What Is the Fasting Mimicking Diet?

Fasting has been a common practice for centuries. While used mainly for religious practices in years past, more recently it’s been found to have numerous health benefits, one of the main ones being weight loss. However, it’s also been shown to improve your blood pressure, cholesterol, glucose levels, and insulin sensitivity. 

Fasting happens when you don’t eat for a certain extended period of time, usually around 12-24 hours. But, sometimes you can fast for a few days at a time. During a fast, you’re typically allowed to drink water, coffee, and tea or maybe even a small amount of food.

At Clover Internal Medicine Associates located in Fort Worth, Texas, our team offers obesity and weight management services. One of the ways that you can manage your weight is through a new and innovative program called ProLon® — a “fasting mimicking” diet created by Dr. Valter Longo. In this blog, we offer insight into what exactly fasting mimicking is and what health benefits it has to offer you.

Explaining the fasting mimicking diet

There are multiple different fasting diets that are currently popular, such as intermittent fasting. Intermittent fasting requires you to eat for 8 hours and then not eat for the remaining 16 hours of the day. This type of diet doesn’t have any type of food restrictions and allows you to consume whatever you want.

But, it can be fairly difficult to not eat for those 16 hours. This is where fasting mimicking comes in. Fasting mimicking is very strict about what you can and can’t eat and when you minimize the amount of calories you consume. By doing this, you can trick your body into thinking you’re fasting.

The fasting mimicking diet is performed over a five-day period, which is an optimum window of time for fasting. During the first day, you consume 1,100 calories with a nutrient breakdown of 11% protein, 46% fat, and 43% carbohydrates. The remaining days, you eat 725 calories consisting of 9% protein, 44% fat, and 47% carbohydrates. In addition, you’ll need to drink 70 ounces of water per day.

To achieve maximum results, you should strive to repeat this five-day diet once a month for three months.

The benefits of the fasting mimicking diet

Fasting mimicking offers numerous health benefits including weight loss, reduced belly fat, and a decrease in blood sugar, cholesterol, and body inflammation. 

Not only can it do these things, but fasting mimicking can also induce a process called autophagy. This is a process of cell regeneration where old cells are recycled in order to make way for new and healthy ones. Autophagy has shown to slow mental decline and other effects of aging.

Next steps

If you’d like more information on the fasting mimicking diet or to start the ProLon program with us, contact our friendly staff to get an appointment set up with us. You can do this by giving us a call or by using our online booking tool today.