There's quite a lot of evidence to suggest "fasting" or sporadic eating is really good for the human body in lots of ways Happydog, but then there's quite a lot of evidence that little often is good for some people too, so you have to take it all with a healthy dose of salt and see what works for you I suppose. Fasting does nothing for me, but then that might be because I'm a very controlled eater (too controlled, but that's another story) and the basic principle of fasting "diets" is that you overeat and undereat in a cycle. The idea is that the human body is made to fluctuate between feast and famine, in the caveman days we wouldn't have had the resources to kill an animal every day, so we'd have fed on raw flesh till stuffed and then starved for a few days, or lived on berries and a few leaves (I wouldn't have been a happy cave woman 😳). So basically they had a cycle of stuffing themselves with delicious raw flesh 😱 then storing that as fat (and glucose), those stores would have been used up well before the next poor creature was killed. The most interesting bit of course if they'd have next to no access to carbohydrate, so the current philosophy of eating twice our body weight in carb is interesting to say the least, we're clearly not made to process that amount of carbohydrate. Dawn phenomena is thought to be related to excess glucose stores. So the liver is programmed to release glucose in the morning to get you moving and ready for hard physical work, on the basis that you'd be starving most of the time. It has no clue how much glucose you actually need btw it just shoves out as much as it can spare, so if you over eat carbohydrate (and actually protein and fat but that's harder to achieve) then you get dawn phenomena because your body will push out too much glucose because it has too much. Fasting helps with that because the process of fasting makes the body utilise the energy source it has and effectively empties the bank vaults. Whether you take well to fasting is complex though, because it assumes that all counter regulatory and regulatory processes are working properly, and that's not the case for everyone. The liver's counter regulatory response in those with T1 is often wonky, and I believe there's increasing evidence to suggest that some categories of T2 and MODY have much the same issue. Although to be fair there's also some evidence to suggest fasting might help with that wonky response 🙄
I don't fast, but then I'm more likely to have a dawn hypo than dawn phenomena, and honestly I dislike starvation, it's a flaw I know but it's just the way I roll 🙂
