Short excerpt from a YouTube video (created and uploaded by James Laughlin) presenting intermittent fasting primarily as a health strategy whose mechanistic effects include lowering insulin, increasing autophagy, enabling use of fat stores for fuel, and reducing visceral fat and fatty liver — with weight loss described as a side effect.
I like to think of intermittent fasting is really the health plan with the side effect of weight loss, because when you understand all the powerful things that it's doing, when we take a pause from food, bringing our insulin down, we're having increased autophagy, we're able to tap into our fat stores for fuel. Finally, you know, people who have metabolic syndrome tend to have a lot of visceral fat or maybe a fatty liver. You know, if you've got a fatty liver, then your body is not working optimally. And so when we're fasting clean, our body has to clear things out. So it starts cle clearing out that fatty liver, it starts clearing out your visceral fat, and we end up so much healthier.
