Intermittent Fasting: Everything You Need To Know

but the principle the metabolic principle between the five two metabolically makes more sense than the sixteen eight hi i'm magnus lichbach i've been a trainer and nutritionist for more than 20 years and today we're doing a special we're gonna do a three-part series with my friend client and professor susan devkoda so susan is a scientist and a professor of medicine at cedar sinai here in los angeles and at ucla so what is it that you specialize in so i my background is actually in nutritional sciences i did a master's in nutritional sciences and then a phd in molecular metabolism and nutrition and but my specialty is actually in the gut microbiome and gut health so i study how diet and the bacteria in your gut interact to either promote health or actually help us understand more about disease so now you know why i want it here today because today we're going to talk about intermittent fasting which is a huge topic it's so popular and i get bombarded with questions about intermittent fasting so here we go [Music] so i get questions all the time about intermittent fasting who can do it should i be doing it and is it better than not fasting and you actually done clinical research on this topic so i would love to hear what you as an expert have have to say about this sure um so fasting is it's you know been practiced since the beginning of time in in various forms many cultures practice it's not a new concept um but where people have sort of innovated on it is how to do it you know how to do it to sort of tap into optimal metabolism uh promoting weight loss you know really fine-tuned it beyond religious practices you know some religions fast for a whole month and you know but this is now getting to a scientific level of fasting um you know i i actually am a proponent of intermittent fasting but there's many ways to do it and some may not get you to the goals you want to achieve while others i believe will get you there fast it really depends on what your your goals are you know there's different types of fasting and you've done some you've done research on the different types as well right um can you tell us a little bit about the different types of fasting yeah sure um you know i think they're the two the two types of intermittent fasting that have become popular uh or the most popular are what's called the 5-2 diet and the other one is called the 16-8 diet so the 5-2 diet the principle is if you have a seven-day week you fast two of those days and then you eat normally on the other five days so what does fasting mean in that sense it's a reduction of daily calories to 500 calories for women or 600 calories for men so that's quite significant if you consider most people are eating 2 000 or 3 000 calories a day so on your fasting day let's say you fast on monday you eat 500 calories then you eat normally on tuesday you can eat normally on wednesday then maybe you fast again on thursday the key is you never do your fats on consecutive days so that's kind of true intermittent in that it's fast eat fast eat you know it's alternating that's the 5-2 diet the 16-8 diet refers to a 24-hour day so that's hours okay so what it's saying is you fast from basically the time you go to bed until lunch about lunch time that's the 16 hour fast and then you eat you have an eight hour eating window so basically what that is is saying skip breakfast and by skipping breakfast you're reducing your daily calories and that's a type of a way to fast that's maybe more palatable to people who find it difficult to fast for an entire 24 24-hour period however uh the 16-8 will not get you to your goals as quickly as the 5-2 so would you say that the 5-2 is better than the 16 8 or better for certain things maybe yes um you know there will be many examples where people say well i had i lost a lot of weight or i feel great on the 16 8 and for me i'm like fantastic keep doing it it's really what works for you but the principle the metabolic principle between the 5-2 metabolically makes more sense than the 16-8 and the reason is you don't so if you just let's say you take the old school approach the 1980s approach of just dieting and eating drinking diet soda all the time and just drastically reducing calories you know all the time and serving rollercoaster dieting what your body will start to do is think you're in a i don't want to say starvation but in a food scarce mode so you'll get to a point where you're just not going to shed the fat anymore what 5-2 does is by you reduce calories one day but then you eat normally the next day and then you reduce and you eat so your body knows you're not food deprived and so it won't hang on to the to the fat as hard as it would if you were just reducing across the board for weeks at a time so by doing it intermittently you actually can tap into the parts of your body that you want to you know get rid of the fat but in your body we'll do it more readily because you're going to then introduce calories the next day so it's a bit of a it's a safer way um and it's sort of you can view it as stoking your metabolism it's like shock feed shock feed and it's a very effective way to do that [Music] how would a fasting day look like on on those two days you said 500 calories is that mainly protein then that's a big part of it but not all of it um that's the number one question i get when when talking about how how do you do five what does 500 look like because it seems really hard you know um so in full disclosure i practice the 5 2 diet um no one pays me to do it but i it just i just feel really good when i do it and i might do it for a month at a time and then i eat my normal diet the rest of time um the way i do it is for breakfast i would have a greek yogurt not a very one with fruit or anything but a more plain greek yogurt maybe 150 calories i should mention that in some parts of the world it's not even a greek yogurt it's skewer or caseella it's called in some countries it's a yogurt that's high in protein so that's the most important thing exactly yeah it's not i'm not eating yoplait you know it's it's a protein rich yogurt and i try to keep that in the 150 calories or less and then i'll have a hard-boiled egg so definitely a breakfast is a protein rich breakfast um and and the thinking behind it is you know if you eat mostly protein and fibers during your for your 500 calories it increases your satiety so you don't feel you know you don't feel hungry you could do all of your 500 calories eating gummy bears that would technically work but i guarantee you you know you'll be miserable you know doing it that way so um so for breakfast i'll do the hard-boiled egg and the yogurt for lunch it's a huge salad you know lots of you know spinach leafy greens not starchy things i don't put fruit in there i don't put corn i don't it's leafy greens green peppers cucumber sort of low calorie but fiber rich foods and just a very slight drizzling of balsamic vinegar and some salt and you get a really you know big fiber load it keeps you full for a long time no protein whip with lunch typically not not on that day just for the caloric purpose but for dinner i'll have like a three ounce chicken breast which is another 120 calories and um and then i might have like a little you know salsa or something with it and then a steamed vegetable but then the next day i definitely you know have my protein for three meals a day and i eat almost what ends up happening is you eat the same foods you eat on your fasting day you just end up eating more of it yeah and that's the habit it actually entrains in you because you start feeling really good and all you really want to eat are those same foods in the beginning you kind of go through this binge on your next day where like ice cream and you know because you can theoretically eat all of that but over time in every person i've talked to who does this they it entrains a different eating pattern where they just start eating more of the healthy food so it's a great thing to do after the holidays for example you know after christmas or thanksgiving when you're eating all sorts of stuff it sort of resets your metabolism if you've been internationally traveling a lot do it afterwards it helps reset your metabolism what are the you know the pros with fasting so definitely the biggest one would be uh weight loss okay you can definitely lose weight um with intermittent fasting that's usually the primary reason people will do it yeah the other reason is what i you know just alluded to which is resetting your your metabolism if you feel you've sort of gone off course getting back into a regimented eating pattern where you're feeling good again you can actually kick start that through even just a week of intermittent fasting or do two weeks of it and then you'll transition into maybe the way you used to eat before you went off track but it's a really good tool because there's a whole psychological component as as well and it just makes you conscious again about looking at labels and paying attention to the calories and looking at proteins and fibers and when you start you know paying attention to labels again you start naturally select if you care you know you have fitness goals it just gets you into that you get educated you actually know what you're eating absolutely and why and that's the added benefit for people who who have never really paid much attention to their diet by doing intermittent fasting it forces you to learn about labels and read them and do a little bit of calculations and really most people i've talked to when they do it are shocked by what portion sizes they were eating before and how many calories those contain they never really paid attention before so this helps you get there as well yeah what about that are there any cons uh it can be unpleasant you know it can be it's not fun the first time you the first few fasting days it you will feel a little sluggish you will go through a little bit of a uh you know you don't want to do it if you've got something really important coming up you know the first week after that your body adapts beautifully and it becomes so much easier but that first few rounds of fast it'll be hard and you can you might get the brain fog you might feel sluggish and so you just want to prepare for that um the it's more lifestyle than anything the you need to prepare to do it well you need to prepare at the beginning of the week and make sure you've gone to the store and have your fasting foods that where you don't have to think about it you know the more you have to think about okay what am i going to eat that's in that those calories and you start you know you start getting bogged down by looking at labels but if you make those selections at the beginning of the week then everything that's in your fridge fits within that profile yeah you don't have to think so it requires a little bit of planning what about someone like me who's already in shape i know nutrition well and i i don't fast do you think i should be fasting or should i stick to what i'm doing now should everyone fast no no i don't think everyone should fast i don't think there's any diet that everybody should do um i think that there are benefits to doing for someone like you you might actually find benefit for very short periods introducing maybe a two week intermittent fast a three week intermittent fast there are um you know intestinal benefits cellular benefits that aren't necessarily related to body composition you know physique but at a microscopic level we've seen in our lab that there is benefit um even doing one bout of fasting a week there can be some benefit to that in terms of reducing inflammation your baseline inflammation we all walk around with inflammation in our bodies it can help reduce that for a period so you know there's no there's no harm in doing it um but i think any physique would find benefit at some level but it's it's not a must certainly in order to be healthy [Music] you've actually done some research in the lab on this yeah we have done research uh in in part because of personal interest we do a lot of uh diet related work because we're personally interested in these things so we've been our own guinea pigs for some of these studies but what we found since our lab focuses on on the gut and gut health and the bacteria and how foods can modify bacteria we naturally ask how does intermittent fasting affect the population of bacteria in the gut and and in turn inflammatory profile of the intestine and what we found was that even a single bout of fasting and this was a total water only 24-hour bout of fasting um actually suppressed what what we call you know pro-inflammatory bacteria in the intestine and actually promoted a very good good health promoting bacteria in the intestine so the the consequence of that is potentially if you fast more than one day a week or if you fast one day over multiple weeks you might be able to continuously suppress pro-pro-inflammatory bacteria and promote the good ones such that you can actually change the inflammatory tone of your intestines this is all super interesting and i think that it's really important for people out there to um know the why and the benefits and you know if it's something they should try or not but it sounds like there's a lot of benefits to it yeah i think if anyone is curious about doing it give it a try you know give it a try people yeah maybe i'll try as well who knows so if people want to know more about this and they're interested in your work uh where can they find you uh you're welcome to uh follow me on instagram um just plug in my name i'm there um if you have specific questions you can dm me on instagram i try to address all the questions i get it might be a little slow at times but feel free to reach out to me there i love hearing from people who want to improve their health and fitness and try to be helpful susan thank you so much for taking the time it's been a pleasure i'm so happy that people out there get this knowledge for someone like you uh you know i'm lucky i get to spend some time with you outside of the camera as well so i knew this but you know now you guys know and i always say you become a product of the people you spend the most time with and i always try to surround myself with experts and you're definitely one of them so keep up the good job and thank you so much thank you magnus i feel the same way that's it for today and we'll be back with some more videos with susan this is the three part series so hope you guys like this video don't forget to press like and hit subscribe i'll see you next week [Music] you

Channel: Magnus Method

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Keywords: Intermittent Fasting, fasting, how to lose fat, how to lose weight, exercise, burning fat, intermittent, best diets, diets, keto diet, healthy eating, how to be healthy, weight loss, how to do intermittent fasting, intermittent fasting meal plan, fasting and weight loss, intermittent fasting explained, serious weight loss, intermittent fasting tips, what is fasting, guide to fasting, a beginners guide to intermittent fasting, fasting benefits, how to burn fat faster

Id: K6v22PZiuk8

Length: 17min 24sec (1044 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 30 2021