Horizon Eat, fast and live longer

Saw this program as well and thought it was very interesting. Decided to give a it a try and have now been on a 4:3 ratio... fasting on Monday, Wednesday and Friday for one week. Was very surprise at how easy i found it to go all day and only eat a 600 cal meal in the evening with the family on my fast days. The myfitnesspal has helped a lot with working out what foods i can use to make up a good meal. I'm going to keep this up for a month and see how i go. I have loss over 5lb already but my goal of 1 1/2 stone by the end of Sept seems a long way of. By the way, this is my first attempt at any form of diet ever..... wish me luck

p.s. picture was from a filming extra part i was in

Regards David

according to the broadcast you can eat it anyway you like it. most people prefer one meal probably.

Hello everyone, is this 2 days or 48 hours? If I have my last meal at 4 pm on Sunday does that mean I can eat normally at say 5pm Tuesday????

On the Horizon programme that we are discussing, Michael Mosley ate 600 calories on two separate "fasting" days per week. He recommends NOT doing 2 consecutive fasting days, though there are other eating plans where I believe people do this. Women get 500 calories on "fasting" days. You eat "normally" (whatever that is.....) on the other 5 days of the week. The idea is to lower levels of hormones that promote ageing - any weight loss is *supposedly* a side effect.

Why not watch the programme for yourself on youtube & see what you think? He did emphasise that it's not suitable for everyone.
Edited to add http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pfna7nV7WaM

It's okay, let their metabolism slow down, use amino acid pools, and be catabolic(destroy muscle tissue). Rules are there for a reason.

I wonder if reducing protein during feed-days, but eating normal quantities of protein during fast days would be better since there is a bigger overall protein reduction. The reason is it's easier to survive on protein foods on fast days.

The amount of protein to consume for the benefits of lower IGF-1 level's is the RDA recommendations. The RDA is 0.8g/kg. So lets say you weight 165lbs
165lbs/2.2 = 75kg
.8 * 75 = 60g of protein to consume per day.

So what I would do if you're doing the ADF(Alternate day fast) is on your fasted day dont eat protein. On day 2 you double it up, so it would be 120g of protein on eating days.

Yes, I get that, but what about exercise? I'm doing Stronglifts 5 x 5 - do I sacrifice muscle gain to the greater god of living longer by lowering my protein?

I'm actually on a 5/2 regimen. Second week now, day #1 done.
I am 77kg, so that's 62g of protein per day. I wish the programme made that clearer because before all this protein-reduction advice, everyone used to say "eat protein" and the common opinion was that there isn't enough protein in our normal diets, yet the programme says we consume too much of it. So the RDA recommendation *is* the reduced amount of protein?
You mention IGF-1, whereas I (pardon my ignorance) am referring to IGH-1 (insulin-like growth hormone 1) since that's the focus of the programme. So if I understood correctly, you advise not to eat any protein at all on the fast day - I presume to put the body into repair mode and/or reduce IGH-1 levels? Is 1 day enough for this? I fast 2 days in a row, so not sure how to proceed if I was to follow your suggestion.
At the moment I am surviving on about 30g of protein - which is half of my RDA, per fast-day. It helps with appetite and ensures I don't burn my muscles as fuel since I eat very little carbs (mostly veg and a portion of fish).
Since the emphasis of the programme was protein reduction, I am a little concerned doubling my protein following the fasting because the same could be said about calories, but no one eats extra calories on their normal day following their fast day.
And since protein is "anabolic", used for growth (correct me if I'm wrong, but it's not just muscle growth is it?), and the idea of the programme was to "stop growing" or stop the "go-go" mode, so the body can "repair" itself, so my point is it might not be necessary to eat extra protein on normal days?

Having written all that, it now seems opposite, since we take protein after we stopped "go-go" i.e. we stopped exercising, and use protein to repair our muscles, but I guess that's just another rather unrelated topic of muscle building.

FYI: Michael Mosley himself (according to his Twitter posts) has a modest amount of protein on his fast days.

One thing I am still not certain is exercise. I am 99% sure that even if I burn 300 Kcal in the gym, doesn't mean I can eat 300 extra on my fast day; a fast is a fast and there should be clear gaps between meals - of ideally 24 hours, if I understood correctly. And yet, the effects of exercise during fasting can be extremely tiring, so there has to be a right workout. From what I read it has to be fat-burning zone (70% max your heart rate) which uses fat for fuel, and anything higher such as interval training would use glucose and since this fasting diet is low on carbs, one would end up using the last remains of glucose in the muscles and get fatigued big time.

There's just one more thing, but I'll write tomorrow, this is long enough :-) Hyper from all the fasting!!

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/lifestyle/9480451/The-52-diet-can-it-help-you-lose-weight-and-live-longer.html

See link above. 55g/day is recommended for the 5/2 diet according to that link (at least that's how it seems to me). The US RDA for protein for adult men is 56g/day and adult women is 46g/day, or you will also see it reported as 0.8g/kg/day.

I don't think you could get 55g in on a fast day so I assume that's for a regular day and the fast day would just be less.

The program didn't focus much on protein though -- it was more about calorie reduction/fasting.

I posted a bunch of links earlier re. studies linking low protein, not calorie reduction, to decreased IGF/IGH (same thing). I do think it's important not to go too low in protein. Have found other studies suggesting that less than 0.8g/kg/day can lead to decreased bone density and muscle loss, for starters, as well as many other problems if you go too low. These factors weren't evaluated in the studies on IGF so there may be hidden costs to going too low in protein -- I would stay at the RDA or slightly above. In one paper, 0.95g/kg/day was enough to decrease IGF.

I think the point is no one really cares about the RDA and most people on a western diet are getting much more protein than that (twice as much or more). Even on a vegetarian diet, I am easily getting 60g a day without even trying (over 1g/kg/day for me). I think that is why that intake is considered "low".

In response to Dan . . .

I guess there isn't any reason you couldn't get 60g protein on fast days -- that's only 240 calories. As far as IGF is concerned, you should be fine to eat 60g protein every day and see the benefit (that's my understanding anyway, I am not an expert). I was just thinking it would be hard to do that in one meal but maybe not.

Why are you doing 2 consecutive days -- I thought the program recommended to do 2 separate days (see link I posted before)? Also, as far as having 24 hours between meals, I don't think that's necessary (per the program, it may have other benefits) -- they recommend 2 isolated fast days with 1-2 small meals so there would never be a period of 24 hours between meals. Essentially, it is not fasting, it is twice weekly calorie reduction.

You sound like you are doing more of an Eat Stop Eat plan except that you are eating two meals during a 48 hour fast period. Not saying it's better or worse, just slightly different than what I thought the 5/2 program was. Could have exactly the same benefits, I am not sure.

I don't know if anyone would be interested in starting a group for the 5/2 plan or those doing moderate protein/strength training. It might be easier than discussing it here.

I am not planning on fasting but am lowering my protein to 1g/kg/day and hoping this does not affect my ability to gain a little muscle. I would be interested in following anyone doing anything similar.

@jsl_mfp

It's just 1 link, and they've just summarised what Michael Mosley ended up doing in the end which is split-meals non-consecutive days.
Like others, I am not sure which is better, doing a longer fast of consecutive days or doing intermittent 2 day fasts. Maybe 2 bursts of fasting is better cumulatively whereas doing 2-day fasts might only get 75% of the benefits. More importantly, I think, is sticking to one thing then you could say confidently that one method works. 2 months later one could try something else. I can't safely say what the results are for me, after 2 weeks, due to lack of proper measuring, a little bit of overindulgence in between (last weekend was a cheesecake and ice-cream pigout), and all the vegetables are clogging me up, not sleeping well, so I am not feeling all too great, but I am sure my body is adjusting. I have absolutely no doubt in my mind that if I stick with it for 2-3 more weeks, I will see the results. Also, I've been slacking on the exercise, and it's such a huge complement to this (or any) diet, and I think that's a rather big step second step (undoubtedly though, diet is more important than exercise). Exercise aids digestion massively, so I think it is critical for those who are not used to so much fiber in their diet (I am trying water + lemon atm to help digestion).

Someone else's review of the program: Just been emailed a link by EarlyToRise: http://www.eatstopeat.com/bbcdiet.shtml?utm_expid=7760520-3

Overall, my decision making in doing 2 consucutive days of fasting has been revolving around:
http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/healthreport/caloric-restrictions-and-occasional-fasting/3995760
I suspect they're the source of all the actual experiments. By doing 2 consecutive days, it is much easier to have a 1 x 24-hour gap (the longest gap in 2 days), whereas on a non-consecutive diet, if you start eating mid-day on your fast day, and resume eating at 8am on a feed-day, that's 20 hours fast (not to mention most people prefer to have 2 meals so they're barely fasting; I think one has to feel hungry and it's perfectly normal to learn to deal with it).

The idea that grabs me, and I quote from the URL above:
"Our ancestors and certainly animals in the wild tend to have limited resources and they have to go off on extended periods of time without food. Feast or famine. And our genes and every cell in our body are geared towards that type of intermittent energy intake. More recently we all eat now, or some of us anyway, three meals a day, but from the standpoint of evolution that’s abnormal. So we were interested to understand at least initially in laboratory animals and then in humans, if we manipulate dietary energy intake, particularly reducing energy intake either in a controlled daily way of what we call intermittent energy restriction, where for example every other day we greatly reduce the amount of calories or maybe two days a week fast or have very low calorie intake.
So what you’re trying to do was in fact imitate evolution, rather than previous research in calorie restriction which was calorie restriction every day of the animal’s life?
That’s right, exactly. What we’re finding in fact when we directly compare intermittent energy restriction to daily calorie restriction, we find that the intermittent energy restriction has more powerful effects in enhancing the ability of nerve cells to cope with stress and resist disease and if we can get into what’s actually going on in the nerve cells...".

And in line with the results on animals on Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases, only by experiencing hunger through fasting for extended period of time will trigger our bodies into survival/repair mode, and fight neural diseases and grow new brain cells. The animals tested upon had a 24 hour gap between their energy intake.

Also, in the URL above, the studies on asthma patients were on 2 consecutive days of fasting (600 kcal per day). Unfortunately as we know, there was no group to do non-consecutive days, so we can't compare the benefits. And yes, Michael Mosley himself got great results doing the non-consecutive variant, but I think he was dieting for a few days before (3.5 day fast and was going through all sorts of diets in the programme) and I don't recall him wating for his indicators to drop to the unhealthy level before doing the 5/2, so his results on non-consecutive fast days were not controlled. Unless I missed something? One can only try.

Today: feast-day. Chocolate peanuts oooooooooooooo

I started this Monday, I'm on my 2nd fasting day of the week (I'm doing one day on one day off).
It's going well, that heavens for miso soup :laugh:

am doing 5:2 and would be interested in joining a group , was just wondering if there was one.