FASTING HAS ITS BENEFITS
The fight against obesity is alive and well, and research might have found a link between intermittent fasting and increased motivation to want to exercise.
I think when most people read this they will blink twice while trying to process the information. Normally people eat to exercise and now researchers are telling us that by skipping meals, you will have more desire to want to exercise. In order to understand this statement, we need to look further into the research to understand why.
Motivation is the driving force in sticking to an exercise regime but as we all know life gets in the way and you find every excuse and justification as to why you are not going to exercise today. The “Hunger Hormone” ghrelin stimulates your appetite but has also been reportedly linked to be essential for endurance exercise by increasing your metabolism to meet the energy demands of prolonged exercise.
A study done by Dr Yuji Tajiri from Kurume University School of Medicine took two control groups of mice who all had access to a running wheel. The first control group had free access to food, the second control group was only fed twice a day. Even though both groups of mice ate more or less the same amount of food, the surprising result was that the mice who had restricted food access ran more on the running wheel than the mice that ate at will.
The assumption was that ghrelin played a role in motivation in the mice. The researchers took it one step further and genetically modified the mice to produce no ghrelin in their bodies and repeated the behaviour of free access to food and restricted food. It was found that the genetically modified mice exercised less than the mice that had free access to food.
The finding thus suggests that ghrelin may play an important role in motivation for feeding and exercise. Dr Yuji cautions that the experiment was done on animals and not humans and is preparing to do real world experiments for the treatment of obesity.
Intermittent fasting has gotten a lot of hype over the past few years and it is possibly, based on doctors’ advice, worthwhile to personally experiment with.