Intermittent fasting (IF) has been touted as the way our ancestors ate. But is it really the best diet for everyone?
Is it best for diabetics?
Photo by Rania Alhamed
Intermittent fasting means compressing your daily meals into a shorter period. This means that you have 12 to 20 hours during the day with no food intake.
And then consuming all your calories for the day in that shorter remaining period.
These long periods of fasting throughout the day may be fine for someone with a fairly normal metabolism.
But, diabetics don’t have normal metabolism.
Intermittent fasting causes blood sugar lows and highs throughout the day.
Diabetics don’t handle carbs well. They get high blood sugars after meals and can crash between meals. Diabetics have a hard time storing glucose in cells for later use. So, their blood glucose levels can be more erratic.
Diabetes causes glucose, the main blood sugar, to float around in the bloodstream and not get used for energy. Insulin pulls the glucose out of the bloodstream and into the cells.
But insulin doesn’t work well in a diabetic’s body. So glucose stays in the bloodstream longer than normal causing damage to the blood vessels.
The ideal diet for a diabetic helps you to maintain a fairly constant blood glucose level without large fluctuations.
Intermittent fasting by definition can’t help you maintain stable blood sugars. This diet consists of long periods of no food coupled with short periods of too much food.
Intermittent fasting leads to constant diabetic med adjustments even throughout the day.
A diabetic’s meds are working 24 hours a day. So, even if they’re not eating during large portions of the day, the meds are still trying to decrease your blood sugar. This can lead to low blood glucose levels.
These low blood glucose levels can lead to weakness, nausea, and even seizures and death!
To safely do intermittent fasting, a diabetic would have to stop or significantly decrease their meds to prevent these low blood sugars.
And how safe is it really for a diabetic to stop their meds??
Intermittent fasting may actually cause eating disorders
Several studies including the two below have shown a tendency for people who adopt intermittent fasting to develop eating disorders.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10640266.2021.1922145
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1471015322000873
In one of the studies the IFers’ scores on an established questionnaire, the Eating Disorder Examination Questionaire or EDE-Q were high. These higher scores in IFers revealed higher tendencies toward eating disorders compared to the non-IFers.
For example, binge eating, bulimia, and laxative use increased in IFers.
Now you could say that binge eating is actually a part of the definition of IF. You fast for a long period of time and then eat all your calories for the day in a short period of time.
But, the binge eating and purging studied were actually outside of the prescribed eating windows.
These practices can be dangerous for diabetics who have a metabolism that has problems handling food well anyway. Now you’re going to withhold food for several hours, and then gorge on food for a short time.
Intermittent fasting may be OK for non-diabetics.
But, it can cause more problems than it’s worth for diabetics. There are safer ways to control your blood glucose with your diet than IF.
Aim for diet templates that allow you to maintain a more constant blood glucose throughout the day. Long periods of low food intake can lead to very low blood sugars which is dangerous for a diabetic on meds.
Diabetes can be helped and even reversed by more balanced diets rather than starting a whole new way to eat.
IF is not the best answer for a diabetic on meds!