Six common beliefs addressed, Part 86

1. The hunger felt during a fast is "false".

Hunger is never “false”. Cravings are false and we can easily figure those out because no one “craves” a real meal. They crave specific junk food items or tastes.

Hunger is real hunger. The question is should you be hungry or not. A short fast of 18 hours or less is usually not enough time to cause hunger. You should be able to use your own body fat for fuel, during this time. Gluconeogenesis takes care of any glucose demands and helps regulate your blood glucose, while you fast. 

But being hungry is not necessarily a bad thing either. It can just mean that your using fuel and you need more to replenish. All hunger means something and that is determined by your neuroendocrine state so there is no one way of interpreting it. The only thing that matters is whether you are in active obesity or not. Hunger is mostly inconsequential.

2. Starvation is not the only thing that produces autophagy. "Normal fasting” can also produce it.

"Normal fasting" is starvation. I don’t understand why people think they are two different things. They are the same thing. The only difference is the length of time you starve for. You can starve for an hour or until you're dead. The starving are fasting. You can get all technical and wise by saying that the obese are starving without fasting, but that’s a completely different conversation. We are only discussing "not eating". All “not eating” is starvation. "Fasting" is just a fancy term for starvation that doesn’t end in death.

Autophagy is triggered constantly in the human body. It is triggered every night, during the night time fast, and for other reasons, such as exercising. Even caloric restriction increases autophagy. Autophagy is useless for the treatment of obesity. It is just something the body does on its own and will not reduce your body fat. You need to burn body fat in order to get rid of it.

3. Will fasting lower blood glucose?

High body fat puts a very high insulin demand on the body, so when your blood glucose should be lowering, your body kicks in its counter regulatory system to prevent this. This is because this system is responding to your basal insulin levels. Higher basal insulin levels require higher glucose production in order to avoid glucose from dropping too low. So, as long as you have high body fat, your fasting blood glucose will be very difficult to get into the normal range of about 83 mg/dL. It will always be slightly higher. Lower blood glucose does not automatically equate to normal blood glucose.

4. Will fasting help with autoimmune disease?

This blog's focus is general metabolic health information, not autoimmune diseases, which should be monitored by a healthcare professional. But I am going to make an exception for this statement, since I want to make clear that "fasting for autoimmune health" is complete quackery and utter nonsense.

When you fast, the body goes into a temporary anabolic state where it under expresses certain non-essential processes. Some of those processes are immune system related. If the immune system is being "suppressed", then it can reduce autoimmune symptoms. This does not occur in everyone. For many, their symptoms increase rather than decrease. So, these short-term symptom chasing treatments, like fasting, are futile and do not treat nor improve the disease itself. You are doing no better than taking an aspirin for a broken leg. The pain is reduced, but the leg stays broken and you’re also damaging your stomach lining in the interim.

Treat your autoimmune disease with a healthcare professional and use supportive lifestyle habits like proper diet, exercise and systemic stress reduction to increase your treatments effectiveness.

5. Can fasting cause diabetes?

The claim that fasting causes diabetes went viral, a while back, causing all the people who make money off of low carb and fasting to have a cow. They claim this is based off a study that "wasn’t peer reviewed" and "couldn't be read", as it wasn’t even published yet. You know, just like the studies they like using to try and "prove" their own nonsense. It’s a tit for tat of BS. But this does make you wonder. If the study supposedly "couldn’t be read", then why are they so sure nothing was found or if what was found was even false?

Either way, we don’t care about any of that here. A healthy metabolism is diabetes resistant. The body does not naturally want to be in a diabetic state. So, it takes much more than just intermittent fasting to cause diabetes. But, that doesn’t mean that fasting is completely benign to metabolic health. Remember, your metabolic state is never "diseased", it is adapted.

Starvation adapts the body to hoard and increase its fat mass. This is a very well understood metabolic process that has been studied multiple times, in multiple settings, and with multiple animals, including humans. If you starve yourself too much, you die. If you starve yourself a little, you tend to get fat over time, after some initial “weight loss”. That’s how the body protects itself from future death. It’s been doing this, since the beginning of time. This is what keeps you alive during a famine and makes you more robust to survive a second one. Our metabolisms are extraordinarily adaptable. You can begin to adapt metabolism, in a very short time, to just about anything. Though it takes decades to adapt into diabetes, it takes a few weeks to adapt into “starvation”.

So, whatever this study was, and whatever it found, it wasn’t anything new. We have always known that starvation spares and increases body fat. Any person who has followed caloric restriction, for a long while, can attest to that fact. Increasing body fat puts you at risk for diabetes because high body fat puts a high insulin demand on the body, which further dysregulates blood glucose. 

But why? Because remember, the only question that matters with metabolic conditions is - Is my blood glucose being disrupted? Fasting disrupts blood glucose, just like carbohydrates, so that can lead to the starvation adaptation described above. It does this though:

• Fast for too long.
• Not eating enough at meal times.
• Binging at meal times.
  

If you do what’s on the above list, fasting will only make you fatter, in the long run, regardless of what the scale says in the short run. This is precisely why fasting has never been used as a proper protocol to address obesity and we have known about fasting, since we have known about eating. Just because you see fasting now on Facebook and trending on Twitter does not mean it’s a new discovery. Books on fasting have been published, since books began being published and just like all other "weight loss" strategies, it's been an utter FAIL.

So, the takeaway message is that if fasting is done correctly, not the way these low carb advocates say, it can be beneficial as an addition to your dietary and exercise protocol. But if done incorrectly, it can increase your body fat over time, through its affects on blood glucose regulation, regardless of what you eat.

6. Does blood glucose go up during illness?

People who have diabetes, or any other type of metabolic syndrome, tend to run high blood glucose during any type of illness or injury. This is caused by an over expression of the adrenal stress hormones that over react to any type of stress in the body.