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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Jason Fung
Read between
December 8, 2019 - January 21, 2020
Prolonged studies of fasting have found no evidence of electrolyte imbalances—the body has mechanisms in place to keep electrolytes stable during fasting.
During short-term fasts, salt depletion is not a concern.
Normally some minerals are lost in the stool and urine, but during fasting, that loss is minimized.
A therapeutic fast of 382 days was maintained with only a multivitamin with no harmful effects on health. In fact, this man felt terrific during this entire period.
Moreover, they found that hunger was virtually absent during these prolonged fasts.
studies show that after a four-day fast, resting energy expenditure increased by 12 percent. Rather than slowing the metabolism, fasting revs it up.
Growth Hormone Goes Up
Growth hormone also increases the availability of fats for fuel by raising levels of key enzymes, such as lipoprotein lipase and hepatic lipase. Since burning fat reduces the need for glucose, this helps maintain stable blood sugar.
Meals very effectively suppress the secretion of growth hormone,
overeating suppresses growth hormone levels by as much as 80 percent.
five-day fasting period,
secretion more than doubled.
very low-calorie diets are not able to provoke the same growth hormone response.
1992 study showed a fivefold increase in growth hormone in response to a two-day fast.
Brad Pilon, author of Eat, Stop, Eat, and Martin Berkhan, who popularized the LeanGains method of fasting, are both bodybuilders.
The underlying assumption of macronutrient-based guidelines is that all fats are equal, all carbohydrates are equal, and all proteins are equal. However, this is clearly false. Extra-virgin olive oil is not the same as trans-fat-laden margarine, even though both are pure fat. Our bodies respond completely differently to each one.
We do not eat a specific percentage of fats, protein, and carbohydrates. We eat foods. Certain foods are more fattening than others. Therefore, the best advice focuses on eating or not eating specific foods, not specific nutrients.
The problem arises when we start changing these foods from their natural state and then consuming them in large amounts.
Boxes of Cheerios do not grow in the ground. If it comes prepackaged in a bag or a box, it should be avoided. If it has a nutrition label, it should be avoided. Real foods, whether broccoli or beef, have no labels.
consumption of omega-6 fats is out of balance with our consumption of omega-3 fats (found in fatty cold-water fish, nuts, and seeds), the result is systemic inflammation, which is a factor in heart disease, type 2 diabetes, inflammatory bowel disease, and other chronic illnesses.
The basics of good nutrition can be summarized in these simple rules. Eat whole, unprocessed foods. Avoid sugar. Avoid refined grains. Eat a diet high in natural fats. Balance feeding with fasting.
Absolute fasts are not generally recommended for health purposes. The accompanying dehydration confers no additional health benefits that compensate for the increase in difficulty. The risk of medical complications is also much higher with absolute fasts.
There is no starvation mode from fasting where you shrivel up into the fetal position on your couch.
Periods
without food could last weeks or even months. There’s a reason that one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse is Famine.
Hippocrates
advised that treatment for obesity should include exertion after meals and eating a
high-fat diet, and he recommended that “they
should, moreover, eat only o...
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After a large meal, blood is shunted to your digestive system to cope with the huge influx of food, leaving less blood to go to the brain. The result? A food coma.
Benjamin Franklin
“The best of all medicines is resting and fasting.”
“Starvation Mode”
In studies with a baseline daily calorie consumption of approximately 2500 calories per day, reducing calories consumed
to approximately 1500 calories a day for a long stretch of time will result in a 25 to 30 percent reduction in BMR.
overfeeding studies, where subjects are asked to deliberately eat more than they normally do,...
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bodies are essentially conserving energy by not burning calories to keep us warm and moving.
If short-term fasting dropped our metabolism, humans as a species would not likely have survived.
four days of continuous fasting increased BMR by 12 percent.
Fatty acids in the bloodstream increased over 370 percent as the body switched over from burning food to burning stored fats.
Fasting Makes You Burn Muscle
Muscle, on the other hand, is preserved until body fat becomes so low that the body has no choice but to turn to muscle. This will only happen when body fat is at less than 4 percent.
elite male marathon runners carry approximately 8 percent
burning sugar, in the form of glycogen, for the first twenty-four to forty-eight hours after you stop eating,
The normal protein breakdown of around seventy-five grams per day falls to fifteen to twenty grams per day during fasting.
Running just on the fat stored in their bodies, most Americans could walk from New York to Florida without technically needing a bite to eat.
why would your body store excess energy as fat if it meant to burn protein
increased growth hormone helps maintain lean body mass.
Exercise builds muscle. Lack of exercise leads to atrophy of muscles.
Fasting Causes Low Blood Sugar
