The fast show

The science says that, when done safely, intermittent fasting can have wide-reaching health benefits

- Julie Lucas

Fasting has been in the news for some time now, but the practice of withholding food,calories and liquids from the body is nothing new – in fact the term breakfast means to ‘break the fast’. Far from being the latest fad, Muslims fast during Ramadan and Buddhists have practised it for centuries.

Dr Michael Mosley was the man to revolutionise the concept with his 5:2 diet: five days of the week you eat normally, the other two are restricted to 500 to 600 calories a day, helping him shed weight and reverse his type 2 diabetes. In his Fast 800 diet, Dr Mosley recommends followers aim to have an overnight fast each day, where they go for 12 hours without eating, say from 7pm to 7am.

‘Current research shows that giving our bodies a break from food, by intermittent fasting, can provide huge health benefits,’ he says. ‘These benefits extend beyond weight loss and include prevention of disease – including cancer prevention – and increased life expectancy.’

In a review of six human studies that compared intermittent fasting with continuous dieting, Dr Michelle Harvie of Manchester University found that weight loss achieved through intermittent fasting resulted in greater conservation of muscle mass, a lower calorie intake across the whole week, and a fall in the insulin resistance of 24% compared to 4% for the continuous dieters.

Nutritional therapist Tracey Harper also recommends trying time-restricted eating with the 16:8 diet, which compresses eating into an eight-hour time slot, then fasting for 16 hours. ‘

‘During a fast, your cells switch from using glucose as their primary fuel source to using fat’