Large info dump on benefits of short-term / intermittent fasting (e.g. 16 hours, 36 hours), and intermediate-to-long term fasting (more than 7 days). My scanning of the internet suggests benefits from fasting for weight, blood pressure, diabetes, concentration, ageing, depression, arthritis, and epilepsy, among others.
Short-term fasting induces autophagy,
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3106288/
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21106691
A process by which the most decayed cells in your body are recycled.
Also, intermittent fasting is more effective than calorie restriction at reducing body fat without reducing muscle. Both reduce body fat and and body mass, but calorie restriction also reduces muscle:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21410865
However, that is from a review paper unfortunately. It is not from a rigorous double-blind placebo-controlled trial. It's estimated that 90% of weight loss from intermittent calorie restriction is from fat, compared to 75% from daily calorie restriction. So you lose ~60% less muscle. That's a massive change.
Separately, from youtube, intermittent fasting may help with mental clarity:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4UkZAwKoCP8
I link it as a link rather than a video because there is a limit of one video per post.
A 1-week fast for GQ magazine, the guy says it cured his arthritis:
http://www.healthpromoting.com/sites/default/files/GQ Fasting Article - TrueNorth Health.PDF
This was the cover story of Harper's Magazine in March 2012
http://media.wix.com/ugd/03997d_422ba2e2c279e899b8d1c3de71f1b1e7.pdf
Starving Yourself to Vigor
By Steve Hendricks
It's 11 pages long, the man did a 20-day water fast which he covered in the article, along with a history of fasting as a medical treatment. It's well-written. He lost 25 lbs, and he kept 20 lbs of weight off over the next two years. 1 pound per day is typical for intermediate-length fasts.
Another video on water fasting,1 hour talk by a doctor who supervises a water fasting clinic:
[video=youtube;6FOBa_hfbRE]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6FOBa_hfbRE[/video]
They had a study where the patients lost 26 lbs at the end of the fast (average length of 21 days), then when they were followed up several months later they had lost 2 additional pounds. They kept the weight off. This is in stark contrast to the reports from the biggest loser study, where nearly all participants on that show regain their weight or more. Why the difference?
I can think of two possibilities:
1) Losing weight with cardio is a bad strategy, your rest metabolism crashes to compensate.
2) Weight lost with ketosis is more likely to stay off. The hormones don't fight back.
BTW this is the study:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12470446
Blood pressure drops significantly, and it's suggested that with long-term water fasting it would converge to 90/60. The patients in the study all lost weight, typically 1 pound per day of water fast, and surprisingly, the weight stays off during follow-up !
In the 1970s a paper was published on a 27 year-old male who did a 382-day water fast, where he consumed water, multivitamins/minerals, salts, some yeast. He lost 276 lbs. This paper goes over the science and his blood work in great details. They gave him some supplements, but very few.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2495396/pdf/postmedj00315-0056.pdf
Apparently, he only regained 16 lbs, or ~6% of the lost weight, in the five years after his water fast ended.
http://cristivlad.com/total-starvation-382-days-without-food-study/
He should be 70 years old now. I wonder if he's still alive, and if he's healthy.
*********
In separate news, I'm sure most of you have heard of
The Biggest Loser news, spurred by a long article in The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/02/health/biggest-loser-weight-loss.html?_r=0
And thus a bunch of copycat "me 2" article from other news organizations.
The contestants of the biggest loser, a popular American reality TV show, often lose a huge amount of weight in a short time, for example hundreds of pounds in six months. They'd been followed-up in a study, and nearly all of them regain their weight or even more in the years following in spite of trying hard to keep it off. Researchers have shown that their metabolism is very slow, they burn hundreds of calories less a day than they should for someone their weight. I didn't fully understand the article, for example how would they know if their metabolisms are slower than they sued to be because of the biggest loser? Did anybody measure their metabolism before the show started?
Perhaps this information is in the real study and did not make it into the NY Times article. The article mentions nothing about what the contestants are eating (carbs, fats, or proteins), and I can't tell what kind of exercise they're doing. One guy sounds like he's working out 4 hours a day, eating little, and gaining weight.
I would have to look into this and other anecdotal information more carefully, but I'm beginning to suspect that long, cardiovascular exercise doesn't work as a weight loss method. In the short-term it works (clearly), but in the medium term the body adapts with a vengeance by reducing rest metabolism and increasing hunger. I'm back in town next week, I think I'm going to reduce cardio to one day a week and it will include at least 50% HIIT. On that day I will eat more fruit, so that my cardio will be metabolically neutral.