Periodic calorie restriction prevented cancer best….

Today's Post: Thursday, 8-6-2009

Fitness expert Jon Benson came out with an eBook not long ago called the Every Other Day Diet. (See http://www.everyotherdaydiet.com/ .)

Jon found several very useful things that he put in this eBook. Switching from eating junk food seven days a week to eating right does cause fat loss for some people. Exercise does cause fat loss for some people and helps everyone to keep off the fat they lose. But restricting calories tends to work best to lose fat.

Unfortunately, most people trying to lose excess fat overdo restricting calories and find they can’t stick with it. And those who do switch to eating right and exercising and restrict calories a more moderate amount tend, eventually, to still cause their bodies to go into famine mode. Then their fat loss stops. Their metabolism slows and they get MUCH hungrier and for more fattening foods. At best that keeps people from losing all the fat they want and makes them feel depleted and less energetic. Worse, quite often it causes them to quit and gain back all they lost.

Jon found that eating special foods that are low calorie but extra filling & on alternate days eating right but all you want and even getting small weekly treats of your favorite fattening foods has several key benefits. Psychologically it is MUCH easier to be a bit hungry for one day sometimes than to be extra hungry every single day forever.

But the other benefit is HUGE. This program not only causes fat loss effectively, it completely avoids turning on a famine response. That means your hunger stays at a normal setting and your energy and metabolism stay high. You feel good and healthy. And, best of all you keep losing your excess fat until it’s all gone.

Researchers just published that this way of eating also was much more effective at preventing breast cancer, & very likely other cancers as well, than simple calorie restriction was!

Further, they suspect it was that periodic calorie restriction minimized insulin levels best which was the cancer preventative.

That’s exciting since minimizing insulin levels also prevents type 2 diabetes and may even reverse it. Low insulin levels also cause fat loss best. And lowering insulin levels is an extremely effective method for losing belly fat!

Last Tuesday Health Day online news had this headline.:

“Periodic Dieting May Cut Breast Cancer Risk”

“ Periodically cutting calories may lower the risk of developing breast cancer better than full-time dieting, according to a new study published in Cancer Prevention Research.”

The researchers took 3 groups of mice of a kind that tend to get breast cancer.

One group ate all they wanted. One group was forced to eat 25% less every day. And the third group of mice ate 25 % less on some days and all they wanted on other days.

If just cutting calories alone prevented cancer, you would have expected the mice who ate 25% less every day to have the lowest rate. That was NOT what they found.

It wasn’t even close. Yes, the mice that ate 25% less every day did better than the mice that ate all they wanted. 71% of the eat all they wanted mice got breast cancer and 35% of the mice that ate 25% less every day got breast cancer. But, in the mice “intermittently” fed 25% less only 9 % did.

“Although previous studies had shown similar results, the researchers were still surprised.”

Intermittently eating 25% less calories cut the cancer rate almost 8 times better than eating all they wanted every day. AND, it cut the cancer rate almost 4 times better than calorie restriction every day!

Since we are all descended from hunter gatherers who tended to eat well some days and not others so we are adapted by evolution to eat that way, this perhaps is not as surprising as it seems.

That’s particularly exciting since it means the doable every other day diet approach is BETTER for keeping you healthy than the virtually impossible all the time diet approach.

That’s really good news!