Can I Combine Fasting With Other Weight Loss Plans?

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Fasting with Other Weight Loss Plans? This is JJ Virgin four time New.

York Times bestselling author, celebrity nutrition expert.

And fitness hall of famer. I've been on a lifelong quest for answers to the toughest health questions and now I'm sharing what I found with you.

Welcome to Ask the Health Expert.

Marguerite from Facebook asks, can I combine fasting with other weight loss plans? Hey, it's JJ and I've got my buddy Sean Wells with us today to answer this question. He is the world's leading nutritional biochemist and expert on health optimization. He's formulated over 4, 500 supplements, foods, beverages and cosmeceuticals and patented 10 novel ingredients and now is known as the ingredientologist. That means the scientist of ingredients. Formerly, he was a chief clinical dietitian with over a decade of clinical experience and he's counseled thousands of people on innovative health solutions such as keto, paleo, fasting and supplements. He's also personally overcome various health issues including Epstein Barr virus, chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, depression, insomnia, obesity and a pituitary tumor. As a world renowned thought leader and author on mitochondrial health, his expertise can help any health conscious individual to better manage stress, experience higher performance and gain energy through utilizing his practical research based solutions. And his new book is called the Energy Formula. You want to grab that? He's also an action, sci, fi and fantasy nerd who loves Spartan races. All right, we'll be right back with the answer, so stay with me.

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Yes, I love this question. I love this question. Fasting combined with other diets, is it possible? Does it make sense? 100%. It does. 100%. I will throw in a caveat. You want to be careful with fasting. If you have an eating disorder or history of disordered eating. Certainly fasting is not ideal. If your diet is too low in calories already, adding fasting to it is not ideal. When you go too low calorie, it will slow down your metabolism, impair your metabolism, and even damage your metabolism. That's a controversial idea. But when done for a long time, there are repercussions that will change your genetics and change your metabolism for a long time. And it can take years to undo the hormonal, the neurotransmitter implications. So I don't like going under a net of about 500 calories for more than a week or two weeks. I think long term that's not going to be healthy. Your body's going to adjust and really go into what would be like battery saver mode where it's really functioning suboptimally so that you can operate somewhat optimally. So in time that's just not ideal. But doing fasting with say the ketogenic diet is super optimal because you're actually, you're increasing blood ketones with the ketogenic diet and when you're fasting you're improving blood ketones. So it's like increasing it on top of it. So I think it's extremely ideal. And especially if you're doing the ketogenic diet for a maintenance of calories as just a way of eating as a lifestyle, then you're adding intermittent fasting on top of it. That's ideal. I don't think doing extended fasting often is is ideal for lean premenopausal women. If you're postmenopausal, if you're someone that does have regular menses and has a decent amount of your body composition, let's say is above 15% body fat, then you can do some extended fasting. But for women it just seems like extended fasting is a little harder on the system. So I would be careful if you're in those scenarios because it can affect you hormonally and therefore can affect your ability to potentially reproduce and affect how you feel long term can affect your menstrual cycle. So those are things to watch out for. Intermittent fasting is going to be much safer, much easier. That would be what I'd recommend doing Paleo, which is essentially eating whole food. If you're experimenting with keto, great. It's worked well for me, especially if you do like cyclical or targeted ketogenic dieting and then adding in intermittent fasting. I love to do like a 16 and 8 where I have an eight hour eating window and I'm eating those eight hours. My time restricted feeding or eating window is during the daylight per Dr. Satch and pandas data because that helps with your circadian rhythm. So I'm eating from 10am to 6pm throughout the year. That's my eight hour window. And then the other 16 hours I'm not eating and it boosts ketones and you get greater clarity. You get all those benefits. You get the autophagy and definitely keto has synergy with intermittent fasting and Paleo has synergy with keto. It's kind of the clean keto if you will, versus dirty or lazy keto. So I think of them as kind of the holy trinity of diets. Again, I prefer lifestyle of having keto. Paleo intermittent fasting. That's something I cover in my book the Energy Formula.

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