Would you like a health practice that is very easy to do, requires no special program, won’t increase your grocery budget, requires no supplements or doctor visits, and has a proven track record of success? This can actually save you time, increase your energy, sharpness and concentration, reduce your disease risk, and increase your longevity. Because of its simplicity and effectiveness, this dietary method has gained tremendous popularity in recent years. It can work in concert with any other natural health protocol, even exercise. It can be used for weight loss, but you can easily maintain your weight and even gain muscle mass if you wish. You can still eat whatever you want, although it works much better with the right foods.
If you haven’t guessed, this health practice is what is called “intermittent fasting.” It is intermittent because it stops and starts in a regular pattern, and it is a fast because it involves periods of not eating. In its simplest form, it is merely a process of maximizing the length of time without food and minimizing the eating periods. The only rule is to keep a regular pattern of eating and fasting because the fasts are training the body to work in that pattern on a regular basis.
Fasting as a practice has been around as long as people have existed. Sometimes fasting was forced due to food scarcity, but it was also voluntarily practiced for social and religious reasons. That type of fasting was usually irregular and did not establish a repeating eating pattern. Intermittent fasting (IF) as a popularized practice is credited to a 2012 BBC documentary called, “Eat, Fast, and Live Longer.” That documentary suggested a 5:2 pattern of fasting completely for 2 days out of the week and then eating normally other 5 days. However, a solid day of fasting is not easy to jump into, and few of us have voluntarily fasted for a full day. Medical procedures sometimes force such a fast, and patients often find that particularly hard to handle. They aren’t used to dealing with the prolonged insulin drop and “hangry” (hungry, jittery, and easily angered) symptoms during the fasting day. For those who did train to do the 5:2 pattern, it eventually became easy to do. But an easier pattern of intermittent fasting became more popular…
IF you prefer the easy way…
The 16:8 (16 hour fast, 8 hour eating window) intermittent fasting pattern is also a very effective diet, and easier to slip into for most people. The typical dietary pattern that most of us grew up with was to eat “three square meals” a day: breakfast, lunch, and dinner. We would get up and set about making breakfast right away, believing that “breakfast is the most important meal of the day.” We then would have a lunch somewhere around noon or early afternoon. Finally dinner would be around 6 or 7, with some time left at the end for dessert. We didn’t want our stomachs growling when going to bed, so we might even throw in a snack shortly before sleeping. That pattern would reverse the 16:8 pattern into closer to a 8:16 sequence. Basically our fasting time was limited to only our sleeping time. If we woke up in the middle of the night, we might even grab a midnight snack. And what happened? We trained our bodies to expect that pattern. We would be hungry when we awoke, hungry at lunch, hungry in the evening, and even perhaps hungry in the middle of the night.
Our bodies are very adaptable, but they do like regular patterns. The old 8:16 eating pattern meant that during the majority of each of our days we had insulin actively being produced to deal with the incoming calories. Then we got used to that insulin pattern, and when we shut that down with an occasional skipped meal, we would get the hangry reaction. In fact, the Merriam-Webster dictionary officially added “hangry” in 2018, because it was becoming widely used to describe someone who missed a meal and had to deal with the unfamiliar insulin drop. If you haven’t applied the term to yourself, you undoubtedly know plenty of people who get hangry if a single meal is delayed. This is a clue as to how addicted we are as a society to plentiful, regular food intake.
Here’s why IF is so easy. You can slowly shift into it without the cold turkey approach. All it takes is slowly pushing back breakfast and/or moving up dinner time. You can do this in tiny increments. If you shift 15 minutes each day into the non-eating period, after a month you will have shifted 8 hours, going all the way from 8:16 to 16:8 in a month with tiny shifts in eating times. You don’t have to do anything drastic, and you can choose which meals to shift to work with your schedule. You could eventually shift one of the daily meals completely out of your schedule, reclaiming that time from your daily routine.
So what’s go great about IF? Why bother? First, it does wonders for your insulin management. The prime reason for type 2 diabetes, obesity, and sugar cravings is that many people spent too much of their day requiring insulin be circulating in their systems. That’s because each meal is calling for insulin, so with multiple meals across the day they don’t get much vacation time from the hormone. Eventually their cells get tired of it and simply become numb to it. And the second reason is related: when they are pushing insulin so much and so often, they are telling their bodies to store away calories in fat; but when the insulin is off and food isn’t coming in, the opposite happens — they start burning fat. Intermittent fasting gives that insulin vacation so they not only improve their insulin sensitivity, but start burning fat as well. Then there is the value of giving the digestive system a rest: even the best meals are a load on digestion, and a rest period lets the digestive tract heal. Also consider the gut flora: sugar-loving and harmful gut bacteria need that sugar coming in regularly to keep their dominance in the digestive tract, and they die off rather quickly without that sugar. Finally, IF causes release of anti-inflammatory compounds and inhibition of pro-inflammatory cytokines. Let’s check the research…
Many benefits
Published in the Journal of Nutritional Oncology is a review study on the impact of IF on cancer prevention (1). Cancer is a disease that is generally develops as a cellular reaction to the body’s environment. Chronic inflammation is the key factor, and reducing inflammation, which IF does, improves health and discourages cancer. Excess fat is by nature inflammatory, as is “leaky gut” when the unhealed gut and overactive bad bacteria allow toxins to enter the bloodstream through the thin lining of the digestive tract. This study shows that intermittent fasting suppresses insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-1) production, and IGF-1 promotes growth of cancer cells. They also found that IF increases autophagy, which is the garbage-collection process of the body to clean up junk proteins which also lead to inflammation. They found that IF improves apoptosis management, which targets dysfunctional cells including cancer cells. Finally they found that IF puts cancer cells in an energy crisis, depriving them of sugar while the rest of the body, in fat-burner mode, survives on ketones, which are an alternative fuel source that many cancers cannot utilize well if at all.
Combination effect
Intermittent fasting by itself is simply a time-restricted eating cycle, and says nothing about what you eat. What happens when you combine IF with a healthy diet? A diet low in animal protein and high in low sugar vegetables has many of the same effects as IF does: it significantly lowers inflammation, improves gut health and gut flora, increases autophagy, improves insulin sensitivity, and reduces risk of many diseases including cancer. Putting the two together is a double win. That was the subject of a study published in Nutrients, where researchers at the University of Hawaii compared the effects of an IF plus Mediterranean diet (MED) protocol vs another relatively good diet without IF (2). The results were particularly striking in the reduction of excess fat on the participants with the IF + MED. The fat reduction was accompanied by decreases in proinflammatory cytokines and adipokines, and an increase in protective adipokines, as well as improved liver health.
We know that there is a diet even better than MED — the “green Mediterranean diet.” You can go even further in the health impact of your “when and what” food intake by substituting highly nutrient-dense raw vegetables in place of animal products. Now combine the other healthy factors such as hydration, exercise, proper sleep, and lowered mental stress – and the sky’s the limit. Each lifestyle factor you improve has a cumulative effect.
Why stop at an 8-hour eating window? What’s wrong with 6 or 4 hours? Would you want to go down to one meal a day (OMAD)? The smaller your eating window, the longer your insulin vacation, the longer your digestive system has to heal up from the load of the last meal, the more autophagy you get, and the less inflammatory your system becomes, so why not OMAD? Some very healthy and successful people have embraced the OMAD approach, but if you go down to one meal a day, you are going to have to work at getting all the nutrition you need in that one meal. That can be challenging for many, but not those who are extremely motivated. An 8-hour window is good, and perhaps you can work down to a 4-hour window while packing in the variety of foods that you need for complete nutrition. You gain more benefits with a short eating window, but there is no need to make this hard. The great thing about IF is how easy it is. A 4 to 8-hour eating window works best for most of us.
Let’s make healthy practices easy. Intermittent fasting, high intensity but short duration exercising and getting up out of your chair often, drinking water throughout the day, especially early, pausing to enjoy and be thankful for life — all these are easy. And they are much easier than getting sick and having to go through various drug protocols, surgery, or other interventions. Regularity in the small things is the easy path to health.
Dr. Nemec’s Review
According to the Journal of Nutritional Oncology the benefits of intermittent fasting are very significant:
1. Decreases IGF-1
IGF-1 is a growth hormone designed to stimulate growth of cells. This is a good thing at times of your life and at other times it’s not a good thing.
Good growth
You are growing up to the age of 22, then you hit your maximum height. So up to this point IGF-1 is promoted because growth is still necessary.
In your 20s and 30s, you are very vital. These are childbearing years, meaning women usually have their children: they’re growing babies, so mostly during this time IGF-1 is still good because there’s healthy tissues that need to grow.
Athletes thrive on being stronger, faster, and more enduring. All athletic competitions and training require growth because they’re breaking down muscle tissue, and need to repair it and grow new tissue that is faster and stronger — so IGF-1 is good for the most part.
Not good growth
There comes a point where good can shift and become bad. This is the negative side of IGF-1. If we’re not growing healthy tissue, either babies or muscles or repairing other tissue and we have IGF-1 circulating throughout the blood, this produces a stimulus to grow at the cellular level when growth is not necessary. When you stimulate growth when it’s not necessary, you are stimulating growth of the one cell in the body that wants to grow all the time. This cell is in everybody’s body and every age, just in different degrees. This cell is a product of living in an inflammatory and toxic environment, which unfortunately everyone is exposed to in this day and age. This cell is called a cancer cell. Cancer cells are known for rapid growth of abnormal cells triggered to grow due to cellular DNA mutations because the cells were trying to adapt and survive in an inflammatory toxic environment. So cancer’s intent is not really to kill the person, but instead to just help the mutations grow rapidly to possibly come up with a combination to survive. The problem is the cells do survive, but they lack communication skills. They do their own thing instead of the community thing and because they don’t listen to any other cells, they never stop growing until it’s too late: they have pressed out other healthy and necessary organ, gland, or tissue functions, which compromises the health of the whole individual. So with this type of growth, we want to lower IGF-1, not raise it. That’s the beauty of intermittent fasting — it naturally reduces insulin and IGF-1.
2. Activate Autophagy
Autophagy is the cellular process that involves the breakdown and recycling of cellular components. In essence, autophagy recycles everything imaginable inside the cell. So if there’s any way you can reuse the proteins, the fats, the DNA and RNA, it will break them down to their component parts — which are amino acids, essential fatty acids, and nucleic acids — and reuse them.
When you stop to think about this for a moment, you see how amazing the body is. It’s the best recycle plant that could ever be. There’s never a wasted structure. If its function is no longer working correctly it’s just recycled to its component parts and rebuilds a new structure. This is brilliance at the cellular level.
3. Reduces Inflammation
Inflammation is the basic root cause of most all disease, and that inflammation is seen when certain inflammatory molecules are raised in the circulating blood. Some of these molecules include the proin?ammatory adipokines such as IL-6, TNF-?, and IFG-1. During intermittent fasting these levels go down significantly, along with a whole list of other inflammatory molecules. You get the big picture: when you intermittent fast you decrease inflammation everywhere in the body, which benefits every cell in the body.
4. Increases fat burning, decreases visceral fat
Those that live the longest will have very efficient, fat-burning metabolism, and have minimal if any of visceral fat. That’s an another wonderful benefit of intermittent fasting. It tends to shift a person into burning more fat than carbohydrates as an energy source, because when you’re not eating during so many hours of the day, your body still requires energy — if there are no carbohydrates going in, then it just starts burning stored fat. That’s the purpose of stored fat: not to be stored indefinitely, but to be burned up regularly with intermittent fasting.
5. Triggers Apoptosis
Apoptosis — also called programmed cell death — is a suicide program used to prevent mutation at the cellular level that could turn into abnormal cell growth. So when the cells get very stressed continuously, the normal biochemical response is apoptosis, meaning the cell automatically kills itself so that it doesn’t turn malignant. When you intermittent fast you stimulate more apoptosis for any abnormal-looking cells in the body. This is another tremendous benefit for health and longevity.
IF + Green
When you combine intermittent fasting with a predominantly plant-based diet that is high in raw green, leafy vegetables and low glycemic index plant choices, you multiply the effect of the intermittent fasting. This is another key in your health and longevity picture: the multiplied effect of two synergistic health promoting activities done together at the same time.
The most important thing about intermittent fasting is that it has to fit well with your life so don’t do it and then stop doing it. Do what works for you and do it for the rest of your life. That’s where all the benefits come in. It’s in the long term, not the short term. It is not difficult to eat all your food in an eight hour time span that everyone should adopt as soon as possible. That alone will increase your quality and most likely your quantity of life. If it works for your schedule at some point in your life to lower to six-hour eating window, that’s even better but not necessary. Remember the goal here is that you can do it the rest of your life, and not burn out because it became too hard so get started today. Make a commitment today and stick to it until it becomes a habit — a very health- promoting permanent habit.
(1) Faris, MoezAlIslam Ezzat; Alkawamleh, Dania Husam; Madkour, Mohamed Ibrahim. Unraveling the impact of intermittent fasting in cancer prevention, mitigation, and treatment: A narrative review, Journal of Nutritional Oncology 10(2):p 29-39, June 2025.| DOI: 10.1097/JN9.0000000000000049, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/390843783_Unraveling_the_impact_of_intermittent_fasting_in_cancer_prevention_mitigation_and_treatment_A_narrative_review
(2) Panizza CE, Lim U, Yonemori KM, Cassel KD, Wilkens LR, Harvie MN, Maskarinec G, Delp EJ, Lampe JW, Shepherd JA, Le Marchand L, Boushey CJ. Effects of Intermittent Energy Restriction Combined with a Mediterranean Diet on Reducing Visceral Adiposity: A Randomized Active Comparator Pilot Study. Nutrients. 2019 Jun 20;11(6):1386. doi: 10.3390/nu11061386. PMID: 31226790; PMCID: PMC6627434. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6627434/
