so obviously the alternate day fasting group is going to have better body composition results because they're on a structured program the other group is not but here's what's interesting the alternate day fasting group did not over compensate on the day that they ate so what this means simply put is that they fasted one day and then the next day when they ate they expected them to eat a bunch of food but they didn't they actually didn't overcompensate so they didn't over eat on the day that they would eat in order to make up for the day they fasted it's like they just naturally just didn't want to eat all that much and the alternate day fasting group also lost 7.7 pounds of body fat which is pretty darn cool and they ended up having lower levels of thyroid hormone while maintaining high thyroid function so in the grand scheme of things we actually want our thyroid levels to be a little bit lower because it allows us to have more longevity low levels of thyroid are linked to longer lifespan but what we don't want to have happen is have our actual thyroid function be suppressed so they were producing less thyroid less damage on their cells but their thyroid was functioning just fine but here is where things get really cool their ketone levels were elevated all the time even on non-fasting days they saw an elevation in ketones what that means is that they had acquired such a degree of metabolic flexibility that they were producing ketones even when they were not fasting so imagine this you're fasting and your body produces ketones which have all kinds of benefits then you go to the next day and you're eating but because you're fast was so intense the day prior your body is still producing ketones sort of an after burn effect the next day now how you know that you're burning fat and how you know you're getting the effects is simply by how many ketones you're producing so I've often talked about when you're fasting you should measure your ketones when you're doing keto you should measure your ketones so I highly recommend if you are interested in intermittent fasting or alternate day fasting or any of this check out keto mojo down below they are a ketone blood measuring device so they're really the gold standard when it comes down to it so you just test your blood and get your ketone reading and see where you're at the higher the ketones the more fat you are likely burning and the deeper in ketosis and the deeper into a fast you probably are so you can put this method to the test you can test your ketones on the days that you're fasting and test your ketones on the days that you're not so a special link down below if anyone wants to try them out again they're called keto mojo put them down below in the description after you watch this video definitely want to check them out now let's jump over to the hunger side of things okay so normally when you are doing any kind of intermittent fasting you're gonna start to see a decline in your hunger which is great but alternate day fasting it might even be more intense because you allow those hunger signals to completely get nullified by going longer periods of time without eating so the study that was published in nutrition journal okay it took a look at subjects over the course of 10 weeks over three phases okay so phase one was just two weeks of eating their normal diet just to get a baseline phase two was where they did a modified fast okay modified alternate day fasting so what that meant is on the day they fasted they still consumed like 25% of their normal calories they just allocated it to the morning or evening or to one particular area and then the next day they would eat ad libitum whatever they wanted then the third phase was very very similar it was just more self-selected feeding where they had a little bit more discretion as to win and what they ate so ultimately into the study what they found was that the hunger levels of those that were doing alternate day fasting were suppressed significantly after a couple of weeks so researchers at the beginning of this study had thought that they were gonna be really hungry and thought that on the feasting day when they weren't fasting that they would dramatically overcompensate so once again exactly like what we've seen in other studies they're expecting people to overeat but they found that they did not so we have to have a little bit of a hypothesis here what's probably going on is something more psychological when you intermittent fast in a normal setting you have a tendency to kind of fast and then binge fast and then binge but imagine this you're fasting and you want to binge but you go to bed instead so then by the time you wake up the next morning the desire to binge isn't really there it's not as much of this impulsive action so this is purely a hypothesis but probably by alternate day fasting works so well you're fasting throughout the day so even if you have a desire to binge you don't have an opportunity to because you go to bed before you actually eat and then by the time you wake up the next morning the desire to binge is gone so that's my theory but also there's hunger hormones and everything else that comes into play so let's take a look at some sample days what you could do if you want to try alternate day fasting okay the first one is going to be what I call the 36-hour more intense alternate day fasting okay so this is where you eat your last meal at bedtime and then you go to bed then the next day you wake up maybe you go you work out maybe you don't anyway you go throughout the rest of the day and don't eat and then you go to bed again okay then you wake up the next morning and you eat so you've all tamanna' six hour fast okay then after you break your fast you go through and you eat as much as you want you just enjoy food maybe you don't eat garbage but you eat much as you want to eat ad libitum you will probably find that you don't want to eat all that much then you go all the way through to dinnertime and maybe you repeat it again now that's a little bit intense cuz they don't necessarily recommend doing 36-hour fasts multiple times per week but that is one method of doing it the other method is sample 2 which is more of what we see in these studies in that last study that I referenced a Nutrition Journal actually utilized this one okay it's where you eat your last meal the day you go to bed okay then you wake up fasted you work out you go through your day and then 24 hours after your last meal you go ahead and you eat a smallish meal about 25% of your normal daily allotment of calories if you normally eat 2,000 calories then maybe you'll consume 500 with your dinner maybe you space it out with two small meals but the point is you're going 24 hours right and then you go to bed and then you wake up the next day and you eat ad libitum as normal so your alternate day fast is really just 24 hours the day is actually still concluded with a meal so it's not even as bad as you would think so anyway that's the two different varieties that you can do one is going to be more aggressive than the other the point is there's a lot of science surrounding alternate day fasting and the big piece of the equation is the fact that you increase your ketone levels and you develop this metabolic flexibility that allows your body to jump in and out of ketosis a lot better giving you some super powerful mitochondria super powerful cells that know the difference between the two it's all about being flexible and not being one-dimensional whether you're one-dimensional keto or one-dimensional not keto we need to have the ability to fluctuate between the two so anyhow please make sure you're keeping it locked in here in my channel if you have ideas for future videos put them down below see you soon

Channel: Thomas DeLauer

Views: 300,706

Rating: 4.9463062 out of 5

Keywords: alternate day fasting, alternate day fasting results, alternate day fasting vs intermittent fasting, alternate day fasting weight loss, intermittent alternate day fasting, alternate day diet, alternate day fasting keto, alternate day fasting before and after, what is alternate day fasting, intermittent fasting for beginners, intermittent fasting, how to do alternate day fasting, alternate day fasting vs omad, thomas delauer, keto, keto diet, thomas delauer fasting, weight loss

Id: VlIYRKuUtmA

Length: 10min 40sec (640 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 21 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/-jake-skywalker-]

Doesn’t seem healthy to me, 16:8 or OMAD makes way more sense imo

[u/jmprice73]

Thomas DeLauer provides a primer for alternate day fasting.