You aren’t 20 anymore. Even worse, you aren’t 30 anymore, either! With the age of 40 comes the startling realization that your metabolism doesn’t run as fast.
Many men turn to various dieting or exercise routines to offset these changes. But more and more are considering intermittent fasting (IF), especially if they’re over 40. Why is intermittent fasting great if you’re over 40? Let’s find out.
What is Intermittent Fasting?
In a nutshell, intermittent fasting is less of a diet and more of an eating pattern or lifestyle choice. It consists of cycling between periods where you fast and periods where you eat, in order to improve your health biomarkers and overall wellbeing. Unlike most traditional diets or weight loss regimens, intermittent fasting doesn’t care what kinds of food you eat; instead, it focuses on when you should eat.
The idea is to model your eating after a more ancestral form—as humans fasted throughout evolutionary history. In the ancient era, humans and their hominid cousins didn’t always have food available, so they had to function without food for extended periods. This has led many to wonder whether fasting is more natural than eating three or four times per day (note: IF is not the same as the “Paleo Diet,” although it’s based on the same notion that living more like our evolutionary forbears could have health benefits).
There are three main fasting methods:
- 16/8, the most popular method, is when you skip your breakfast and restrict your eating to between 8 hours. 12 PM to 8 PM or 1 PM to 9 PM is a typical bracket used by many. You then fast for the remaining 16 hours of the day.
- 5:2 dieting is also popular. This is when you consume between 500 and 600 calories for any two nonconsecutive days during your week, and then eat normally for the other five days of your week.
- Eat-stop-eat is a third popular intermittent fasting routine. With this routine, you can fast for 24 hours once or twice each week, then eat regularly for the other days of the week.
- Basically, no matter which method you use, IF forces your body into a different mode of energy consumption and hormone production. This provides a plethora of benefits.
How Does It Work?
When you aren’t receiving food at the same rate and you enter a state of true hunger, your body undergoes several metabolic and cellular changes. For instance:
- Your insulin sensitivity improves and levels of insulin across the body can dramatically drop. This has a helpful side effect of making stored body fat much more accessible for energy-burning, which is why many people use intermittent fasting for fat burning purposes.
- There is some evidence to suggest that your cells will begin to repair themselves when your body enters a fasting state. This also helps your cells digest and get rid of old or dysfunctional proteins that can build up within healthy cells.
- Entering a fasting state causes the level of the human growth hormone, or HGH, to increase up to fivefold. This allows you to lose fat and gain muscle more effectively.
- Furthermore, there’s some evidence to suggest that intermittent fasting can improve your gut health over the long-term and even provide lifespan enhancing effects.
All this is to say that the adjustments your body undergoes when entering a fasting state multiple times per week can provide a number of benefits. But why is it such a great choice for men over 40? Let’s break it down.
Why Is Intermittent Fasting Great for Men Over 40?
Aside from the standard benefits that intermittent fasting seems to bring to people who practice these eating cycles, there are some benefits that men over 40, specifically, may find particularly important.
Intermittent Fasting Helps You Lose Weight and, Specifically, Belly Fat
It’s no secret that men over 40 start to gain weight a lot more easily than before, and for many men, that means belly weight. Unfortunately, there’s no such thing as targeted weight loss; while you can practice as many dieting regimens as you like, there’s no guarantee that the fat will come off around your stomach. So you’re stuck looking for an effective weight loss regimen that you can work with over the long-term.
Intermittent fasting is a great choice for this reason. Short-term fasting can increase your metabolic rate and help you burn calories more effectively. It can also help you lose weight over a few months, providing real results that can motivate you for further fasting without having to wait up to half a year. Even better, in studies, many of the people who lost weight with intermittent fasting, lost belly fat in particular. If that isn’t good news, we don’t know what is!
Intermittent Fasting Improves Heart Health
Many men suffer from heart problems as they get older, and indeed, heart disease is the biggest killer in the world. Many people end up dying from heart disease because of associated problems like high blood pressure, high cholesterol, systemic inflammation, elevated blood sugar levels, and so on. The good news is that intermittent fasting can help with all of these aspects and more.
For men that might be battling several health issues all at the same time, intermittent fasting could be a one-size-fits-all solution that they can maintain over time. You can lose weight, improve health across the body, and build muscle all at once. What’s not to like?
Intermittent Fasting Can Help Prevent Cancer by Affecting Metabolic Rate
No one likes to consider cancer, but it’s something that men over 40 and other middle-aged folks need to start thinking about eventually. Some studies suggest that cancer growth rates are heavily affected by metabolic rate, which may explain part of why people are more likely to get cancer as they get older.
Interestingly, there’s even some evidence showing that intermittent fasting can help prevent various types of cancer. The exact reasons for this aren’t fully understood, but it’s likely due to the way intermittent fasting affects your hormonal cycles and your metabolic rate. As mentioned earlier, fasting can help you induce your cells into a state of repair, perhaps lessening the likelihood that you’ll have cancerous growths over time.
Additionally, intermittent fasting can help with the side effects of chemotherapy for some patients. This makes it a great recovery regimen in addition to a proactive lifestyle choice.
Intermittent Fasting May Extend Your Lifespan
As we said earlier, intermittent fasting may even have lifespan-extending features that we aren’t yet fully aware of. The diet hasn’t fully taken off across the entire population, and no one practicing it over the long-term has yet made it to a ripe old age. Anecdotal evidence about old folks who barely eat aside, there are some studies with rats showing that intermittent fasting can extend the lifespan similarly to calorie restriction.
Many men over 40 start to think more about mortality and extending their “good years” as long as possible. We think making the most of your years is always sage advice, but even better is adding on more functional years when you have basically the same ability and metabolism as you did when you were younger.
If there’s some evidence that intermittent fasting can help with this goal, how could you not give it a shot?
Intermittent Fasting Can Help You Build Muscle
Lastly, there’s plenty of evidence to show that your human growth hormone levels can increase up to five times when your body enters a fasting state. Note that this doesn’t mean that you build more muscle automatically, but it does mean you might be able to enjoy similar gains that you did in your 20s and 30s if you work out while you’re fasting.
The great thing about this choice is that you can use it in conjunction with other muscle-building strategies. For instance, when you do eat meals, you can make sure that you eat lots of protein or other muscle-building compounds for better nutrition. While you won’t be able to drink a post-workout shake while fasting, it’s a small price to pay for the purported benefits. When combined with workouts, it’s likely that your weight loss goals will be more easily met, as well.
Plenty of men over 40 want to regain the bodies they had when they were younger, and why not? Intermittent fasting might be the key.
Summary
Is intermittent fasting right for you? Only you can say, but we’d heavily recommend that you try it out for yourself. The great thing about intermittent fasting is that it doesn’t require nearly as much prep work or forethought as something like a traditional diet. Many big diets require meal prep, calorie tracking, and more.
With intermittent fasting, all you need to do is keep yourself from eating for certain periods. For men over 40 with a lot on their minds, IF could be a perfect fit.
