Hi everyone! Today I'm posting a yummy #waffle recipe, it's actually one of my favorite flavors and to spice things up a little bit on this new month, even when it's not fall yet, I prepared these waffles as kind of a comforting food for me.
Also, as I promised, I talk about Intermittent Fasting in a more detailed way. On stories I can’t be as thorough because they would be very long and you would get bored.
So, to get into the topic, Intermittent Fasting was designed by the hypothesis or thought that in fasting periods we utilize primarily free fatty acids as our main source of energy to refuel all of our metabolically active organs and to fulfill other needs too.
So, what this dietary approach promises is that you will be using that extra fat and this will help you lose weight. This process I explained goes on while we sleep, but with Intermittent Fasting that will happen not only at night but during the day too.
As I mentioned on stories, there are different types of fasting protocols for this dietary approach which are as follows:
24-hour fast or Prolonged Fasting: this protocol suggests fasting for 1 or 2 days of the week. The days where you are not fasting allow you to eat anything you want (a.k.a: ad libitum).
Intermittent Calorie Restriction: this protocol focuses on restricting calories on certain days, while ad libitum diet on the other days.
Time Restricting Feeding: This is one of the most popular protocols in the intermittent fasting dietary approach. Consists on eating on a restricted number of hours. For example, you can eat on a window of 8 hours and you can choose when to fast; you can fast early in the day or mid-day and forward.
Alternate Day Fasting: focuses on days where you can eat anything you want and days where you can have a calorie restriction up to 60-75% of your total calories (so you can only consume 25-40% of what you typically would eat in a day).
Studies have focused on intermittent calorie restriction and alternate day feeding.
The majority of human studies that review this diet have been done on a short period of time, the longest study period was 12 months. This is probably due to how new this dietary approach is. Another thing I noticed is that the populations used in these studies were very small, the largest population was 22 subjects. For reference, the minimum or suggested amount of subjects in a study is 30. If you have smaller populations, the results you get can’t be generalized to everyone else. In order to have substantial and groundbreaking results, you have to have a larger population, I would suggest more than 30 subjects.
The majority of these clinical trials (compare the control group with the study group) compared either the intermittent calorie restriction or alternate day restriction with constant caloric restriction (which is the common way of aiming for weight loss). Few studies that compared the alternate day feeding and constant calorie restriction showed that there was a reduction in % fat and weight. Others showed that there was no statistical significance between either method, so the results here are not consistent. Animal studies have promising results, but the results may differ when evaluated in humans.
One of my suggestions, for now we don't have a lot of studies with larger populations or for long term, I would say we can wait until more research is done and we can really verify the effectiveness that this dietary approach offers.
Also, an important factor is that a lot of the people involved in these studies said that the intermittent fasting method was hard to keep up with and were not satisfied with it. I believe this is key and will determine how sustainable this method will be. Because when we talk about lifestyle changes to improve our health, we can’t see them with an expiration date, because they should be sustainable. Taking care of ourselves is not meant to be for a few months and the go back to practices that don’t improve our health.
This is why I mainly don’t recommend diets that have extreme caloric restrictions, juice detox cleanses, or any kind of food restriction since these methods are not sustainable. They promote disordered eating since they create a lot of anxiety around certain foods and teach us that some foods are good while other foods are bad or restricted. Like I’ve mentioned in previous posts, BALANCE IS KEY! No one can handle a super restrictive diet for so long and many of these diets out there are not studied for prolonged periods of time. As a dietitian I promote a sustainable, yummy and fun way of eating! I promise, it doesn’t have to be complicated to be nourishing!
If you have any questions related to this topic feel free to message me or email me to andreamarro75@gmail.com
Now my easy peasy Pumpkin Pie Spice Waffles #recipe!
Ingredients:
1 cup almond flour
2 eggs
1/3 cup almond milk
1 teaspoon pumpkin pie spice
1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
2 teaspoons apple cider vinegar
1 teaspoon baking soda
Method:
Combine all ingredients in a bowl
Mix well, avoiding flour lumps
Spray some avocado oil on the waffle iron, pour 2-3 tablespoons of batter and let it cook
Repeat this process until you finish the batter
Serve with your fave syrup/honey, fruit and enjoy all the fall flavors in August!
References:
Calorie Restriction and Fasting Diets: What Do We Know? National Institute on Aging, U.S Department of Health and Human Services. Content updated on August 14th, 2018.
Mary-Catherine Stockman, RD, LDN,1Dylan Thomas, MD,1Jacquelyn Burke, MS, RD,2andCaroline M. Apovian, MD1. Intermittent Fasting: Is the Wait Worth the Weight? Current Obesity Reports, 2018.
Corey A. Rynders,1,2,*Elizabeth A. Thomas,3,4Adnin Zaman,3Zhaoxing Pan,5Victoria A. Catenacci,3,4andEdward L. Melanson1,2,3. Effectiveness of Intermittent Fasting and Time-Restricted Feeding Compared to Continuous Energy Restriction for Weight Loss. Nutrients, 2019.
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