Book Summary: The Fast Diet
The Fast Diet by Michael Mosley examines the health benefits of intermittent fasting. Intermittent fasting is essentially limiting the time of day you eat your meals to a particular window, such as 8 hours.
Related Book Summaries:
Grain Brain – David Perlmutter
What To Eat When – Michael Roizen
Quotes:
A pound of fat contains more energy than a pound of dynamite.
The more different types of plants you eat, the more diverse your microbiome.
There is no reason to be alarmed by benign, occasional, short-term hunger. Given base-level good health, you will not perish.
The Fast Diet Book Summary Notes:
- When your young you need to eat large amounts to make sure you meet your nutritional needs. As you get older though you just don’t need the same volume of food.
- Fasting can even have positive effects on conditions such as diabetes, Alzheimer’s and depression.
- Fasting was used by our evolutionary ancestors as we had no way of storing food safely long term.
- A study of type 2 diabetics found that the group which consumed their daily calories in 2 meals only, versus the other group which spaced the same amount of food across 6 meals, lost an average of 3 more pounds during the study.
- Fasting causes a drop off of IGF-1 within the body. Research on mice showed that mice genetically altered to not produce this same hormone lived almost twice as long as other mice.
- When IGF-1 drops off, the body begins a repair mode where it focuses on fixing and repairing cell damage.
- When examining a group of people with low natural IGF-1 the researchers found no instances of diabetes or cancer.
- Fasting can also help the body regulate its insulin levels.
- Fasting can be beneficial for people suffering from inflammatory disorders such as asthma and eczema.
