Highlights in this podcast:
03:05.5 – That’s what a fast actually means
03:08.2 – Short fasting can accelerate fast loss and make you healthier
03:56.3 – They’ve said some shocking stuff that was actually incorrect
04:30.6 – Intermittent fasting is where you go for a certain amount of time without food
05:01.9 – fasting is nothing new, it’s just gaining a bit more publicity
05:51.8 – The two-day diet is intermittent dieting
07:04.6 – You’re going to be messing around with your metabolism
08:01.2 – They’re not educating themselves on nutrition and what’s healthy
09:21.8 – Comparing it to a healthy fat-loss way of eating
09:53.2 – “do you do intermittent fast?
10:15.9 – “Would you intermittent fast to do that?”
11:28.8 – Physical hunger versus psychological hunger
12:04.3 – If you’re eating well, your brain functions should be perfect
12:34.6 – It’s easier to completely deny yourself food than to drop your calories
12:57.0 – It’s not good psychologically to be constantly thinking about food
14:37.0 – One of the great thing to do is have breakfast
17:22.1 – Females don’t respond to intermittent fasting
17:50.9 – When you have a good base of healthy eating
19:16.7 – My biggest fear
20:38.9 – She’s losing weight but our machine shows another thing
21:51.6 – Most people don’t have the right nutrition
22:11.7 – Protein is very important for detoxification
23:23.9 – Every individual is different
23:47.7 – The worst something can do
23:58.8 – Respect for food and realize its importance
Join Our Centre in Bedford
Join Our Centre in Milton Keynes
Join Our Centre in Northampton
CLICK HERE To Download A FREE Chapter Of Our New Book “The Belly Fat Cure”
Hello and welcome to another new episode of the TheDVCC.com podcast. I’m Mark Gray
Stephen: And I’m Stephen.
Mark: And today, we’re back in our car and recording. It’s a bit rainy and bleak outside.
Stephen: It’s really is.
Mark: It’s warm inside. We’ve got lots of goods and topical things to discuss today, I believe, is kind of a lot of stuff in the media. A lot of clients in Milton Keynes and Bedford at our personal training studios have been talking and asking questions about this subject and this subject is “Intermittent Fasting.”
Stephen: But first off, can we just discuss where we’re doing this podcast. So we are in a car, we’re sitting in …
Mark: It’s Aspects Carpark, a little bit away from Fitness First, which is a gym in Bedford where we actually first kind of started at it really, maybe I don’t even know how many years ago, it was seven years?
Stephen: Seven years ago?
Mark: Seven years ago maybe eight? We’re self-employed personal trainers there and we cut our teeth effectively.
Stephen: That’s where we started, and so literally, where we started literally personal training, wasn’t it? That was where we both where we did our first personal training sessions.
Mark: It was and we’ve obviously come a long way, I’d say, but we still got lots of clients and that we first…I think the longest client that we’re training is, who was with me, I met him the first month that I was at Fitness First and he’s still training the same, getting great results, obviously still, still progressing…
Stephen: Christopher?
Mark: Yeah, Christopher. Yeah he’ll love this. Hope he’ll listen to it. Chris Phibbs! There’s a little shout out for you but yeah…
Stephen: I remember 8:00 p.m. on a Monday night trying to find some sort of exercise that’s I was able to do because I was so busy. I remember, I’m just trying to work out what you could do with two feet of spaces and stretching and standing.
Mark: …It’s kind of what, that Big Bucks Gym is what led us to creating the
DoubleVision Conditioning Centres – small, friendly, informal but professional places to get results…
Stephen: Personal results…
Mark: Places to go where actually people care, yeah, hopefully I think a feedback from client says that’s the case, but where literally everyone cares about how well you do and the results you get.
Stephen: Everyone’s got a name, not just the number, not like a membership number, everyone got a name where we will know what-his-name and he will know us…
Mark: So anyway, let’s get back to intermittent fasting. What actually is intermittent fasting?
Stephen: Well, I think it’s about time we spoke about it, because there’s a growing number of people that are claiming short fasting or basically fasting where you’re not eating any sort of food at all, that’s what a fast actually means. They’re saying short fasting can actually accelerate fast loss and make you healthier. It’s actually not a new thing, because when you think about it we all fast everyday at night, that’s called sleeping, it’s what we called sleeping. But it’s kind of becoming more well-known. You know, what’s really kicked it off is there was a serialization of a book which we’ll speak about in a minute, called the two-day diet, that was serialized in the Daily Mail which obviously is the most the bestest place to get your nutritional information from, and yeah,
everyone should read and believe exactly what they say in the Daily Mail.
Mark: So if you don’t realize that sarcasm from Stephen, because the Daily Mail generally is kind of two years behind everything, so…
Stephen: …and not true as well…
Mark: They’ve said some shocking stuff that was actually incorrect, like scientifically incorrect. But anyway carry on…
Stephen: But intermittent fasting is a thing, I mean, I have been aware of it for a number of years, but like I say it’s becoming more prominent. So I actually spent a lot of time very recently just going over everything again because obviously we look at, when look at things and different techniques and things like, we look at them from…are they useful for our client’s perspective?…so we’ll talk about that today. But just to give the overview that intermittent fasting is basically where you go for a certain amount of time, there’s load of different types of fast, so 24 hours without any sort of food, there are actually
36, people doing 36-hour fast which is a long time, and they’re obviously a lot tougher than a day. Then people do, what, 16, 8, so fasting for 16 hours, eating for 8. There’s quite a few different permutations and different ways of doing it. But the actual principle of fasting is nothing new. It’s been around for a long, long period of time, but like you say it’s just gaining a bit more publicity and people are kind of claiming it as the next big thing for fat loss and making you healthier, but like I say we do it everyday, it’s just moments, it’s just called sleeping for us.
Mark: Right…
Stephen: So yeah, that’s the overview of what actually intermittent fasting is. It’s basically going a period of time with no food. You can drink water, but no food we’re talking.
Mark: So is the two-day diet intermittent fasting?
Stephen: Well, this is the funny thing, because I’ve heard a lot of people saying, ‘oh yeah, I’m fasting, I do the two-day diet.’ Basically a two-day diet is where you for two days of the week you drop your calories down to, I believe, 500 – 500 or below – for two days and people are thinking they’re fasting. This isn’t fasting. It’s actually intermittent dieting because you’re still having food on those two days. So my issue with this is I gota few different concerns with it. One is, it is dieting. You’re denying yourself calories for two days. So when you compare it to someone that’s eating whatever they want for seven days, if you were to cut those calories down for two days, then of course you’re going to lose weight to start with
Mark: You’re going to lose fat?
Stephen: Well, not necessarily fat, sorry. You’re going to lose weight, some of it could be muscle, who knows what it is you’re losing, but you will lose weight. The same way that, you know when we did a podcast about Cambridge Diet and different things like that and that’s 500 calories a day, correct?
Mark: Yeah, and LighterLife, I think so…
Stephen: And they work in a short term, they work very well in the short term. So I’m not denying that to lose weight if you didn’t worry about what sorts of weight you wanted to lose and you don’t mind losing muscle, and all you wanted to do is step on a scale and see a certain number. You didn’t worry about how you’re going to feel…
Mark: or look…
Stephen: or look…because obviously losing muscle doesn’t provide you with a healthier body so you don’t look as healthy,
Mark: …and then always good aesthetically pleasing…
Stephen: Yeah…then you will in a short-term lose weight, but again you’re going to be messing around with your metabolism, like we come back to that podcast that we’ve recorded all about, how it can affect you metabolically. But what will happen with the two-day diet is that you will eventually stop losing weight doing it that way and also well one of the dangers is that you end up binging on other days because of denying yourself food and the problem is you’re just dropping your calories down to 500, so what happens is when that weight stops, what will people do? Add another day probably, and then it’s three days of 500 calories. And in the end, all you’re ending up is getting towards LighterLife or whatever, you know, the really super low calorie type diets which as discussed do mess around with your metabolism and in the long run, again it’s a diet. So diet typically means I’m coming off this at some stage, going to eat normally and people normally, they’re not educating themselves on nutrition and what’s healthy and they will rebound and put that weight back on. And I just I think people they’re still preying on people where they’re trying to look for the easy options, the next big thing, but it’s not fasting, it’s just intermittent dieting. So you know if you’ve listened to everything and people are starting to get more and more aware of the dangers of low-calorie diets and things like that, you’re effectively just doing Weight Watchers really low calorie for two days…
Mark: And you got the whole thing again is the word diet means short terms. So people aren’t going to be doing, they’re not doing their two-day diet forever, are they? So what happens when they go back. They’ve not been educated on what they should be doing. They haven’t created any more health habits. It’s just the same, different permutations in all levels pretty much.
Stephen: And the thing being, I mean, they will find some studies saying that people were healthier, but the problem with a lot of these intermittent fasting studies is that they’re comparing people that eat poorly with people that then start fasting. So if you’re eating really badly, you know, you’re eating McDonald’s seven days a week, of course if you’re going to have two days where you’re fasting and not eating those foods, that’s going to make you healthier, because over the week you’re eating less of those bad foods. But my interest is in comparing it to a healthy fat-loss style way of eating, which not only makes you lose fat, maintain your lean muscle or at least build a little bit of lean muscle tone, but makes you healthier as well and there aren’t any real studies that compare that sort of food eating, then adding in intermittent fasting.
Right, so, let’s go then. We’ll firstly the question is do you intermittent fast, you have to, I know, you’ll trialed it and tested it?
Stephen: Obviously we’ve sometimes in some occasions have to have, I mean we naturally have a low, not naturally, we always have a low body fat because we eat as we talk about, but sometimes we have a photo shots and things, so we need to get down a little bit more which is, you know, only for a relatively short term, because it’s for photos. Would you intermittent fast to do that?
Mark: Ah. No personally, I wouldn’t…well, I have done…It’s probably best to answer that first saying I have, or we both have, and trialed intermittent fasting. You’re asking whether I would do it…I think it’s good to go into what our experience personally was. Now obviously we’ve been eating healthily for a very long period of time. We’re very much in control of what we eat and so, you know, we very rarely get into situation where we are desperately hungry and therefore choose whatever is front of us. But it should be noted that we’re quite aware of food and, you know, how good or bad it is for you. So we have done it but I found it useful actually. We did a 24-hour, didn’t we? And the reason I found it useful was it did allow me to kind of not be scared of when I was hungry. So what it actually allowed was to kind of realize what was a physical hunger or what was psychological. So I was kind of, I’m used to eating quite regularly, so it actually allowed me to keep get controlled of my eating.
Stephen: Are you trying to stand on the fence because I’m going to be brutal and say I hated it. Absolutely hated it. Because I was hungry. Everyone says that your brain function and you’re going to go certain period of time, you’ll find that your brain functions, you know, so much better, and I think that is rubbish, because the only reason your brain function would be bad was if you’re eating glutenous foods or intolerant foods, foods that you shouldn’t be eating anyway. But if you’re eating well, not eating foods that you’re intolerant to, your brain function should be perfect and I just found that I was fuzzy, I was nowhere near as effective. Sure I didn’t have to prepare food, therefore I may be saved myself half an hour in that day, but by the end of it, I just wanted to eat whatever was around.
Mark: Well, that’s the thing, wasn’t it, we found is that if you intermittent fast and then you’re not in the situation where you are able to eat exactly healthy food in front of you, you’re going to be eating anything. I mean, actually it’s easier to completely deny yourself food than to drop your calories down to say 500 like the two-day diet does, because it’s doing nothing…
Stephen: it’s doing nothing…
Mark: Yeah, it’s all or nothing. At least you know you can’t have anything. When you’re doing something like a two-day diet, where you’re dropping your calories down, you’re constantly trying to – oh, is that too many calories or is that…can I have that, can I not have that…and its not really very good psychologically to be constantly thinking about food in that way the whole time.
Mark: So in short, you would not do it.
Stephen: For me, no I wouldn’t do it. This is where I thought we get on to talking about for our clients whether we would recommend it or not and overall, and why. The simple answer to that is no. We wouldn’t recommend it for the majority of clients. People walking through the door, immediately the worst thing to do, when we meet a lot of people, their whole history has been dieting, overeating, dieting again, constantly on a different sorts of diets, trying to lose fat, and often they come in with metabolic damage and just not that ideal relationship with food. Correct Mark?
Mark: Yes. That’s the whole point and that’s why they come to us because they want a lifelong lifestyle change, right? They want to know what to eat, how to be on top on what they should be eating, to eat for health, to eat for fat loss and to form habits that will stick with them forever.
Stephen: And I think often when you read anything about intermittent fasting, people would say, oh yeah, you know, when we were cavemen we didn’t use to..
Mark: Yeah, that’s the one I hear a lot is when we used to go in bouts of catching a buffalo and eating it and then time of not eating a lot…
Stephen: And yeah therefore, you know, missing breakfast isn’t that bad and I agreed completely, but that’s looking at the world through a straw. It’s not necessarily what often is the problem when people come to us. One of the great things you can do is add a healthy breakfast because a lot of the time people aren’t having breakfast anyway. So they are effectively fasting for quite a while because they’re sleeping at night and then they missed breakfast. So effectively a lot of people are fasting anyway in that time, but they obviously have more fat than they want to have. So clearly the wrong thing to do is them to try and take away food from them and to make them fast more when often just by adding a healthy high-protein, healthy fat breakfast can make a big difference. And it’s not actually the meal that necessarily makes difference, it’s what that meal does to them for the rest of the day. So psychologically, it makes massive difference. Also it means that they’re eating a lot less bad food throughout the rest of the day because it really regulates their blood sugar and things. So a lot of people that kind of talk about intermittent fasting saying, yeah, but, when we’re cavemen we weren’t able to just get food, we have to, and we didn’t have McDonald’s just then. We didn’t have all the sugars and processed food.
Mark: …processed foods….
Stephen: The sugar wasn’t available. So it’s a very different thing fasting when food is available to fasting when it’s not available.
Mark: It’s not even that fasting when food is available, it’s the fact that the food is different to what it was when we were cavemen. So you could only get vegetables or not even vegetables, but you can only get things that you could catch, you know.
Stephen: Well the only real sugar was honey up a tree which you could potentially die if you…those are killer bees…
Mark: Yeah and that’s that. So they’ve proven that. They would gorge on that sure, but you’re not going to get it for twice in your life, I think.
Stephen: So I mean, I think, it’s a good example to show that a lot of people are already fasting because they obviously don’t eat while they’re asleep and then they’re missing breakfast and they’re not at the weight, near the amount of fat they want to be.
Mark: And I have a quick question in the middle of this. Stephen and I have had little disagreements in the past about basically opinions, not that our opinions are different, but at giving opinions. Because sometimes Stephen doesn’t want to seem like he’s telling people, but I believe that you, the listener, wants to know our opinion and if it’s different to yours, fine, comment, but I want to make sure that we don’t feel that we have to sit on the fence or get both sides of the story, you know. You’re giving the background but at the end of the day, you have an opinion. If I am 3 stone, perhaps I’m 3 stone more than I want to be. I come in, I’m a female and 45.
Stephen: I have one thing to mention, actually, a lot of the intermittent fasting studies show that, at the moment they’re all on animals, but a lot of them show that females don’t respond as well to intermittent fasting.
Mark: Okay, I’m a 45-year-old female, I’m going to give you a million pounds if I lose that 3 stone in as healthy and quick a time as possible, what would you do to get that million pounds or to save your life even, what would you do? Would you use intermittent fasting?
Stephen: No. I wouldn’t.
Mark: Thank you.
Stephen: I would use healthy…I was going to get on with this. I want it to be, you know, make a nice discussion and then give my opinion. But I think in my opinion you should only ever experiment with intermittent fasting when you have a really good base of healthy eating, not if you’re just starting transformation, not if you’re even quite neutral healthy eating. Even if just a year of doing it is not that much. So for us trialing it is completely different to, because we have had 10 years, 15 years, actually a whole life of healthy eating effectively. So for them people to come, to try another sort of diet, which effectively…
Mark: The question is then, why are you saying try and try intermittent fasting, what’s the point if it’s not as good as eating healthily and having health habits? Because I’ve tried it, because I need to be able to speak to people about it from experience, but I wouldn’t do it again.
Stephen: Right. My only caveat for that is for me, when I go on a flight, it’s easier for me to fast then,
Mark: Right and how often do you fly?
Stephen: Not as much as I like.
Mark: Five times a year? There we go, so you fast five times a year and that’s because you don’t want to eat the airline food because you often get sick from it, right?
Stephen: Uh-hmm.
Mark: Okay. That answers it. You’re going to give people your opinion, don’t be afraid of it.
Stephen: You’re my dad.
Mark: Well yeah. Just give an opinion.
Stephen: That is my opinion. I’ve given my opinion on it.
Mark: Anymore? You want to give any more background on it, the question and plan to ask.
Stephen: Yeah, well basically, it’s basically my biggest fear is people kind of read these things and think that they’re the next big thing. But if you already got a history, yeah not being at the weight you want to be then it really is completely the wrong thing for you to go and do, because you don’t have that background of healthy eating. You really need to be focusing on eating healthy, you know natural foods. You need to be making sure that the amount of protein you’re eating is correct. That you’re having a good healthy breakfast, healthy fats in your diet, so really, yes it is the last thing you should be doing when if you spent a lot of your time trying to lose weight. At the end of the day, as far as
I’m concerned, that sort of person is no different to doing any other sort of diet.
Mark: I’ve got a little case study as well and from a lady in Milton Keynes. It was last week I spoke to her. She came to us, joined the DoubleVision Conditioning Centre at Milton Keynes, and she was doing intermittent fasting and just kind of started it when she joined up and she wants to lose, I think, it was 2-1/2 to 3 stones. And because she has started doing it, I kind of let her do that. I gave her education about her nutrition. But as her results were going I could see, she was losing weight, but our machine shows that she was just losing muscle. The thing is, when she was eating, she was fasting, but when she was eating she just wasn’t eating enough protein and that’s just, that is a common, common thing amongst women, that they don’t have enough protein when they’re eating, when you shock and fast in days, they’re still not getting enough on the days that they are eating and she was losing weight, so if she hadn’t been using our scales and, you know, I think she would have been happy because she was losing weight, but she wasn’t looking as better, and she knew this. She was feeling fit or better. So then we started to, you know, gradually creating health habits as we normally do, so with good amounts of the right things, and she kept that weight off, but she just was managing to, she is now managing to increase her muscle tone and lose fat, because her body composition actually
got worse when she was doing it. And I know there’s going to be lots of guys, you know, other trainers as well, who hang the hat on intermittent fasting, who will be saying that that’s what’s the case we do. Right, you’ll keep muscle, in fact go up in muscle, and lose fat which like I just said you’re wrong because most people, 99% of people, don’t have the right nutrition. Therefore on their “on” days when they’re allowed to eat, they’re not going to be right. You can’t battle it.
Stephen: No, and you won’t actually be even able to make it half as good as it needs to be. You have to be taking branched-chain amino acids and loads of different other source of supplements. I think people don’t realize is that protein is very, very important for detoxification. So actually detoxifying all the toxins that we’ve taken daily is very important. So people don’t really realize that that without that protein, you can’t get rid of all of the bad stuff you’ve taken everyday.
Mark: It kind of a little bit of a bugbear well for me in and I’ve been watching, like I’ve known about intermittent fasting pretty about five to four years, I think, and I have been watching trainers in America. I heard the headlines such as that really got my goat, things like if you’re not doing intermittent fasting, you’re stupid. If you’re trainer doesn’t say that intermittent fasting is wrong, then fire them. That kind of thing and a chap who is demonstrating it, he used to look relatively lean and you know packed, but he is very, very skinny. He has a very low amount of muscle mass or muscle tone to his body, because he’s obviously just been losing weight. He’s obviously not going to be healthier and this whole thing of putting your hat into or hanging your hat in one thing is completely wrong. Because every individual is different and like Stephen has said, there perhaps could be occasion that’s intermittent fasting is correct for an individual. However, for 99% of all of our clients, it isn’t. And they represent 100% of the population.
Stephen: That’s 99% of the population. So realistically, in our eyes, or my eyes and Mark’s eyes, the worst thing someone could do before they’ve really had quite a few years, a lot of years of healthy eating, healthy respect for food and realize it’s importance, health wise, body fat wise, and everything like that, is to try and then cut your calories down or fast in any way because realistically you’re already used to probably starving yourself and then binging, and then why would you put yourself in that same situation?
Mark: True. I actually delete that Facebook friend because of all those silly posts, so don’t start posting that.
Stephen: You need to be courteous on Facebook. You need to just delete…
Mark: There’s the thing to keeping your morale high. If anyone ever post some negative comments, you don’t have to delete them, but you could just hide them from our newsfeed on Facebook, and I wake up to sunshine because everybody is, and any people on my Facebook that I see writing nice posts and happy posts, so yeah that’s a little side note.
Stephen: Anyway, I think we kind of answered, well we have answered all the questions hopefully people have on intermittent fasting, the two-day diet, all these different things and we’ve given you our opinion. If you disagree and there probably going to be people that will listen to this and say, “Oh you know I’ve lost 2 stone or whatever, I’ve lost lots of weights and I’m feeling better and healthier and whatever.” That’s fine. I’m not deleting your comment, because it would be great to have a discussion. Like we say, we never just do this at least, or discuss things without experience of the subject, you know. We’re always testing, we’re always learning, always reading, always on courses. And so
I would really appreciate your comments. Do comment after this podcast. It would be really great to hear from you and then we could have more discussion in the Facebook comments below. Alright, I reckon that’s it. Until next time.
Mark: Bye-bye.
Stephen: Bye-bye.
