Intermittent fasting: a solution for obesity

by Zaina Abbas, MBS 2020, Geisinger Commonwealth School of Medicine
mentor: Darina Lazarova, PhD

For most of my life, I assumed I was healthy enough. I was involved in physical activities like marching band and I ate mostly homemade meals with my family. After graduating high school, I lost a lot of the structures that inadvertently were pushing me to be healthy. College was a big change. Fast forward three years, I had put on 50 pounds. At that time, I found I was eligible to take a one-hour course in physical education along with my other courses, and that semester was the catalyst to reclaiming my life back.

By the end of the course, I had an extra credit option to take a DEXA scan, a technology used for determining both bone density and body composition. At completing the cardiovascular and weight-training course, I was still about 40 pounds heavier compared to my high school years. I was also not ready for the results from the DEXA scan. I was 39% fat? The projected weight changes in the report meant that losing the weight I gained in college was not enough: I would still teeter on being overweight. I believed that becoming obese would be something I could notice and recognize. Acknowledging the report data like “lean mass” relative to “fat mass” helped me realize there was probably more I could have done to prevent obesity besides seeing pounds gained.

Flash forward to today - I am at a normal, desired body fat percentage with more lean mass. How did this happen? With this blog post, I hope to share a diet strategy I still use today, about a year after reaching my goal. With the daily obligations that add pressure on us like school and work, our healthy habits should give us a break from the routine and not add to the everyday burden. Calorie-counting was not my passion, and it was never going to be. When I discovered intermittent fasting, my life changed for the better. There is still a lot of research to be done on the role of the brain in weight management but at least the impact of intermittent fasting made it easier for me to reframe how I treated my other responsibilities. Many other diets felt like additional commitments to add to my already full plate of deadlines and obligations.

Intermittent fasting varies from person-to-person and can easily incorporate additional diet strategies. Some have only one meal the day of fast, while others set an eating time window. Some choose to include low-calorie liquids like tea and coffee outside their eating window, while others include only water. Some alternate between days, while others fast for only a couple days a week. Personally, I set an eight-hour window from when I have my first meal daily but if I can, I plan my eating window around my schedule in advance. As opposed to other weight management plans, I never caught myself feeling as bad when I had an unsuccessful fast because of the many ways to adjust. I felt like I was rescheduling my mealtimes to find a lifestyle I could commit to, not cheating on a diet. I could forgive myself for messing up because I would eat what I wanted so there were no punishing low-calorie meals or forbidden foods and no reason to stop trying to do better the next day. This strategy pushed me to define a lifestyle that worked for me to get better on my own terms.

The habit of intermittent fasting also allowed me to pay attention to the quality of foods that left me hungry sooner. I would later even begin to use the information about the ingredients in the meal and their calories to educate my future mealtime decisions. Reflecting on my failed diets, I struggled connecting numbers and lists to my main health goals when I made those details my focus. After tiring easily in exercise, I was truly starting to understand what peers meant when they said they wished they had eaten better before a workout.

Researchers have studied the effects of intermittent fasting combined with other strategies such as exercise, low-carbohydrate diets for weight control. However, intermittent fasting may alleviate also symptoms of diseases such as non-alcoholic fatty liver disease and type 2 diabetes. The studies demonstrate that there are positive effects of intermittent fasting worth exploring. In the meantime, I have learned that my success in weight management depends upon my feeling that I treat myself well, so being kind to myself with intermittent fasting was the best place to start my journey to a healthier life.