Man 2.0 Engineering the Alpha

minimum of eight hours of fasting . It just so happens that you fast when you sleep, so the information is misleading. More specifically, insulin sensitivity is higher when your glycogen levels (the energy stores in your body) are depleted, like after your sleeping fast.
    Intermittent fasting takes that a step farther and turns your body into a fat-burning, muscle-building machine. You see, if you skip breakfast and extend the fasting period beyond the typical eight to ten hours, you increase insulin even more.
    Does this make a difference? You bet it does—both internally, in terms of the efficiency with which your body functions, and externally, with how you look.
    But that’s just the beginning. Insulin sensitivity is also increased after you exercise (due to further glycogen depletion), in which case if you can train in your fasted state in the morning and then eat, you have set your body up to maximize fat burning in the morning. What’s more, you turn all your post-workout meals—so everything you eat the rest of the day—into super fuel that will have you looking leaner and more muscular, and feeling more satisfied and energized than ever before.
    In the end, there is no science that supports the idea—from a direct comparison—that eating breakfast is better than not eating breakfast. Some people might have a psychological dependence or belief that it’s what they need, or they could have a habit of binging when they are hungry. But from a physiological perspective, as in how your body actually reacts to breakfast, there’s nothing special about eating early in the morning. In fact, forcing yourself to eat at a particular time, or a prescribed number of times, is just as big of a problem as saying you need breakfast.

    DIET FIX #2: YOU CHOOSE HOW OFTEN YOU EAT
    The reason why so many people hate dieting is that there’s too much confusion about what you can and can’t eat. Calorie-restrictive plans like Weight Watchers certainly don’t agree with plans like the Atkins diet, the first iteration of which allowed dieters to eat all they wanted as long as they kept carbs low. As we’ve already mentioned, this confusion goes out the window with intermittent fasting, as it offers much more freedom to eat foods that you enjoy.
    Despite the incredibly disparate nature of most diets, the one thing that has been consistently suggested in most books published over the past twenty years is the frequency of meals.
    If you’ve read a diet book, seen a nutritionist, or hired a personal trainer at any point during that time, you’ve probably been told that in order to lose weight, you need to eat five to six small meals per day. *
    This style of eating, commonly referred to as the frequent feeding model, is popular with everyone from dietitians to bodybuilders and has been repeated so often for so long that it’s generally taken as fact.
    But it’s not.
    The reputed benefits of eating frequent, small meals have never been scientifically validated, although there have been studies that have tried. The theory suggests that since eating increases your metabolic rate, the more often you eat, the more your metabolic rate will be elevated. But this has never been conclusively shown.
    That part is actually true, by the way. Every time you put food in your mouth, you burn calories. When you eat, your inner machinery needs to work hard to break down the food you eat; the breakdown and conversion of food into energy requires some energy itself, and some is used to help you walk, think, breathe, build muscle, lose fat, and even sleep. Some.
    And the rest? Well, the leftovers require energy to be transported as adipose tissue—the bad stuff that gives you love handles—or broken down and passed through your digestive tract.
    Going a bit farther, we know that the amount of energy you burn depends on the food you eat. This is known as the thermic effect of food. Of all the foods you eat, protein is the most metabolically expensive—it costs more energy to break down, digest, and put to use than either carbohydrates or fat. Up to 30 percent of the calories you eat from protein are burned during the digestion and processing of those foods.
    That’s one of the main reasons why diets with protein are so great; the more protein you eat, the more calories you burn. Carbohydrates are less metabolically active (about 6 to 8 percent burned), and fats are the least metabolically active (about 4 percent burned) despite being the