The Fast Diet: The secret of intermittent fasting � lose weight, stay healthy, live longer (2 page)

I’ve argued for years that dieting is a fool’s game, doomed to fail because of the restrictions and deprivations imposed on an otherwise happy life, but this felt immediately different. The scientific evidence was extensive and compelling, and (crucially for me) the medical community was positive. The effects, for Michael and others, were impressive, startling even. In his
Horizon
documentary, Michael called it ‘the beginning of something huge… which could radically transform the nation’s health’. I couldn’t resist. Nor could I conceive of a reason to wait.

In the months since I wrote
The Times
feature, I have remained a convert. An evangelist, actually. I’m still ‘on’ the Fast Diet now, but I barely notice it. At the outset, I weighed 60kg (around nine and a half stone). At 5’7”, my BMI was an OK 21.4. Today, as I write, I weigh 54kg (eight and a half stone) with a BMI of 19.4. That’s a weight off. I feel light, lean and alive. Fasting has become part of my weekly life, something I do automatically without stressing about it.

Six months in, I have more energy, more bounce, clearer skin, a greater zest for life. And, it has to be said, new jeans (27-inch waist) and none of my annual bikini dread as summer approaches. But, perhaps more importantly, I know that there’s a long-term gain. I’m doing the best for
my body and my brain. It’s an intimate revelation, but one worth sharing.

I have written about fashion, food and body shape in national newspapers and magazines for 20 years, starting out at
Vogue
, followed by
The Guardian, The Observer
and
The London Evening Standard,
where I was named British Fashion Journalist of the Year in 2000. I am currently a columnist for the
Mail on Sunday’s You Magazine
and a regular features writer for
The Saturday Times
. In 2009, I wrote a book,
101 Things to Do Before you Diet,
cataloguing my dismay with fad regimes, and their hopeless yo-yo of loss and gain. Intermittent Fasting is the only plan I have discovered in two decades that gets the weight off and keeps it off. And the anti-ageing health benefits? Gravy.

We know that for many people the standard diet advice simply does not work. The Fast Diet is a radical alternative. It has the potential to change the way we think about eating and weight loss.

• The Fast Diet demands we think not just about what we eat, but when we eat it
  
 

• There are no complicated rules to follow; the strategy is flexible, comprehensible and user-friendly
  
 

• There is no daily slog of calorie control – none of the boredom, frustration or serial deprivation that characterise conventional diet plans
  
 

• Yes, it involves fasting, but not as you know it; you won’t ‘starve’ on any given day
  
 

• You will still enjoy the foods you love. Most of the time
  
 

• Once the weight is off, sticking to the basic programme will mean that it stays off
  
 

• Weight loss is only one benefit of the Fast Diet. The real dividend is the potential long-term health gains, cutting your risk of a range of diseases, including diabetes, heart disease and cancer
  
 

• You will soon come to understand that it is not just a diet. It is much more than that: it is a sustainable strategy for a healthy, long life
  
 

Now, you’ll want to understand exactly how we can make these dramatic assertions. In the next chapter, Michael explains the science that makes the Fast Diet tick.

F
or most animals out in the wild, periods of feast and famine are the norm. Our remote ancestors did not often eat four or five meals a day. Instead they would kill, gorge, lie around and then have to go for long periods of time without having anything to eat. Our bodies and our genes were forged in an environment of scarcity, punctuated by the occasional massive blow-out.

These days, of course, things are very different. We eat all the time. Fasting – the voluntary abstaining from eating food – is seen as a rather eccentric, not to mention unhealthy, thing to do. Most of us expect to eat at least three meals a day and have substantial snacks in between. In addition to the meals and the snacks, we also graze; a milky cappuccino here, the odd biscuit there, or maybe a smoothie because it’s ‘healthier’.

Once upon a time parents told their children not to eat between meals. Those times are long gone. Recent research in the US, which compared the eating habits of 28,000 children and 36,000 adults over the last thirty years, found that the amount of time spent between what
the researchers coyly described as ‘eating occasions’ has fallen by an average of an hour. In other words, over the last few decades the amount of time we spend ‘not eating’ has dropped dramatically.
¹
In the 1970s, people like my mother would go around four and a half hours without eating, while children like me would be expected to last about four hours between meals. Now it’s down to three and a half hours for adults and three hours for children, and that doesn’t include all the drinks and nibbles.

The idea that eating little and often is a ‘good thing’ has partly been driven by snack manufacturers and faddish diet books, but it has also had support from the medical establishment. Their argument is that it is better to eat lots of small meals because that way we are less likely to get hungry and gorge on high-fat junk. I can appreciate the argument, and there have been some studies that suggest there are health benefits to eating small meals regularly, as long as you don’t simply end up eating more. Unfortunately, in the real world that’s exactly what happens.

In the study I quoted above, they found that compared to 30 years ago, we not only eat around 180 calories a day more in snacks – much of it in the form of milky and fizzey drinks and smoothies – but we also eat more when it comes to our regular meals, up by an average of 120 calories a day.

In other words, snacking doesn’t seem to mean that we
eat less at meal times; it just whets the appetite.

Eating throughout the day is now so normal, so much the expected thing to do, that it is almost shocking to suggest there is value in doing the absolute opposite. When I first started fasting I discovered some unexpected things about myself, my attitudes to food and about my beliefs.

• I discovered that I often eat when I don’t need to. I do it because the food is there, because I am afraid that I will get hungry later, or simply from habit
  
 

• I assumed that when you get hungry it builds and builds until it becomes intolerable, and so you bury your face in a vat of ice cream. I found instead that hunger passes and once you have been really hungry you no longer fear it
  
 

• I thought that fasting would make me distractible, unable to concentrate. What I’ve discovered is that it sharpens my senses and my brain
  
 

• I wondered if I would feel faint for much of the time. It turns out that the body is incredibly adaptable and many athletes I’ve spoken to advocate training while fasting
  
 

• I feared it would be incredibly hard to do. It isn’t
  
 

Although most of the great religions advocate fasting (the Sikhs are an exception, though they do allow fasting for medical reasons), I have always assumed that this was principally a way of testing yourself and your faith. I could see potential spiritual benefits but I was deeply sceptical about the physical benefits.

I have also had a number of body-conscious friends who, down the years, have tried to get me to fast, but I could never accept their explanation that the reason for doing so was ‘to rest the liver’ or ‘to remove the toxins’. Neither explanation made any sense to a medically trained sceptic like me. I remember one friend telling me that after a couple of weeks of fasting his urine had turned black, proof that the toxins were leaving. I saw it as proof that he was an ignorant hippy and that whatever was going on inside his body as a result of fasting was extremely damaging. As I wrote in the introduction, what convinced me to try fasting was a combination of my own personal circumstances – in my mid-50s, high blood sugar, slightly overweight – and the emerging scientific evidence, which I list below.

There were a number of researchers who inspired me in
their different ways, but one who stands out is Professor Mark Mattson of the National Institute on Aging in Baltimore. A couple of years ago he wrote an article with Edward Calabrese in
New Scientist
magazine, ‘When a little poison is good for you’,
²
which really made me sit up and think.

‘A little poison is good for you’ is a colourful way of describing the theory of hormesis – the idea that when a human, or indeed any other creature, is exposed to a stress or toxin it can toughen them up. Hormesis is not just a variant of ‘join the army and it will make a man of you’; it is now a well-accepted explanation in biology of how things operate at the cellular level.

Take, for example, something as simple as exercise. When you run or pump iron, what you are actually doing is damaging your muscles, causing small tears and rips. If you don’t completely overdo it, then your body responds by doing repairs and in the process makes the muscles stronger.

Vegetables are another example. We all know that we should eat lots of fruit and vegetables because they are chock full of antioxidants – and antioxidants are great because they mop up the dangerous free radicals that roam our bodies doing harm.

The trouble with this widely accepted explanation of how fruit and vegetables ‘work’ is that it is almost certainly wrong, or at least incomplete. The levels of antioxidants in fruits and vegetables are far too low to
have the profound effects they clearly do. In addition, the attempts to extract antioxidants from plants and then give them to us in a concentrated form, as a
health-inducing
supplement, have been unconvincing when tested in long-term trials. Betacarotene, when you get it in the form of a carrot, is undoubtedly good for you. When they took betacarotene out of the carrot and gave it as a supplement to patients with cancer, it actually seemed to make them worse.

If we look through the prism of hormesis at the way vegetables work in our bodies, we can see that the reasons for their benefits may be quite different.

Consider this apparent paradox: bitterness is often associated in the wild with poisons, something to be avoided. Plants produce a huge range of so-called phytochemicals and some of them act as natural pesticides, to keep mammals like us from eating them. The fact that they taste bitter is a clear warning signal: keep away. So there are good evolutionary reasons why we should dislike and avoid bitter-tasting foods. Yet some of the vegetables that are particularly good for us, such as cabbage, cauliflower, broccoli and other members of the brassica family, are so bitter that even as adults many of us struggle to love them.

The resolution to this paradox is that these vegetables taste bitter because they contain chemicals that are potentially poisonous. The reason they don’t harm us is that these chemicals are present in them at low doses that
are not toxic. Rather, they activate stress responses and switch on genes that protect and repair.

Once you start looking at the world in this way, you realise that many activities we initially find stressful – like eating bitter vegetables, going for a run, or Intermittent Fasting – are far from harmful. The challenge itself seems to be part of the benefit. The fact that prolonged starvation is clearly very bad for you does not imply that short periods of Intermittent Fasting must be a little bit bad for you. Indeed the reverse is true.

This point was vividly made to me by Professor Valter Longo, director of the University of Southern California’s Longevity Institute. His research is mainly into the study of why we age, particularly concerning approaches that reduce the risk of developing age-related diseases such as cancer and diabetes.

I went to see Valter, not just because he is a world expert, but also because he had kindly agreed to act as my fasting mentor and buddy, to help inspire and guide me through my first experience of fasting.

Valter has been studying fasting for many years, and he is a keen adherent of it. He lives by his research and thrives on the sort of low-protein, high-vegetable diet that his grandparents enjoy in southern Italy. Perhaps not coincidentally, his grandparents live in a part of Italy that has an extraordinarily high concentration of long-lived people.

As well as following a fairly strict diet, Valter skips
lunch to keep his weight down. Beyond this, once every six months or so, he does a prolonged fast that lasts several days. Tall, slim, energetic, Italian, he is an inspiring poster boy for would-be fasters.

The main reason he is so enthusiastic about fasting is that his research, and that of others, has demonstrated the extraordinary range of measurable health benefits that you get from doing it. Going without food for even quite short periods of time switches on a number of ‘repair genes’, which, as he explained, can confer longterm benefits. ‘There is a lot of initial evidence to suggest that temporary periodic fasting can induce long-lasting changes that can be beneficial against ageing and diseases,’ he told me. ‘You take a person, you fast them, after 24 hours everything is revolutionised. And even if you took a cocktail of drugs, very potent drugs, you will never even get close to what fasting does. The beauty of fasting is that it’s all co-ordinated.’