Happy New Years Eve friends!
So I want to start by saying a HUGE thanks to all of you that have read my blog thus far. The response had been great and I genuinely appreciate it. Especially as it is just the beginning and I'm still figuring out the best way to do this thing and finding my writing voice. So far I've had over 200 views and that is pretty cool. Heading into the new year, my goal is to put out one article every 2 weeks. Sometimes it may be more often and sometimes depending on externalities it may be less often. But that's my goal.
I realize I just posted the second article in the IF series yesterday but seeing as this protocol I'm doing regarding the topic begins arbitrarily tomorrow to start on the first day of the new year and will be running for 8 weeks through the end of February, I figured I'd just go ahead and post this protocol post to put it out there. Plus this will allow me to move on to start researching other topics since I'm sure you all are tired of reading about IF!!
OK for the protocol, we will be using the tried and true scientific method:
Ask a question: Can the addition of an intermittent fasting protocol to an already established HIIT style fitness program help maximize body weight reduction?
Background research: In creating the previous 2 blog posts, I researched more than 15 scientific journal articles and application articles through various sources, i.e. PubMed (various journals), Testosterone Nation website and others.
Construct a Hypothesis: If I add a daily 8 hour IF feeding window to my already established HIIT fitness protocol, then my overall body weight will be reduced by 5% over 8 weeks.
Let's dig into this testable guess. First, I'll explain a few things that are listed, the 8 hour feeding window is exactly that. I will allow caloric intake only during a predetermined 8 hour window each day. The other 16 hours will be set for digestion, recovery, sleep and essentially letting my guts take a rest. This time period will allow a resetting of blood glucose levels and improve insulin sensitivity. Also, considering the normal digestion period from putting food into your mouth to the small intestine breaking it all down and shuttling nutrients into the blood for use is anywhere from 3-8 hours depending on what you ate, this new period of nothing new coming in will encourage the body to be more efficient with energy expenditure. The idea is that since the body generally has high levels of stored energy through body fat, this gap in caloric intake will encourage the body to use this stored energy rather than relying on new nutrients being ingested. In simple terms, the hope is that limiting calories to be consumed during a smaller than normal window will encourage the body to burn all this flubber I have stored on my buns, hips and stomach!
The second aspect is the fitness plan. I used the acronym HIIT in the hypothesis above. What this means is High Intensity Interval Training. It is essentially a fitness protocol that includes short bursts of maximal exertion to jack the heart rate up followed by continued normal exertion throughout an entire workout. The plan that I'll be following is one that I used from the Muscle and Strength website, this is to prevent any biased situations seeing as I am a certified personal trainer (NASM). The program is a 5 day per week functional movement mixed training workout plan. There is a day for overall strength, a day for muscle endurance and hypertrophy, a day for overall power and a day for speed and agility. It will also include a day for stress reduction and flexibility through yoga. I have been doing this workout for a few weeks (not including the yoga day) and have a solid baseline. I've seen a reduction of overall bodyweight by 2% going from 255 lbs down to 250 lbs. So now I'll be adding the more target specific nutrition plan into the mix to see if, as guessed, I can drop an additional 13 lbs in 8 weeks.
I have compiled an Excel document that has my daily caloric goals including macronutrient breakdown and percentages. This is what I will use to ensure that I stay on track. I will do weight measurements every 2 weeks on Sundays using the scale at my gym for consistency.
Now is time to put up or shut up and get this experiment going. I'm looking forward to seeing where I end up at the end of 2 months.
If anyone is interested in getting more specifics or if you would like to implement a similar protocol feel free to reach out and let me know and we can discuss how to get your caloric goals etc.
Now go forth and make the last day of the year fantastic. Be safe and have fun and let's male 2016 our best year ever!!!!
Cheers,
Shawn
Thursday, December 31, 2015
Wednesday, December 30, 2015
Intermittent Fasting, What Else is There to It?
Hello friends!
So now we are starting to wind down after the holiday hangover and switch into auto pilot to finish the year out. Then it is as if a little switch goes off in ALL of our brains that says based on this arbitrary date (January 1st!), we must now begin the annual reinvigorated reinvention into a new you! We are all guilty of it, maybe not every single year but multiple times in your life you have sat down and put pen to paper thus creating a list of goals that you were finally going to accomplish. Now answer this one question with a very important follow up question to yourself: Of all the New Years goals that you have laid out over the years, have you ever accomplished one of them? ........ WHY NOT?
OK enough self reflection for now. We can dive into a whole new blog article on why arbitrary goal setting doesn't work for the majority of us. So I digress back to the topic at hand. Intermittent fasting. To summarize the first post on the topic in case you didn't read it, following an intermittent fasting protocol can help you reset your circadian rhythms and create a more stable hormonal balance. The benefits of that are better sleep which leads to more energy thus allowing the body to train harder, repair more efficiently and then watch those GAINZ roll in baby!
So now let's talk about a few benefits and short comings of using an intermittent fasting protocol. The are definitely some of each. To start, let's look at the downsides. In case you get bored or fall asleep reading this, I'd much rather have you get through the downsides at least.
First, depending on the type of fasting you do, if your diet is already poor and you have deficiencies in certain nutrients, vitamins or minerals, a protocol like this can exacerbate that deficiency which systemically can then create other deficiencies and snowball you into a very messy situation health wise. According to an article from the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, it was noted that participants in an alternate day fasting protocol that began with protein or vitamin deficiencies showed a worsening of the deficiencies throughout the protocol which led to muscle tissue catabolism in some of the participants. In other words, like ANY nutritional approach that is focused on restrictive eating patterns there will be some sort of risk involved, especially if you're starting, like most people that do any dieting, in a poor nutritional health state. It is advised to get some blood work done before beginning any new nutritional protocol to see what areas of opportunity there are to shore things up or know what markers to keep an eye on. Seeing as the goal of any new dietary approach is to get you more fit and more healthy, it makes sense to minimize the damage as opposed to making it worse, right?
A second and in my opinion more obvious downside to fasting that was proven through experimentation was HUNGER. LOTS AND LOTS OF HUNGER! OK maybe not that bad but it is common sense to think if you skip an entire day of eating, especially when we live in a time where food has never been more abundant, the body may begin to freak out if there is nothing shoveled into our mouths. In multiple studies that I read from the British Journal of Sports Medicine, the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition and others, one commonality that cropped up was participants either admitting to cheating on the programmed study or in post study questionnaires stating that while not having cheated, the hunger pangs never subsided on the non-feeding days as they had hoped.
After completing a cycle of fasting, one of the major concerns that came out of these studies was the reality that there a very strong likelihood to begin binge eating. There are multiple studies that I will dive into deeper in another blog article that focus on the extreme addictions to foods such as simple sugars so it can cause someone who spent several weeks cleaning up their nutrition and implementing a fasting protocol to lose some weight only to end up worse off after its all said and done because of a binging episode.
Soooooooooo....... are you still with me too this point? Those are all the downsides that I'm going to talk about for now. If you want more info on those, start a conversation in the comments or message me offline or on other social media to chat about it. Now, let's talk about the benefits.
Why do most people aim to clean up their nutrition? For a small percentage it is to feel healthier. Also there are those that are already dialed in at the gym but want to see the muscle mass increase. Then there are the rest of us, those of us wanting to lose body fat. There are a multitude of things that intermittent fasting protocols can do but reducing body fat is its bread and butter.
Let's talk about why that is. Well its simple really, intermittent fasting is really just a pinpointed target specific version of a nutrition protocol that aims to create a caloric deficit. This is the most tried and true way to ensure weight loss. Now this also doesn't mean to starve yourself either. That's a whole other negative issue. What we are talking about here is a subtle cumulative caloric deficit by the end of each week that you follow this protocol. The minor downside to that statement is that, yes, there is planning that needs to be done ahead of time to get your caloric needs and then to adjust them as you go through the protocol. So that is where doing some research to learn how to do this or working with a trained specialist can benefit you.
So if caloric deficit is the goal, why not just eat less each day as opposed to the timed feeding window approach? Well that is a decision for you and ONLY you to make. But here is some sciency stuff to help with that decision. In one particular study that compared daily caloric restriction, daily feeding window fasting (8 hours on 16 off ), and alternate day fasting, overall visceral fat and total body weight was reduced in all the protocols but what set IF apart, both ADF and daily fasting, was the fasting insulin sensitivity. The study lasted 12 weeks and there was a reduction of between 20-31% in participants fasting insulin levels. What this means is that there is a possibility that if following a fasting protocol properly, that not only can you lose weight but your chance of getting type II diabetes lessens at a much faster rate than traditional caloric reduction diets. According to the research, for every kg of bodyweight lost, there is a 16% reduction of becoming diabetic.
As for the body fat reduction element, it is shown in multiple studies that minimizing the window in which calories are consumed forces the body into a state of efficiency that has to rely on what is readily available to create energy. We all have body fat on us and it can be argued that most of us have way too much body fat. But for me personally, I like to look at as I simply have a massive energy store and now that I'm going to do this n=1 fasting protocol, I'm primed for crazy success! What that is really saying though is I'm fat and I don't want to be anymore!
But what kind of success can I expect? Going back to the study I looked at in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, a fasting study that lasted 22 days showed a reduction of overall body weight between 2-3% and overall body FAT reduction between 3-5%. This study was paired with a 4 day per week low intensity weight training and 2 day per week steady state cardio training protocol.
Now, are there other benefits to fasting? According to several studies, there is in fact potential for other strong benefits on top of circadian biology corrections, improved insulin sensitivity and reduced chance of becoming diabetic and body fat reduction!
One study that jumped out at me focused on improved cardiovascular stress adaptation. Seeing as hypertension and heart disease is the public enemy number 1 in most first world countries, it makes sense to set ourselves up with the best possible tools to combat this disease. Currently being tested on rats which is a common method before getting approval to test on humans, IF protocols are showing highly positive results in reducing resting heart rates and lowering blood pressure markers which improve cardiovascular function. In simple terms these markers being improved make your heart function way more efficiently which going back to fitness training affords you the ability to train harder and become a more optimal version of yourself.
In closing, I've tried to lay out the good, the bad and the ugly with intermittent fasting for everyone reading this. Hopefully I've done just that and not created too much confusion. Now it's time for me to dive into that aforementioned n=1 experiment. The next post in a couple of days will lay out exactly what my question, hypothesis and experiment to test it all will be so stay tuned for that. While I'm going through the experiment, I'll be switching gears to focus on other topics so don't worry, if intermittent fasting isn't your thing, this blog will absolutely touch on a topic of interest for you at some point I'm sure!!
Now go forth with your day, finish the year strong and let's dive into 2016 head on and ready to kick ass! At least for the first couple of weeks, anyway!
Cheers,
Shawn
So now we are starting to wind down after the holiday hangover and switch into auto pilot to finish the year out. Then it is as if a little switch goes off in ALL of our brains that says based on this arbitrary date (January 1st!), we must now begin the annual reinvigorated reinvention into a new you! We are all guilty of it, maybe not every single year but multiple times in your life you have sat down and put pen to paper thus creating a list of goals that you were finally going to accomplish. Now answer this one question with a very important follow up question to yourself: Of all the New Years goals that you have laid out over the years, have you ever accomplished one of them? ........ WHY NOT?
OK enough self reflection for now. We can dive into a whole new blog article on why arbitrary goal setting doesn't work for the majority of us. So I digress back to the topic at hand. Intermittent fasting. To summarize the first post on the topic in case you didn't read it, following an intermittent fasting protocol can help you reset your circadian rhythms and create a more stable hormonal balance. The benefits of that are better sleep which leads to more energy thus allowing the body to train harder, repair more efficiently and then watch those GAINZ roll in baby!
So now let's talk about a few benefits and short comings of using an intermittent fasting protocol. The are definitely some of each. To start, let's look at the downsides. In case you get bored or fall asleep reading this, I'd much rather have you get through the downsides at least.
First, depending on the type of fasting you do, if your diet is already poor and you have deficiencies in certain nutrients, vitamins or minerals, a protocol like this can exacerbate that deficiency which systemically can then create other deficiencies and snowball you into a very messy situation health wise. According to an article from the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, it was noted that participants in an alternate day fasting protocol that began with protein or vitamin deficiencies showed a worsening of the deficiencies throughout the protocol which led to muscle tissue catabolism in some of the participants. In other words, like ANY nutritional approach that is focused on restrictive eating patterns there will be some sort of risk involved, especially if you're starting, like most people that do any dieting, in a poor nutritional health state. It is advised to get some blood work done before beginning any new nutritional protocol to see what areas of opportunity there are to shore things up or know what markers to keep an eye on. Seeing as the goal of any new dietary approach is to get you more fit and more healthy, it makes sense to minimize the damage as opposed to making it worse, right?
A second and in my opinion more obvious downside to fasting that was proven through experimentation was HUNGER. LOTS AND LOTS OF HUNGER! OK maybe not that bad but it is common sense to think if you skip an entire day of eating, especially when we live in a time where food has never been more abundant, the body may begin to freak out if there is nothing shoveled into our mouths. In multiple studies that I read from the British Journal of Sports Medicine, the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition and others, one commonality that cropped up was participants either admitting to cheating on the programmed study or in post study questionnaires stating that while not having cheated, the hunger pangs never subsided on the non-feeding days as they had hoped.
After completing a cycle of fasting, one of the major concerns that came out of these studies was the reality that there a very strong likelihood to begin binge eating. There are multiple studies that I will dive into deeper in another blog article that focus on the extreme addictions to foods such as simple sugars so it can cause someone who spent several weeks cleaning up their nutrition and implementing a fasting protocol to lose some weight only to end up worse off after its all said and done because of a binging episode.
Soooooooooo....... are you still with me too this point? Those are all the downsides that I'm going to talk about for now. If you want more info on those, start a conversation in the comments or message me offline or on other social media to chat about it. Now, let's talk about the benefits.
Why do most people aim to clean up their nutrition? For a small percentage it is to feel healthier. Also there are those that are already dialed in at the gym but want to see the muscle mass increase. Then there are the rest of us, those of us wanting to lose body fat. There are a multitude of things that intermittent fasting protocols can do but reducing body fat is its bread and butter.
Let's talk about why that is. Well its simple really, intermittent fasting is really just a pinpointed target specific version of a nutrition protocol that aims to create a caloric deficit. This is the most tried and true way to ensure weight loss. Now this also doesn't mean to starve yourself either. That's a whole other negative issue. What we are talking about here is a subtle cumulative caloric deficit by the end of each week that you follow this protocol. The minor downside to that statement is that, yes, there is planning that needs to be done ahead of time to get your caloric needs and then to adjust them as you go through the protocol. So that is where doing some research to learn how to do this or working with a trained specialist can benefit you.
So if caloric deficit is the goal, why not just eat less each day as opposed to the timed feeding window approach? Well that is a decision for you and ONLY you to make. But here is some sciency stuff to help with that decision. In one particular study that compared daily caloric restriction, daily feeding window fasting (8 hours on 16 off ), and alternate day fasting, overall visceral fat and total body weight was reduced in all the protocols but what set IF apart, both ADF and daily fasting, was the fasting insulin sensitivity. The study lasted 12 weeks and there was a reduction of between 20-31% in participants fasting insulin levels. What this means is that there is a possibility that if following a fasting protocol properly, that not only can you lose weight but your chance of getting type II diabetes lessens at a much faster rate than traditional caloric reduction diets. According to the research, for every kg of bodyweight lost, there is a 16% reduction of becoming diabetic.
As for the body fat reduction element, it is shown in multiple studies that minimizing the window in which calories are consumed forces the body into a state of efficiency that has to rely on what is readily available to create energy. We all have body fat on us and it can be argued that most of us have way too much body fat. But for me personally, I like to look at as I simply have a massive energy store and now that I'm going to do this n=1 fasting protocol, I'm primed for crazy success! What that is really saying though is I'm fat and I don't want to be anymore!
But what kind of success can I expect? Going back to the study I looked at in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, a fasting study that lasted 22 days showed a reduction of overall body weight between 2-3% and overall body FAT reduction between 3-5%. This study was paired with a 4 day per week low intensity weight training and 2 day per week steady state cardio training protocol.
Now, are there other benefits to fasting? According to several studies, there is in fact potential for other strong benefits on top of circadian biology corrections, improved insulin sensitivity and reduced chance of becoming diabetic and body fat reduction!
One study that jumped out at me focused on improved cardiovascular stress adaptation. Seeing as hypertension and heart disease is the public enemy number 1 in most first world countries, it makes sense to set ourselves up with the best possible tools to combat this disease. Currently being tested on rats which is a common method before getting approval to test on humans, IF protocols are showing highly positive results in reducing resting heart rates and lowering blood pressure markers which improve cardiovascular function. In simple terms these markers being improved make your heart function way more efficiently which going back to fitness training affords you the ability to train harder and become a more optimal version of yourself.
In closing, I've tried to lay out the good, the bad and the ugly with intermittent fasting for everyone reading this. Hopefully I've done just that and not created too much confusion. Now it's time for me to dive into that aforementioned n=1 experiment. The next post in a couple of days will lay out exactly what my question, hypothesis and experiment to test it all will be so stay tuned for that. While I'm going through the experiment, I'll be switching gears to focus on other topics so don't worry, if intermittent fasting isn't your thing, this blog will absolutely touch on a topic of interest for you at some point I'm sure!!
Now go forth with your day, finish the year strong and let's dive into 2016 head on and ready to kick ass! At least for the first couple of weeks, anyway!
Cheers,
Shawn
Thursday, December 24, 2015
Intermittent fasting: Myth or Magic??
Good day Friends!
It appears that the Jolly Ol’ Fat Man will be sneaking down your chimneys at some point
tonight. So make sure to leave out some eggnog and cookies. Definitely keep the
rum or whiskey in the nog to a minimum as this dude has to travel the world and
doing so tipsy does not sound pleasant!
There are so many potential topics that I could have started this
blog with but literally from the second that I decided to do this, I knew
exactly where I wanted to start. Intermittent fasting. Why? Honestly, I do
not have a solid answer for that. It just jumped into my brain as a topic that
would make for some good research to kick this whole thing off with. Self-admittedly,
I have tried various approaches to using intermittent fasting (IF) in the past
with a modicum of positive results so diving deeper into the science of it all
was definitely fun to see the WHY on the results.
As a disclaimer, right off the bat, I got a little carried away
with reviewing articles and found a lot of avenues that this article could have
gone down. With that in mind and the fact that I will be pairing this subject
matter with an n=1 experiment using an IF protocol, I have decided to turn this
into a series of posts that will conclude with a findings from my own hands on
experience of it all.
Now, where to start? How about the beginning. What exactly is
intermittent fasting? It is a nutrition protocol that is designed to create a
caloric deficit by restricting calories during a predetermined period of time.
There are several different window sizes that this feeding period could
encompass. A lot of the articles that I read while researching this topic had
an alternate day feeding window(ADF). This approach is designed to have a 24
hour ad libitum feeding window that means essentially eat as much as you want
for the time period and then drop to a 20% or less caloric intake the following
24 hours and repeat. Another popular approach follows similar feeding
parameters on the fasting days but it does not alternate every day, rather you
eat ad lib for 5 days out of the week and 2 of the days you follow the 20% or
less calories. This fasting protocol is called creatively enough, 5/2 IF.
The methodology that I will be implementing in my personal experiment will be
to do a daily feeding window between 6-10 hours and fasting the remaining hours
of each day. I will be experimenting with adding a re-feed day towards the end
of the week where I will eat ad lib for 24 hours.
One thing that I want to stress is that one of the major drawbacks
to re-feeding days as well as one of the biggest struggles that was seen in the
majority of the studies that I researched was the idea that an ad lib re-feed
was an excuse to eat whatever garbage you wanted and that is not the case at
all. All it actually means is that there is no set window of time to consume
your calories. You still want to ensure that a daily caloric goal is met and
not hyper-exceeded and if you want to be extra careful with it, a pre-determined
goal for each macro-nutrient (Lipid, Protein, Carbohydrates) can be established
as well.
The idea of intermittent fasting somewhat goes against the fitness
model norm which is to eat micro meals every couple of hours to, as it is
incorrectly assumed, keep the metabolism fired up. The reality is when it
comes to metabolism and how the body processes food, every time a new meal or
snack is ingested the body releases insulin to counter the rise in blood sugar.
If you process carbohydrates just fine and are completely healthy then great, eat your 6 small
meals but just know that you are not burning more body fat by "stoking the
fires" of your metabolism. But for a large percentage of the population,
having a constant stream of insulin being released into the body can actually
do more harm than good when it comes to insulin sensitivity in the long run.
Another factor that plays into a benefit of eating in a small
window as opposed to simply feeding periodically throughout the entire day is
centered on circadian biology. I am sure everyone reading this has heard of
circadian rhythms. This is our body maximizing and regulating our hormones
throughout the day to essentially set us up for the highest level of success
for an assumed task during optimal periods. These tasks range from needing to
be jolted awake in the morning by such hormones as cortisol and growth
hormones, knowing when to have the most energy to do daily work tasks through shots of
periodic adrenalin, knowing when to eat and
digest food, giving us the feeling of being full through the releases of
leptin and ghrelin and knowing when to naturally wind
down to get to sleep for the night with the release of melatonin. Unfortunately,
in modern society, we have all but shunned the body’s ability to put us
in the right place at the right time by using
annoying alarm clocks, slamming gallons of coffee, eating garbage food at any
chance we can and since we live in the first world, that is very readily
available and then binge watching Netflix TV shows all night and not getting
the adequate amount of sleep. All of the above is a recipe for disaster when it
comes to hormonal balance and how those hormones being out of whack can lead to
obesity, diabetes, heart problems, cardiovascular issues and so on.
Now, exactly how does the circadian rhythm work inside our bodies?
It is primarily regulated by the suprachiasmatic nuclei of the hypothalamus.
But there are also other regulatory "clocks" throughout the
body, such as the liver and feeding the body is the main trigger queue for hormonal
regulation throughout the body. It is hypothesized that kicking these triggers
out of whack can do some damage to the body. The idea that things such as
overnight shift work, where people stay up overnight and sleep during the day
have a higher risk of diabetes and coronary heart issues so that is what
ultimately led to digging into this idea further for a lot of researchers.
To take this circadian thing a step further, there are studies
that show the trillions of tiny little critters that crawl around on us and
inside us, especially in our small intestine - known as the microbiota - that have similar lifestyles
to us humans, including a circadian rhythm. I mean, it is bad enough that
these little critters mooch off of us their entire lives but then they have to
copy our circadian patterns as well!?! RUDE! Just kidding, it is actually a
reality of millions of years of symbiotic evolution that has gotten our
crawlies to sort of follow our lead. These crawlies do so many things in our
bodies such as synthesize nutrients, trigger enzymatic reactions to facilitate
the creation of key vitamins, ensure we poop on a regular basis and we all know
how important that is! I mean, going full circle to the beginning of the
article, imagine if Santa Claus had some sort of gastrointestinal distress from
his gut crawlies acting a fool. Can you imagine the mess that would be made
with a cranky tummy paired with literally millions of cookies and glasses of
milk!!?!?! No thank you!
Now, how does all this circadian garbage tie in with IF? Well,
there are studies coming out now that are showing if using an IF protocol and
keeping the feeding window from essentially mid to late morning through the
early evening and letting our hormones sort of take care of everything else, we
can basically reset our circadian time clocks which will
in turn get our hormones back into alignment, help us sleep better which leads
to proper overnight bodily repair and thus making us more rested and ready to
take the external stresses of the day the following day which makes us more
productive and leads to more energy to do things such as go for a jog, hit the
gym and then repeating it all the next day. That run-on sentence was a
calculated grammatical error for the sake of proving the point that tomorrow is
built on the actions of today and the day after tomorrow is built on the
actions of tomorrow. So by working to fix tomorrow with sounds decisions today,
your body becomes a well-oiled machine!
Ok, so this first post is not the end all be all of intermittent
fasting. It is essentially by design to basically wet your whistle! I
will be writing a follow up post in the next week with even more science
relating to the ways in which intermittent fasting is both good and bad plus I
will explain what I have found in both cases. I will then do a 3rd pre-emptive
post that will go over my protocol that I plan to follow for 12 weeks to put my
money where my fasted mouth is before moving on to other topics. Lastly, after
my experiment is all wrapped up, I will conclude with my hands-on findings. I
appreciate each and every one of you that takes the time to read these posts. I
am doing this blog simply to share the stuff that fascinates me about
nutrition, fitness and the human body and hopefully it keeps your interest
along the way as well!
Cheers, happy holidays, merry Christmas, and happy Festivus for
the Rest of Us or whatever you celebrate!!
Shawn
FOR MORE INFO CHECK OUT THE FOLLOWING LINKS AND/OR ARTICLES:
Patterson, R., Laughlin, G., Lacroix, A., Hartman, S., Natarajan, L., Senger, C., . . . Gallo, L. (n.d.). Intermittent Fasting and Human Metabolic Health. Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, 115(08), 1203-1212. doi:August 2015
Leproult, R., & Cauter, E. (n.d.). Role of Sleep and Sleep Loss in Hormonal Release and Metabolism. Pediatric Neuroendocrinology Endocrine Development, 11-21. Retrieved December 24, 2015, from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3065172/
Barnosky, A., Hoddy, K., Unterman, T., & Varady, K. (n.d.). Intermittent fasting vs daily calorie restriction for type 2 diabetes prevention: A review of human findings. Translational Research, 302-311. Retrieved December 23, 2015, from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24993615
Bowden, PhD, J. (n.d.). Jonny Bowden | The Nutrition Mythbuster – “Eat Every Three Hours”: Oh, Really? Retrieved December 24, 2015, from http://jonnybowden.com/eat-every-three-hours/
Circadian Rhythms Fact Sheet. (n.d.). Retrieved December 24, 2015, from https://www.nigms.nih.gov/Education/Pages/Factsheet_CircadianRhythms.aspx
Tuesday, December 22, 2015
What the heck is this blog even about?
Howdy everyone! My name is Shawn. I'm nobody of great importance (YET!!!!), so I want to start by saying thank you for even giving this little slice of the interwebs a sniff of your attention.
So why am I doing this blog at all? Well in short, curiosity. I'm going to school for a Bachelor's of Science in human nutrition and with each passing semester, I walk away with more questions than answers. That fact is not due to a lack of knowledgeable professors, in fact it is quite the opposite. There is simply so much to learn about the human body and how everything we consume breaks down to essentially turn into a new version of ourself. And it is absolutely for better or for worse.
I plan to create posts on here that begin to answer or at least dig into some of those questions I have come up with. I absolutely have to stress that I'm no expert and all I'm trying to do with this blog is share the insight I gain from doing research. It will be primarily analytical in nature but what sort of scientist would I be without some hands on experimentation. So along the way I'll present some good ol fashioned n=1 testing. This will be done primarily to refute or to confirm the analytical findings.
I'm certain that you like most people, myself included, feel lost in the sauce when it come to the good and bad of human nutrition. Hopefully after I dig into a bit of the science and chew on it for awhile I'll be able to digest it and create a shareable recipe of understanding to help you to grasp a bit more about how food interacts with everything you do.
Now, fad diets come along several times a year and major ones come out every few years. We've all seem them, heard about them, had friends talk about them relentlessly (bacon, anyone!?!?!) and so on. 9 times out of 10 there is some half baked science that the diet is centered around. And more often than not, the nutritional protocol involves making whatever "expert" that is promoting it very wealthy by having to buy certain foods, supplements or books and other products. Some of these plans work, some work only in the short term, while others fail all together and can cause serious health problems. So..... the million dollar question is - how can we know when to jump on the "gravy train" or when to pump the breaks and say, "Nah, I'll skip the all mashed potatoes and gravy diet fad!"?
The answer is not simple because as I mentioned, most of these fad diets have some semblance of science to back them up. And so to the lay person with no background in biochemistry and human nutrition, no time to become intimately familiar with these advanced science topics and just simply want that ultimate missing link to regaining their health, it is easy to be persuaded and overwhelmed by all the bells and whistles of that mashed potatoes and gravy (MPG) diet.
If the purveyors of the MPG fad wheeled out a truckload of obscure research with at best, fringe results, but promised you'd finally be able to lose all that stubborn tummy fat and they had the "science" to prove it and then they put out long tedious articles with all sorts of big fancy doctory sounding words, then hell, give me a plate of them taters!! But wait!!!!! How could that same average person from above know the data was obscure and fringe or if it had been properly vetted by a group of scientific peers to give it any type of credibility?
Luckily, for you, there are nerds like me! I, without question, do not have all the answers and it could even be argued that I don't have ANY of the answers. But what I do have is a thirst for learning about all this whacky stuff and I am lucky there are forums like this blog space that afford me a place to babble on and share what I find.
So that is what I'm going to do. I hope to keep the articles fun and engaging but to justify the hours I will spend doing research for each post, I have to have some boring science parts too. I'll do my best to keep those to a minimum and for those that are as nerdy as I am and want to dig into what I find, I will always have a citations section at the end of each article with all of the sources I used to get my info from.
I hope you come along with me on this nerdy journey and always feel free to reach out with comments, questions and differing opinions on here or my other social media platforms that you may follow me on.
Cheers, homies and homiettes!
Shawn
So why am I doing this blog at all? Well in short, curiosity. I'm going to school for a Bachelor's of Science in human nutrition and with each passing semester, I walk away with more questions than answers. That fact is not due to a lack of knowledgeable professors, in fact it is quite the opposite. There is simply so much to learn about the human body and how everything we consume breaks down to essentially turn into a new version of ourself. And it is absolutely for better or for worse.
I plan to create posts on here that begin to answer or at least dig into some of those questions I have come up with. I absolutely have to stress that I'm no expert and all I'm trying to do with this blog is share the insight I gain from doing research. It will be primarily analytical in nature but what sort of scientist would I be without some hands on experimentation. So along the way I'll present some good ol fashioned n=1 testing. This will be done primarily to refute or to confirm the analytical findings.
I'm certain that you like most people, myself included, feel lost in the sauce when it come to the good and bad of human nutrition. Hopefully after I dig into a bit of the science and chew on it for awhile I'll be able to digest it and create a shareable recipe of understanding to help you to grasp a bit more about how food interacts with everything you do.
Now, fad diets come along several times a year and major ones come out every few years. We've all seem them, heard about them, had friends talk about them relentlessly (bacon, anyone!?!?!) and so on. 9 times out of 10 there is some half baked science that the diet is centered around. And more often than not, the nutritional protocol involves making whatever "expert" that is promoting it very wealthy by having to buy certain foods, supplements or books and other products. Some of these plans work, some work only in the short term, while others fail all together and can cause serious health problems. So..... the million dollar question is - how can we know when to jump on the "gravy train" or when to pump the breaks and say, "Nah, I'll skip the all mashed potatoes and gravy diet fad!"?
The answer is not simple because as I mentioned, most of these fad diets have some semblance of science to back them up. And so to the lay person with no background in biochemistry and human nutrition, no time to become intimately familiar with these advanced science topics and just simply want that ultimate missing link to regaining their health, it is easy to be persuaded and overwhelmed by all the bells and whistles of that mashed potatoes and gravy (MPG) diet.
If the purveyors of the MPG fad wheeled out a truckload of obscure research with at best, fringe results, but promised you'd finally be able to lose all that stubborn tummy fat and they had the "science" to prove it and then they put out long tedious articles with all sorts of big fancy doctory sounding words, then hell, give me a plate of them taters!! But wait!!!!! How could that same average person from above know the data was obscure and fringe or if it had been properly vetted by a group of scientific peers to give it any type of credibility?
Luckily, for you, there are nerds like me! I, without question, do not have all the answers and it could even be argued that I don't have ANY of the answers. But what I do have is a thirst for learning about all this whacky stuff and I am lucky there are forums like this blog space that afford me a place to babble on and share what I find.
So that is what I'm going to do. I hope to keep the articles fun and engaging but to justify the hours I will spend doing research for each post, I have to have some boring science parts too. I'll do my best to keep those to a minimum and for those that are as nerdy as I am and want to dig into what I find, I will always have a citations section at the end of each article with all of the sources I used to get my info from.
I hope you come along with me on this nerdy journey and always feel free to reach out with comments, questions and differing opinions on here or my other social media platforms that you may follow me on.
Cheers, homies and homiettes!
Shawn
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