After I came up with the Fast to Last diet, I immediately had three questions: Will this diet work? Is this diet safe? and Has this diet been published before?
Will this diet work? Details on the answer to this question will be explored in future posts.
Is this diet safe? When I first mentioned the diet to my friends, their first reaction was that they had never heard of it, their second reaction was that it sounded very unsafe. The general thinking these days is that one should eat several small meals a day. One of my friends almost freaked out saying that I would do serious harm to my body by following this eating regimen. I decided to ask my neurologist neighbor with a strong interest in diet and nutrition. He had also never heard of it, but said that I would probably do no harm to myself by following the diet.
Did I invent this diet? After talking to several people, including many who follow the dieting world fanatically, and getting a general dumbfounded response, I began to think that I had actually invented a new diet. After a few minutes searching the Internet, however, I found that a very similar diet had been published in 2005. (http://www.fast-5.com/) That diet, the FAST-5 diet, was essentially identical to the one that I had come up with. The only difference was that the eating window was 5 hours rather than 4 hours. Further research showed that this and similar diets fell under the more universal dieting strategy known as Intermittent Fasting (IF) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermittent_fasting) Studies on IF with animals had taken place as early as 1943. So, I quickly realized that I had NOT invented a new diet. I did, however, conclude that this diet was certainly not well known, and for more than a half-century had been generally ignored. I also noticed in the Wikipedia article that a flurry of a dozen or so academic papers have been published in the past 4 years. Could there actually be something to this Intermittent Fasting idea, and might people only now be waking up to it?
Will this diet work? Details on the answer to this question will be explored in future posts.
Is this diet safe? When I first mentioned the diet to my friends, their first reaction was that they had never heard of it, their second reaction was that it sounded very unsafe. The general thinking these days is that one should eat several small meals a day. One of my friends almost freaked out saying that I would do serious harm to my body by following this eating regimen. I decided to ask my neurologist neighbor with a strong interest in diet and nutrition. He had also never heard of it, but said that I would probably do no harm to myself by following the diet.
Did I invent this diet? After talking to several people, including many who follow the dieting world fanatically, and getting a general dumbfounded response, I began to think that I had actually invented a new diet. After a few minutes searching the Internet, however, I found that a very similar diet had been published in 2005. (http://www.fast-5.com/) That diet, the FAST-5 diet, was essentially identical to the one that I had come up with. The only difference was that the eating window was 5 hours rather than 4 hours. Further research showed that this and similar diets fell under the more universal dieting strategy known as Intermittent Fasting (IF) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermittent_fasting) Studies on IF with animals had taken place as early as 1943. So, I quickly realized that I had NOT invented a new diet. I did, however, conclude that this diet was certainly not well known, and for more than a half-century had been generally ignored. I also noticed in the Wikipedia article that a flurry of a dozen or so academic papers have been published in the past 4 years. Could there actually be something to this Intermittent Fasting idea, and might people only now be waking up to it?
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