To say that losing weight is a difficult and frustrating experience for almost everyone who ever tries it can only begin to capture the discouragement that years of struggle have brought to so many. As a primary care doctor I would say about 75% of people who come to my office either need or want to lose some amount of weight. But how to make this happen?
When I started in primary care I remember thinking that helping people lose weight would be easy. I was young, naive and freshly educated with the best modern medical knowledge. I promptly set out giving the best advice I had learned. It’s basic math don’t you know. Laws of physics and all. You burn more calories than you take in and the weight is going to come off.
Well, it sounded good and made sense to me. And I kept at it, year after year. I tried to motivate people. I had the best of intentions. You have to want it…etc. In reality I am only beginning to see the guilt trip that physicians can unknowingly place on people.
Then one day about 7 years into my practice I had a thought. I was thinking of different people that I had helped quit smoking and how many of them had not really wanted to stop but had other motivators that were enough to see them through. And then I tried to think of all the patients that I had helped lose weight sustainably…
I could only think of one patient.
I had counseled thousands of patients about diet and exercise. Why am I not seeing more benefit? I’m thinking, “I can guarantee that people want to lose weight way more than they want to quit smoking.” People spend a lot of money on weight loss pills and programs. They work hard and cut calories. Yet they rarely succeed. Why is this?
Then I became discouraged.
For a time I basically gave up on dietary counseling altogether because I thought “What is the point?” I gave basic advise. Cut out the junk food and soda etc. I thought, “Am I uniquely bad?” No, I talked to colleagues and they reported similar stories. I looked at national data which was equally bad. Nobody seemed to know what to do.
It was at this low point that the story of how I came upon fasting began. I first observed the potential of fasting with a patient whose Type 2 Diabetes significantly improved after a medically necessitated period of fasting. So check out that link for the background on that. For the purposes of this article I will say that after finding fasting as a therapeutic tool I have not looked back and it has been night and day in my medical practice ever since. Nearly every day now I have people coming back to clinic who are losing weight and having substantial improvement in their health due to a practice of simple fasting.
At its essence fasting is incredibly simple. If you ponder deeply about it it is actually… nothing. It is nothing at all applied to ones life for a period of time. Now it doesn’t get much simpler than that!
To be clear there is a lot of complexity going on inside the body. As a person of science I am very interested in these things, but that stuff can get somewhat complex. I find that some people find it helpful to know some of these finer points and others find it overwhelming or at least unnecessary. “Skip the lecture and just tell me what works!”
This is the Key Point
There are two energy pathways in the body:
Pathway A: (Fed State)
You are burning food for energy. Move the slider all the way to the left. Every time you eat you are resetting the clock on Pathway A.
If you eat breakfast early and dinner late you may stay in Pathway A indefinitely.
Pathway B: (Fasted State)
You are burning stored energy. ~12 hours without eating and you’ve flipped the switch. Drag the slider to the right.
8 hr eating plus 12 hr to Pathway B gives you 4 hours running on stored energy each day. That’s Level 1.
There is No Space to Burn Body-fat
Do you want to burn away body-fat without exercise? That is Pathway B. The trouble is our paradigm of three meals spread throughout the day never allows us to go there. It doesn’t have so much to do with calories. It has everything to do with space to let the body activate its natural, hardwired fat-burning pathways. You need more than 12 hours.
The body-fat is the body’s emergency plan for when the food runs out. To the body this is a precious resource. It will never waste it. It will always run on the easier sources of energy while they are available. This is the power of fasting. Give the body some space. Trust it. It knows what to do. It’s fat-burning time.
Ready to start? Check out our Simple Fasting Plans for details.
If you would like to hear a more detailed analysis as to why fasting works for weight loss I recommend that you continue with the following series of articles:
1. Understanding Insulin and Metabolic Adaptation.
2. Understanding and Managing Hunger.
3. What to Eat and Drink when on a Fasting Program.