Assessment
FOOD
Before you begin any fitness and strength interventions, it’s crucial to assess where you currently stand. This section will guide you through key assessments, including cardiovascular fitness (VO2 Max), muscular strength, and body composition. By establishing your baseline, you can track your progress effectively as you move through the experiment.
The Food Experiment: Fasting and Measuring Ketones
The main goal of intermittent fasting is to switch your body over from primarily burning glucose to primarily burning fat as the primary energy source. This metabolic switch triggers many of the benefits of intermittent fasting related to insulin resistance. The switch typically occurs after about 12 hours of fasting and the switch remains on as long as you don't have any carbohydrates to switch it back off again. To ensure that you have made the metabolic switch to fat burning, we find it useful to have our patients measure ketones in their urine. This can be done by picking up a urine dip stick at the pharmacy (they are sold over the counter) and dipping it in your urine. If the urine shows more than trace to 1+ ketones, then you have made the switch to fat burning.
Top 3 Goals for the Food Experiment
Changing your eating habits can be difficult. Use these important metrics in your hypothesis statement for the food experiment so that you will be motivated to create and sustain the change: hsCRP: Plant based diets and the Mediterranean diet especially if you are already significantly limiting carbohydrate intake are anti-inflammatory. Further, if you are losing weight and using intermittent fasting, you can expect your levels of inflammation to go down. Triglyceride: Triglyceride levels are a sensitive indicator of insulin resistance and decline when you remove red meat, pork and even chicken from your diet. Fasting Insulin: Has been shown to decline with intermittent fasting, but you should expect plant-based diets to reduce it as well.
Assessing Food Content
