Does intermittent fasting actually do something at a cellular level, or is it just eating less?
The distinction people are really asking about.
Something quite specific happens, and it has a name: autophagy. From the Greek - self-eating. It sounds frightening and is the opposite. It is the hour in which the body sweeps its own rooms: clearing damaged cells, worn proteins, the debris of living, and rebuilding from what it finds.
Yoshinori Ohsumi was given the Nobel Prize for describing it, and his own sentence is better than any I could write: when you give the body a break from constant digestion, it begins a process of self-healing and renewal.
The usual doorways are 16:8, a full day once or twice a week, or 5:2. Fasting is not new and it is not magic - every tradition that ever prayed also fasted, and they were not counting macros.
One caution, and I mean it. Fasting is a poor idea in pregnancy, where there is a history of disordered eating, or alongside certain medications. Discipline is a virtue; stubbornness is not.
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