Postby Harriet » Tue Feb 12, 2019 4:34 pm
Oh, I got so long-winded with this - sorry - but I have always found it interesting.
For several years in the very early 2010s I did Alternate Day fasting form of I.F., from the 2008 book of that name, with low calories one day and high calories the next. You would start out at less than 500 on your low days (the author Dr. James Johnson called it the 20/100, meaning starting at 20 percent of calories one day, 100 the next) but let low days go up when you felt you were off to a good start, usually a few weeks. I was at 800/1800 for a long time, about 45/100, and even dd learned to ask if I was "up" or "down" on a certain day. There was nothing really wrong with it and it probably helped me keep my weight stable. For all I know, I was receiving the longevity benefits all through that time. I began to blame it for some of what my doctor called "gastritis" (which is how doctors tell you your tummy's irritated) and kind of moved away because I thought maybe the empty-tummy days were causing it. No proof of that.
By 2014, the longest time ago that we can search this forum, I wasn't fasting anymore and the farthest back post I can find, I was just saying I used to do it and might do it sometimes again if I felt like it. So I can't find much I said here over those years.
The disappointment for me as I followed ADay was that on the net, everyone on it just posted about calories, and people were eating horribly, insisting they got the same benefits as long as they ate the same calories, no matter what they ate. This was an error in understanding the book. In the book, Johnson based his plan on nutrient-dense and high-water-content foods, suggesting his readers follow Dr. Barbara Rolls' work on eating food with lots of volume, to feel full.
But he also felt he should at least include the popular discussion in those years about whether weight loss in and of itself was a health goal worthy of reaching, no matter what. Walter Wil_let had famously said that since the only benefit between eating 1.5 daily fruit/veg servings and eating 8 was a 25-percent reduction in heart disease (this was later disproved - there are many other benefits), then he believed it wasn't statistically significant enough to suggest that overweight people make it a priority. Dr. Johnson allowed that discussion in his book even though he disagreed, because, as he explained, he believed his theory would triumph. The theory was that I.F. would minimize the impact of heart-disease promotion because (1) you would lose weight, and (2) you would be activating a stress response that would save you from the lack of the fruits and vegetables he advocated. I'd known people of all weights who had died of heart disease, and thought 25 percent more living patients was not just statistically significant it was downright wonderful, so Wil_let's ideas only made me focus on nutrition more.
Eventually the BBC did a series of programs on new ideas in health, with the first one being about this type of fasting, and way more popular than any of the others. The psychiatrist who hosted it wrote a book called The Fast Diet, also called 5:2 (only 2 days at 500 cals per week instead of 3), which was more popular than the AF book had been. As often happens in the publishing world, he didn't even mention Dr. Johnson, who had co-authored the first published study of I.F. in humans in 2004. He did mention the other co-author, Mattson, whose only research had been in rodents until he met Johnson. Oh, well. Mattson's a smart fellow, and deserved attention, too. That Fast Diet author has just come out (last month) with a new book called The Fast 800, with 2 different plans, one of which suggests no alternating times, just a flat 800 calories every day.
So he's skipping all around with this book - he had once said he saw no reason to hold calories low every day. He says there are 3 plans, but the 3rd is the Mediterranean Diet, and I don't see how that's his.
I'm fascinated by medically supervised fasting in facilities, with either juice or water fasts, which are doing great things for sufferers of extreme chronic disease. Wonderful stories coming out of that recently.