What Breaks a Fast?

Time-restricted eating or intermittent fasting means restricting one’s eating to a specific period during a 24-hours day – or going without food for a fixed number of days.

There is a biological difference between fasting and time-restricted feeding. Fasting and eating est...

There are many factors that impact the calories burned part of the calories in, calories out equation.

• Some of those are obvious: the amount of exercise, type of exercise, basal metabolic rate, and how much energy one burns just sitting there. 
• Metabol...

If one's main goal is simply to lose weight, then it really does not matter what one eats provided that the number of calories burned is higher than the number of calories ingested. 

A study from 2018 looked at weight loss in people following one particular...

• In endurance athletes, it leads to a significant decrease in free testosterone (not to the extent that it should be avoided).
• Studies in athletes have shown significant reductions in cortisol.
• Shortening the feeding window to less than 8 hours can inc...

One of the aspects of fasting that have drawn a lot of people to time-restricted feeding and fasting is the clarity of mind that people get. 

• People don't have to think about when they're going to eat because they know when their eating window begins. They also don...

Relatively short feeding windows of say four to six hours do produce a number of positive health effects. Things like increased insulin sensitivity, which we know is good, remember type two diabetes is a reduction in insulin sensitivity improvements in beta cell function and the ...

You should allow yourself a transition period of anywhere from one week to 10 days in which you shift your feeding window by about an hour each day or so.

And then once you establish a feeding window that feels comfortable for you and that you think you ca...

It does seem that it can create significant weight loss and can help obese individuals because it can reduce resting blood glucose, and every other day fasting in many cases can produce more rapid effects on weight loss and reductions in blood glucose than time-restricted feeding...

If your main interest is maintaining and, or building muscle, then it can be beneficial to ingest protein early in the day.

You would still want to obey the foundational rule of no: not eating any food for the first hour post waking or at least the first ho...

• It pays off in the metabolic sense and in the health sense and in the weight maintenance or loss sense to not ingest any food in the first hour after waking and potentially for longer. 
• For the two and ideally three hours prior to bedtime, you also don't inge...

• Blood glucose and insulin go up when you eat and down when you don’t eat (barring type 1 or 2 diabetes)
• What you eat has a differential impact on the rise in blood glucose (e.g., simple carbs and sugars will raise it the most, grains will raise it more than fibrous carbs like lettuce...

• There are a few factors that are going to govern how quickly you transition from ingesting food to a fasted state, as you ingest your last bite or sip of calories, that's not when the fast begins. 
• Very large meals are going to take longer to digest than very small meals. So learning...

People think that they are on an eight-hour feeding window or six-hour feeding window, but when their data are analyzed (from fasting apps), it almost is always the case that they're actually on a feeding window that's one or even two hours longer than they think.

It turns out that peop...

There are not a lot of good studies exploring plant-based non-sugar sweeteners, like Stevia.

Most people need to establish this for themselves. The best way would be to wear a continuous glucose monitor to go into a fasted state of either one hour or two hours, or maybe...

It's essentially cleaning up dead cells and cells that are injured or sick. And this is a natural process that occurs mainly during sleep. Fasting of any kind does tend to enhance autophagy.

Autophagic conditions can also be created simply by follow...