The Protein Review

… Protein, Weight Loss and Training

Posts Tagged eat stop eat

Buy These eBooks

Jan 20

Posted by Ty in Reviews | No Comments

I’m such an impulse buyer that I bought these ebooks IMMEDIATELY after seeing the websites:

How Much Protein?
Eat Stop Eat

These are the COOLEST ebooks I’ve read in a while. That’s why I posted all those excerpts about them.

I’ll quit yapping about it …you can read about them here:

How Much Protein?
Eat Stop Eat

——————————————–
HERE’S WHY I’M  A WEIRDO
——————————————–

So, the guy who owns these products is an entrepreneur as well as a health & fitness freak and he gave me a review copy of each of these books for free so that I could promote them as an affiliate… but I bought them anyway.

And the reason why???

I didn’t want to have to email him and ask for it… and then wait on his response…

I wanted them NOW.

So I bought the ebooks immediately. 

(It’s cheap anyway).

Whatever.

Here’s the deal – this is GOOD. I highly recommend these ebooks because they WILL HELP YOU.

I’m already implementing what I’ve learned.  Check it out:

How Much Protein?
Eat Stop Eat

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Health Benefits of Fasting – Conclusion

Dec 19

Posted by Ty in Articles | No Comments

As you can see from this series on fasting, fasting has been an often overlooked answer to the dieting needs of many people.  For the vast majority of us, the answer to the question, “Should we be fasting?” is a resounding YES!

For healthy people wanting a simple and effective way to lose weight, the combination of short term fasting and exercise is an easy way to create a caloric deficit and has no negative impact on our metabolism or our muscle.

Fasting for 24 hours, once or twice a week may be the easiest way to decrease your calorie intake by 10% to 20%, without having to sacrifice and restrict what you eat. It’s like getting the benefits of an entire week of strict dieting, while only sacrificing for one or two days.

So with fasting we can create prolonged dietary restriction (the only proven nutritional method of weight loss) while only sacrificing one or two 24 hour periods in a week, allowing us to reset the balance between fed and fasted.

The best part of these findings is that since many of the health benefits from fasting occur in the first 24 hours; we can use the Eat Stop Eat style of flexible intermittent fasting and NEVER GO A DAY WITHOUT EATING!

This series about fasting was taken from the ebook Eat Stop Eat by Brad Pilon.

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Fasting Effects On Insulin Levels

Nov 30

Posted by Ty in Articles | 3 Comments

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.

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The Health Benefits Of Fasting

Nov 26

Posted by Ty in Articles | No Comments

When you look at all the research on fasting, it’s astonishing to note all the health benefits that fasting offers. You may remember in the late 1990’s that the Mediterranean diet became the latest fad diet? The idea behind the diet was based on research conducted in the Greek Island of Crete. The research suggested that the diet of the Mediterranean region was superior to the North American diet.

On average, the population of Crete were healthier than North Americans, with less incidence of cardiovascular or heart disease. Researchers attributed this improved health to a high daily intake of whole grains, fruits, vegetables and olive oil.

This theory made good sense, as these are all accepted ‘healthy’ foods. However, recently a group of researchers at the University of Crete, School of Medicine suggest that one very important factor was left out of this research. The majority of the Greek people in this area are religious and In the Greek Orthodox Christian Church there are some very lengthy fasting recommendations.

The Orthodox Church specifies a combination of dietary restrictions and fasting for a total of between 180 and 200 days out of every year. While this is by no means conclusive evidence, it did suggest that a very healthy group of people were not only consuming plentiful amounts of healthy foods, but also took part in routine periods of fasting.

There is strong evidence to show that short term intermittent fasting, was not only an effective and easy way to cut calories and thus lose unwanted body fat, but it was also associated with many amazing health benefits.  By short term I mean 1-3 days of fasting and these days would never be in a row.  You would want to have a break of at least 2 days between each fast.

The Health Benefits of Fasting

In dozens of published peer reviewed scientific studies, short-term intermittent fasting has been found to have the following health benefits:

  • Decreased body fat & body weight
  • Maintenance of skeletal muscle mass
  • Decreased blood glucose levels
  • Decreased insulin levels & increased insulin sensitivity
  • Increased lipolysis & fat oxidation
  • Increased Uncoupling Protein 3 mRNA
  • Increased norepinephrine & epinephrine levels
  • Increased Glucagon levels
  • Increased growth hormone levels
  • Decreased food related stress

Quite a list I’m sure you will agree. What is even more amazing is that many of the benefits were found after as little as 24 hours of fasting!  You have to admit, these are impressive findings!

So if fasting can do all of these amazing things, it begs the question – should we all be fasting?

This post has been adapted from the book Eat Stop Eat by Brad Pilon

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Intermittent Fasting

Oct 4

Posted by Ty in Articles | 8 Comments

If you have been following my recent posts you can see that intermittent fasting is an area that I am becoming interested in.  Intermittent fasting is where you go on a fast for 24 hours and then return to your normal eating patterns.

This style of fasting seems to be a safe and healthy way to shed off bodyfat by creating an overall calorie deficit over a week. Intermittent fasting does not seem to have any side effects whatsoever, and is being used as an effective weight loss plan.

The fast can be performed just once a week, but it is optimal to do it twice a week to create a calorie deficit.  Obviously you never fast 2 days in a row.  The best way is after the first fast have 2 days of normal eating, then the second fast, then 3 days of normal eating before repeating the cycle.

One particular study on fasting showed the following results:

  • No decrease in Energy Expenditure – metabolic rate DID NOT slow down
  • A decrease in RQ – indicating an increase in fat burning
  • Increased blood flow
  • Decreased blood insulin levels – Considered to be one of the major health benefits of fasting
  • Increased glucagon levels – more reliance on body fat as a fuel source
  • Increased Growth Hormone levels
  • Increased noradrenaline – More fat burning hormones
  • No increase in cortisol – No reason to think that muscle is being broken down

Basically, the fast put the body into a fat burning state without compromising muscle mass.

I’m always happy to test out new things so, the plan that I’m going to follow is found in Eat Stop Eat by Brad Pilon.  I think I’ll track myself for about 12 weeks and then post my findings.  What I’ll be doing is fasting twice a week and working out twice a week as well.  The gym workout will be weightlifting performed on the same day as the fast.

Before you freak out, you need to understand that this is exactly what Brad recommends.  Check out the ebook and see for yourself how this works.
Either way I’ll still post my progress so that you can monitor it here too.

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3 Day Fast

Sep 13

Posted by Ty in Articles | No Comments

I’ve only just got an email from Brad Pilon about a 3 day fast.  If you don’t realise, Brad has written another ebook (his first actually) called Eat Stop Eat.

It’s about how to use fasting as a method of calorie control to create fat loss.  I’m currently trying it out and will post results once I’ve finished.

Anyway, recently Brad read a study about the effects of a 3 day fast.  It’s interesting stuff so I thought I would share it with you.

In this study the effects of a 3 day fast on human metabolism was examined.

By the way, Eat Stop Eat does not use a 3 day fast!

The authors found the benefits associated with fasting are:

  • No decrease in Energy Expenditure – metabolic rate DID NOT slow down
  • A decrease in RQ – indicating an increase in fat burning
  • Increased blood flow – some very impressive numbers, (I challenge any “Nitric Oxide” supplement to show this kind of data!!)
  • Decreased blood insulin levels – Considered to be one of the major health benefits of fasting
  • Increased glucagon levels – more reliance on body fat as a fuel source
  • Increased Growth Hormone levels – If you have read Eat Stop Eat then you know that I think this is one of the major keys behind the benefits of fasting
  • Increased noradrenaline – More fat burning hormones
  • No increase in cortisol – No reason to think that muscle is being broken down

One interesting point was the demonstration of the change in fuel sources that were fueling metabolism.

The amount of calories being burned during a  fasting day and a non-fasting day are roughly the same (about 2000 cals), however during fasting a lot more of these calories are coming from fat. And, since the subjects were not eating any fat while fasting, this fat must have been body fat.

Another interesting finding was that the majority of this fat was stomach fat.

While I do not recommend fasting for 3 days straight (Eat Stop Eat is done over 24 hours), this study does add evidence to the idea that fasting can be an effective method of reducing calorie intake and increasing fat burning without negatively effect metabolic rate, or muscle mass.

Check out Eat Stop Eat here and discover how easy it can be to lose bodyfat.  No diets, no restrictions.

(Gjedsted J, Gormsen LC, Nielsen S, et al. Effects of a 3 day fast on regional lipid and glucose metabolism in human skeletal muscle and adipose tissue. Acta Physiol 2007, 191, 205-216.)

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