Fasting Effects On Insulin Levels
Decreased Insulin Levels & Increased Insulin Sensitivity
Insulin is one of the most important hormones in your body. Every nutrition, medicine and physiology textbook has at least one chapter devoted entirely to the effects that insulin has on your body.
When you eat, the insulin levels in your body increase. This increased amount of circulating insulin drives the storage of nutrients. In other words, insulin is the primary signal that tells your body to store the energy from your food as body fat and glycogen.
When insulin levels are high, you are in storage mode, plain and simple. What’s more, when insulin is elevated, you are unable to release fat from your fat stores – The key thing to remember is that when your insulin is high, your fat isn’t going anywhere.
Many popular diets, such as The Zone and The South Beach Diet, are based around the idea of controlling your insulin levels. These diets attempt to help you accomplish this by instructing you to eat small frequent meals that have a low effect on your blood sugar levels.
While eating frequent small meals, or meals with a low ‘glycemic index’ (a measure of the meal’s effect on blood sugar) may help you ‘control’ or ‘even out’ your insulin levels, fasting for as little as 24 hours has been shown to drastically reduce your insulin levels. This is especially important because in order to burn body fat insulin levels must be very low. Simply ‘evening them out’ may not be enough.
In research conducted on people who fasted for 72 hours, plasma insulin levels dropped dramatically, reaching a level that was less than half of its initial levels. What is even more impressive is that 70 percent of this reduction happened during the first 24 hours of fasting.
(As little as 24 hours of fasting can cause a marked decrease in circulating insulin levels.)
Extract from the ebook Eat Stop Eat by Brad Pilon.
Comments feed
So does this mean that someone like myself, who is trying to complete the almost impossible task of gaining muscle while losing fat should incorporate fasting into my diet plan. For example I currently eat 6-8 times a day, mainly protein 5-6 of those meals, and more carbohydrates and vitamins in the other 2-3, low fat conitnuously. I figured this would keep my metabolism high, while at the same time providing enough nutrients to gain muscle. My workout consists of crossfit, mixed with a basic powerlifter workout (Bill Starr’s 5×5). Doing HIIT on between days.
Hey London,
Fasting would definately help you lose bodyfat. With the experiments that I am doing with 24hr fasting I have not lost any muscle size or strength at all. I only do the fast once or twice a week (usually once a week due to my busy life at the moment). Brad explains in his ebooks that eating 6-8 times a day could actually keep you fat, it does depend on the volume of food you are eating and the overall total calories that you consume, of course. In Brad’s other ebook “How Much Protein” he also explains that even large protein consumption can contribute to bodyfat.
Nutrient wise, you sound like you are doing the right thing there and the workouts are good too. Heavy weights preserve muscle tissue while you are dieting. The other thing that Brad shows in “Eat Stop Eat” is that a 24 hr fast can cover a two day period. So, for example, you could actually eat up till 12 noon, then start a fast until 12 noon the next day and then commence eating again.
I should post more about “How Much Protein?” That book is a real eye opener about the myths around protein. Oh, the other thing you need with your diet is Creatine Monohydrate (don’t worry about the new fancy ones, stick to mono). Hope this helps and good luck!!!