Episode 26: Is Intermittent Fasting the New Intuitive Dieting?
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Episode Transcription
Participant #1:
Hello, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of The Upbeat Dietitians Podcast. Hello, everyone. Welcome back. In today's episode, we are going over a very popular fad diet right now. Yes, it is a fad diet. We're going to be going over intermittent fasting. It's very exciting. I'm sure you've heard of it. I feel like most people that have heard of it, I can't imagine you haven't at this point. And basically it'll be kind of discussing what intermittent fasting is, the most popular methods. Who could benefit from it, the efficiency or efficacy more so with weight loss. And then when you should not do intermittent fasting. Yes. Okay. So let's jump right in and talk about what intermittent fasting is. So the term intermittent fasting is just like an umbrella term for having alternate periods of fasting and eating fasting, eating fasting like a back and forth, which honestly, I feel like that's just being a human is like having periods of that. But it mostly means like having specific times where you fast in times where you eat. And so you have these fasting times during specific times during the day, and you have these eating times during other particular times of the day. And there are different methods. So there's a few we're going to kind of lift off. But there are a bunch of different, like, intermittent fasting methods that kind of dictate when you eat and when you fast. So one very popular one is the 16 eight method, which is where you go for about 16 or so hours without food. And then that allows for about six to eight. I don't know. I can't do math six to 8 hours where you're actually eating food. The second one is the eat stop eat method. Which is where you fast for 24 hours, about one to two times a week. So you eat and then you stop and then you eat. And then the third one is the five two diet where you only consume 500 to 600 calories on two non consecutive days of the week. But the other five days of the week, you get to eat normally, whatever you want. Yeah, they're all very similar in the sense of there's restrictions on times you're eating and the amount of calories. So when it comes down to it, it's restriction over a certain amount of time. One of the biggest arguments behind why people should be doing intermittent fasting is there's a lot of points made around how excess calories and less activities leads to increased risk of obesity, type two diabetes, heart disease, et cetera. And basically they're saying that when you eat less by limiting what times and the amounts you're eating, you will better decrease your risk of these diseases. And Additionally, there have been arguments that fasting will decrease your amount of attempts tissue or your fat. And just to kind of come back right away, that first argument, there are many different methods of decreasing your calories and increasing activity. Not through fasting. You can eat three meals a day, two to three snacks a day, and still not consume excess calories and still be physically active. So just right away, that argument kind of doesn't have a lot to stand on. Additionally, the entire process around fasting being linked to decrease fat mass is not very supportive by research right now, but we'll get more into that as we go. Of course, we always want to come bring all this information to you from evidence based approach and kind of look over what the science says. So there are actually some cases where intermittent fasting can't benefit you with any fad diet or any diet in general. If it works for you and you feel good and energized throughout the day, great, you can keep doing that. But from a scientific standpoint, a testimonial basically, one person's experience is the weakest type of scientific evidence. So just because it works for one person does not mean it will work great for someone else. But if you feel amazing doing this, go ahead, knock yourself out. If you don't mind restricting yourself for long periods of time, that's your life, because at the end of the day, it's your body and you get to do what you want with it, and we will not judge you for that. It's when it becomes almost toxic behavior where people push it on to others and basically use fear mongering tactics and tell them like, oh, you're going to get diabetes because you're eating for more than 8 hours during the day, stuff like that. Most people work for 8 hours a day. So are they just supposed to not eat outside of work just for that perspective? Right. Like most fear Mongering and also saying it's the only approach that works. That's what gets me too, is saying it's the only way to lose weight, the only way to reduce your risk of diabetes or whatever other claims they make. Like we kind of already said, there's a million ways to go about health and you can't just pinpoint one particular style of eating. Exactly. Additionally, someone who might be experiencing garage symptoms, gastroesophageal reflux disease. Did I say that? Right? Okay. I haven't said that whole acronym in a long time. Essentially, like when you experience feelings of reflux and like your esophagus and burning and regurgitation Burgundy, I combine burning and regurgit vegetation. Any Burgundy experiencing intermittent fasting can help with this because one of the biggest things with Gerd is we want to reduce how many hours before bedtime we're eating. And Additionally that laying down, eating really close to eating can't exasperate our reflux symptoms. So from some standpoint, fasting at night can help because it's pushing back that window of when we're eating so close to bedtime. Basically with anything we talked about. We talked about this so much. If it's not maintainable and you can't see yourself doing this long term, it's probably not for you and you probably won't see a lot of success with it, which is really unfortunate because there are a lot of diets that make promises that they can't upkeep. Yeah. So in terms of weight loss, we can't talk about fasting without discussing weight loss. Let's go over if it will help with weight loss. So we kind of already boiled it down a little bit earlier saying that it is going to lead to a period of time you're allowed to eat versus other times where you can't eat. That likely to lead to egg caloric restriction and then that will lead to weight loss. So it boils down to that simple fact. But there is just a lot of cons that go along with it, which I'll get into. But this is the only way that it would lead to weight loss is if when you have that eating period, if you're eating less calories than you burn, then, yeah, you're going to lose weight. Just like any other fat diet where you eat less and you burn and weight loss occurs. Like Emily already said, you can eat three meals and two snacks throughout the day and still be in a collective deficit and lose weight and not have to feel so restricted. Another sort of or I guess one of the first cons of doing this, having this style, this pattern of eating is that restriction both physically and mentally, I'd say can lead to periods of overeating or even binging during that eating period, which I just said period like eight times. But we're going to go I didn't notice it that much. And if the whole point of this is weight loss and you're binging and overeating during that eating period, I can't keep saying the word period. I need to find a new word. If you're overeating during that time, then that's going to undo the whole effect of weight loss and you might even gain weight during this. It all comes down to if you can't do it for the rest of your life, don't even start doing it. It's not worth it. It is much more feasible to make small, sustainable changes that are actually going to be able to be part of your life forever. Because if they're not, you're just going to fall off of it and then feel guilty and then probably head straight into that whole restriction cycle anyway. So if you feel like you already kind of do a fasting thing, maybe like you don't eat breakfast and you kind of do lunch and dinner and you feel like you don't overeat during those times and that works for you. Cool. Keep it up. Go for it. That's totally fine. But I have seen a lot of clients that don't eat breakfast just because they don't have time or they don't know what to eat or they forget and then they end up overeating at either lunch or dinner or like at nighttime because it just comes back with a vengeance that hunger does. And then that, of course, would be where a fasting would not be effective. So again, if it works for you to not have breakfast or whatever meal would be, go for it. But it often just leads to overeating later in the day. Yeah. I actually joke that I do intermittent fasting because I like eating dinner so early. Like, I eat at 04:00 p.m.. I am a senior citizen and I will eat breakfast around like 738. So I'm technically getting if I like, I typically finish on like 430. So I'm getting about at least like a 1415 hours fast in I'm technically an intermint faster, but I don't call it that just because I like eating early dinners. Yeah. You don't have to label your diet. You can just. No. Anyway, that feels good. Yeah. And I don't even need to. It's just because I put them off. It's whatever works for you. I don't skip meals because I'm a hungry person. Hungry Hungry Emily. I am a Hungry hungry hippo. Hungry hungry. I wasn't going to call you a hippo, but if you want to call yourself that's okay. I call myself a Hungry Hungry Hippo just because of the commercials. You know the game. Well, yeah. Okay. What commercials that are you talking about? Have you never seen a Hungry Hungry Hippo commercial? Not the commercial, no. It's all these people playing Hungry Hungry Hippos and then there's like some music going on in the background. Can you still buy them? Can you still buy that game? I think so. Like the commercials are like recent. Yeah. Go watch a commercial. I don't think this is an actual song, but I'm so Hungry Hungry mostly because I like the game I used to play all the time. Yeah. Maybe that's why I became dietitian. We were inspired put that in a cover letter. I was inspired by the childhood game Hungry Hungry. I wanted to help the other Hungry Hungry. I felt bad for the ones that didn't get to eat the marbles, and that's how I knew I wanted to be a dietitian.
Participant #1:
Anyway, the last point kind of is when you should not do intermittent fasting. So if you have any type of history of disorder eating, an aid disorder, obsessive exercise, any type of really extreme restriction can be detrimental to your health. And we don't want to push you back into that cycle of disorder eating or anything else like that. So that kind of goes not only for intermittent fasting but any type of really restrictive diet. We want to work on building up your relationship with food in your body again and not necessarily telling you what you can and cannot do. Additionally, if you work a high stress, high energy job where you're on your field throughout the day or you work all day and you're a parent and you have to take care of your kids or you work multiple jobs, essentially, if you are doing a lot throughout the day and need to be pretty energized, intermittent fasting probably won't be for you because there's a period of time where you're not allowed to eat. And if you need that energy from food, you're going to be really tired and can potentially burn out. Yeah. Keyword food. There don't just be depending on caffeine for energy when you could be eating. Yes, that too. We should do an episode on caffeine. We should. We touched on it. And like the back to school month, we should do a whole episode. Yes. I feel like there's a lot we can go into that. So stay tuned. We'll talk about caffeine. Additionally, since we just talked about weight loss, you should probably not do intermittent fasting for weight loss because there are much more maintainable strategies you can take to lose weight and just restricting the time of day or taking out meals, it can lead to a caloric deficit. But are you going to do that for long periods of time and when you want to go back to more normal eating, how your body adjusted that so probably not the best weight loss method as well. And then lastly, if you are a diabetic, you should not be doing intermittent fasting because if you've worked with any type of dietitian before you've got any type of carbide education, diabetic education. Whatnot it's really important that we are maintaining a stable blood sugar throughout the day and with long periods without eating that can lead to those hypoglycemic States and your body will overcompensate with those other systems and you might have to rely more on medication or whatnot. And your body typically wants food when it's not hypoclycemic state so normally you would add like 15 grams of carb or something to get it back up pretty quickly. But if you're within that fasting period, what are you going to do? It can be really dangerous for diabetics especially. So we do not recommend it. Yeah. So final verdict then is I say like two out of ten. We would not recommend in a minute fasting. It's not a zero. We will save other fat diets for zeros because there are worse things to do than intermittent fasting because apparently Emily is intermittent faster. She exposed herself on camera today. This is a safe space. Should we start ranking diets? I feel like we should. We should go back. That'd be fun. We could do a whole episode of just like ranking then. Yes. Okay. But anyway, I say two out of ten for fasting. I don't know if you agree or not. I agree it can work for some people. But if you just naturally don't eat for twelve to 16 hours a day, you don't have to call it in a minute fasting. That can just be when you are hungry or not hungry or sleeping or whatever. And that's okay. You don't have to have a name for your diet. You can just eat in a way that feels good for you. Of course, like Emily just said, we do want you guys to eat about every three to 4 hours. Ideally, that helps with not only maintaining that blood glucose stability but also helping you stay satisfied for a while so you don't end up getting down to like a one on the hunger scale. And then overcompensating and eating so much you get full and then you end up being too full. So you restrict and that whole cycle just keeps going around. So ideally we want to shoot for like getting something in every three to 4 hours and trying to get in some protein, fiber, and healthy fats. Each of those eating periods help us again with blood sugar stabilization and staying satisfied. Go help cool blood. Does it again. Yeah, I don't think I really have much to add on that. And yeah, I guess I'm an accidental intermittence. Every day you expose something about yourself that makes me question everything. First the peanut butter thing, now you're an intermittent faster. I know it can't keep up. It's okay. Maybe someone will also realize they're an accidental intermittent faster. But I also don't go around promoting it. I just kind of live my life and do whatever I want. Ais? Yeah, accidental element. We should get shirts that say that. Would you guys like those with any other AIS? One shirt that says AIS. It's like medical condition. What is that? We should make this? I feel like would that be like somehow giving back to the intermittent fasting energy right now? We're not going to do that. We are all our own thing. We are intuitive eating. That's where God and if you happen to intuitively fast, I guess that's okay. As long as it's actually intuitive like Emily and not like Gwenneth Paltrow. Yeah, exactly. We don't support that because that's not a thing. Intuitive fasting is not a thing. You're listening to audio. I am wagging my finger ferociously right now.
Participant #1:
No. Okay. Okay. Let's get to the voters question. Yeah. So in honor of fall and this is the first, I guess, is it officially fall? Isn't fall in like a couple of weeks into September, so it's still summer. Technically, when they hear it, though, it'll be fall. Well, it's September, so we can do our first fall question. Yeah. We make panels here. Yeah. Our bonus question today is candy corn, Yay or nay. And I feel like you know my answer. I think I know yours. Yeah. Well, I'm a human garbage disposal, so. Yeah, I'll eat literally anything. Pretty much. It's not my favorite candy. I don't choose it. If it's there, I'll eat it, but I might go buy it, probably. Yeah. I'm the same way. I get really excited around the hype of fall foods and I get really excited for candy corn, but I'll eat like ten pieces and then be over. I know. It's just like a swock of sugar. Yeah. I was going to say it's so sugary and I love how it looks because it's so cute. I think that's the appeal for me, too. It's just like the visual aspect of it. Yes. Follow up question, candy corn versus the candy pumpkins. Pumpkins all the way. Really? Oh, yeah. I was going to say candy corn because the pumpkins are so sugary because they're like bigger and they're so much more dense. I only have like two and I'm like I agree. Okay, cool. Yeah. I was like a little bit candy pumpkins. Pair them with some protein. That blood sugar is the best. Yeah. We don't want that roller coaster going on. Oh, gosh. Cool. Such a dietitian. Okay. That was an easy one. We agreed for once. Yes. Cool. All right. Thanks for tuning into another episode of The Upbeat Dietitians podcast. As always, email us DM us if you have any episode ideas you want to hear, any guests you want us to host on here. And yes, thank you so much for supporting us. And we hope to
Participant #1:
I don't know how you always get stuck during the outro, but I live for it. One day I'm just going to make a progression video of every other day. I like to think it's improving, but it's improving. It's improving. Okay. Yeah. Well, look out for that Tic TAC, guys. It's coming of Emily progressing in her outro. Yes. Okay. Thank you guys so much for listening. We will see you guys next week. All right, bye.
