The Hidden Benefit Of Fasting That No One Is Talking About…

Fasting is very in at the moment. Despite being popularised thousands of years ago by various religious sects and being present in almost every single society and religious practice since the dawn of time it is undergoing a very modern rebirth.

A brief history of fasting:

Feel free to skip this if you want to get into the meat of the article:

Skipping meals was once fitness heresy. All through the 90s, it was a widely held belief that if you wanted to get into shape then you had to eat 6 meals a day, at regular intervals, to keep the metabolism purring like a well-groomed feline. If you went without protein for longer than 3 hours then unspeakable things would happen to your body as you enter the inner circle of catabolism and experience soul destroying loss of gains. If you were skipping meals regularly then you might as well not bother training at all.

As you can imagine this mindset created a high barrier to entry for every day, non-gym obsessed person.

Then disruption

Ori Hofmekler published his Warrior Diet which utterly rejected the notion that the Bodybuilder approach was the correct approach to physical mastery. He built a pseudo-historical thesis on the idea that the great warriors of yore, the Roman centurions, in particular, subsisted on meager rations through the day and a hearty feast in the evening. He proposed a 4-hour feeding window.

Martin Berkhan, the godfather of intermittent fasting pioneered a 16/8 ‘Leangains’ approach to dieting. The controversial Swede maintained year-round extreme leanness whilst possessing excellent muscular development and strength levels. More than anyone he challenged the status quo of multiple meal feedings being superior to restricted feeding windows. Crucially he did this by referencing scientific papers rather than referencing historical anecdote.

Brad Pilon, operating at roughly the same time as Berkhan released his book Eat, Stop, Eat. A Fasting manifesto which explored a lot of the data around fasting.

More recent incarnations of these approaches are the 5/2 diet- eat normally for 5 days and severely restrict your food for 2. Gregory O’Gallagher has essentially repackaged the 16/8 approach with his own spin to great effect and Berkhan has come out of the wilderness after a long hiatus.

So far so fitness. Why the sudden interest in fasting? Mainstream science has been giving fasting some attention of late which has lent a decent amount of credibility to the practice. Valter Longo, in particular, has been examining the impact of restricted feeding windows in rodents. Most of the benefits associated with fasting seem to be centered around the process of autophagy. This cellular clean-up process is triggered by a fasting state and helps to optimize cellular repair and mitochondrial function.

The idea is that there are discrete benefits to fasting above and beyond the calorie restriction aspect.

Episodic periods of scarcity are more beneficial for the body than chronically low-calorie diets.