Intermittent Fasting for Blood Sugar Control: Benefits and Risks

Are there different types of intermittent fasting? You may have heard the term before, but I want to help you deeply understand it, its role when it comes to blood sugar control and all of the associated benefits and risks. I hope it helps you decide if this is right for you.

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Table of Contents

Different Types of Intermittent Fasting
Is Intermittent Fasting Right For You?
The Cons of Intermittent Fasting
What Should You Do About Intermittent Fasting?
The Tricky Thing About Intermittent Fasting

Different Types of Intermittent Fasting

Let’s start with a comprehensive breakdown of the different types of intermittent fasting that exist out there. These include:

• 16:8 Fasting: This essentially means avoiding food for 16 hours and eating within an eight-hour window.
• 5:2 Fasting: That means that you eat normally for five days and restrict calories or fast entirely for two days.
• Alternate Day Fasting: Where you simply don’t eat food every other day.
  Time-Restricted Feeding: Where there is a particular window of time where one is feeding and then not eating during other times.

The Arguments for Intermittent Fasting

Why might intermittent fasting be a good idea? The overarching idea is that there are different things that your body does when you’re not eating.

One thing is that your body has lower insulin than it produces. And when you’re not making insulin, you can get more sensitized to it.

That’s a good thing because you end up requiring less of it to control your blood sugar. The knock-on effects of that have resulted in studies showing that intermittent fasting may help lower blood sugar levels, enhance insulin sensitivity, and reduce the risk of type two diabetes.

There is also some popular thinking around weight loss and fat reduction. If you are eating in a narrower window of time and limiting your total food intake, intermittent fasting may cause weight loss (particularly with abdominal fat). That said, this is a bit of a grey area.

We also may be able to use it for our metabolic health. There has been data linking intermittent fasting to improvements in blood pressure, cholesterol levels, and other markers of overall metabolic health.

That may then tie into things like cell repair and autophagy. Autophagy is kind of having its own moment, but it means that we chew up and destroy unhealthy cells — breaking down bad cells to make room for good cells, which we do more during fasting.

There are also purported benefits around inflammation. Some research suggests that intermittent fasting can lower inflammatory markers, which would be a good thing and lower the risk of chronic diseases like heart disease and many cancers.

The Arguments Against Intermittent Fasting

When it comes to the pros and cons of intermittent fasting, we’ve covered a lot of the good that it could do and the data associated with it. But what could be wrong about intermittent fasting?

The biggest thing to consider is whether these benefits are coming about because people eat in a certain time – as many would claim – or because they lowered their total food intake.

There have been studies trying to make this distinction between time and total intake. The thing they have consistently found is that lower food intake is the bigger needle mover — rather than the periods in which people eat.

Conversely, those that practice intermittent fasting but fail to lower their total food intake, do not see the same benefits as the ones listed above.

Metabolically, the argument is that if you constrain your food to a certain window of time, that by itself is helpful. The behavioral effects are that when people constrain their food to that window of time, they end up eating less food overall.

Is Intermittent Fasting Right For You?

If it turns out that eating in a certain window of time is good for your total food intake, that’s great. You should continue doing it for your health.

The issue is that some may start intermittent fasting, lower their food intake, but simply become more comfortable getting more food in that window. They begin to normalize eating during those times, eat more, and increase their overall intake.

In most cases, this ends up negating all of the benefits that you would have initially experienced in the first place. Mainly because your intake increased.

But if you’re someone who does better eating less food, just more often, then you’re just as likely to see all of those same benefits.

And it turns out that the major benefits of autophagy and cellular health are more tied to less food and less tied to food timing.

The Cons of Intermittent Fasting

Now that we’ve learned that intermittent fasting, or eating during designated periods, isn’t the benefit that it’s thought to be, we may need to think more deeply about any potential consequences of the practice. What might be bad about intermittent fasting?

There is evidence that intermittent fasting may raise cortisol levels. When that happens, this can worsen the body’s stress adaptation. That can cause:

• More muscle loss
• More fat retention
• Disruption of electrolytes

There is also evidence that intermittent fasting can disrupt thyroid hormones. That can slow the basal metabolic rate. Many studies have shown that fasting in various ways can lower T3 and raise thyroid stimulating hormone (TSH).

We also need to consider that intermittent fasting may disrupt the relationship that we have with the food we eat. Those who have been prone to emotional stress and the effects of their diet can get worse with fasting. It can also be bad for those with eating disorders.

Then there’s the topic of appetite. Overall, studies have shown that intermittent fasting does not have a discernibly better effect on appetite than simply eating less food.

Another con is also possible cardiovascular health issues. One study showed that those who were restricting their food to an eight-hour window had a 91% higher chance of cardiovascular death. That’s a pretty big claim!

That could be tied back to cortisol elevation. We know that those who have higher levels of cortisol have more inflammation in their body and more risks for cardiovascular disease. We also know that cortisol is a blood sugar-raising hormone.

If one spends large amounts of their day away from food, their blood sugar would run far too low if they didn’t make more cortisol to bring it back up. This is not definitive, but more studies may bear it out in the future — it’s something to keep an eye on.

Another concern is hypoglycemia. Those who are more prone to it can encounter more issues when they are doing intermittent fasting. But I want to tell you a bit more about that in a different way, to help you get a handle on the next steps.

What Should You Do About Intermittent Fasting?

Let me tell you about someone I spoke to in the recent past. This is a person who had struggled for years with the effects of hypoglycemia, and she reached out to me to thank me for some of the guidance I had provided that got her back to a healthier place.

This person has been told that her issues would be improved with intermittent fasting, and she tried many versions of it with all sorts of different methods. The issue was that it always gave her more symptoms of hypoglycemia – more jitters, more anxiety, more problems.

After seeing some of my videos and reading some of my work, she tried eating every two to four hours and built a diet around healthy, slow-burning carbohydrates, lean proteins, lots of vegetables, and less saturated fats.

And what she found was that she felt better. Her energy was stable, she didn’t need coffee as badly, and she didn’t have as many out-of-control patterns when she did eat. Her total food intake went down and she felt way better.

While that isn’t true for everyone, when we study people in groups, what we often find is that most do better if they eat more often rather than fast. If that’s been you, and you’ve thought about or tried to fast, you shouldn’t worry about that.

The Tricky Thing About Intermittent Fasting

When we talk about intermittent fasting, what we’re really talking about is the effects that it can have on behavior rather than overall metabolic health.

On behavior, some people can stumble onto eating less food as a byproduct of intermittent fasting. But on metabolism, it doesn’t seem to leave a great change.

If you are keen to try intermittent fasting, here are some things to consider:

• Start gradually. Choose a window of time that is not too restrictive and phase into it slowly.
• In terms of times of day, studies show that we’re better off when we eat earlier in the day and stop eating in the evening.
• If you’re going to narrow the time in which you’re eating, you’re probably best off eating breakfast, lunch, and having an early dinner before stopping eating altogether.

It’s important to think all of this through. If intermittent fasting has worked well for you, your weight, and your appetite, that’s awesome. But you should check your health and stay connected with a practitioner who can help you in the journey.

If it’s not working for you, reconsider your strategy. The best studies suggest that you can enjoy all of the benefits by simply reducing your food intake or enjoying foods that are better for you.

A lot of today’s discussion informed my thinking when it came time to write the Adrenal Reset Diet, especially focusing on foods that had resistant starch. I hope you’ll check it out and consider it a new method that could replace intermittent fasting if it isn’t working for you.