Intermittent Fasting is one of the emerging popular health and fitness trend. People often follow the pattern of intermittent fasting to lose weight, improve their health, and simply to have a healthy life. Intermittent fasting is said to aid weight loss, improve metabolism, and protects against diseases.
What is Intermittent Fasting?
Intermittent fasting is not a diet, it's a pattern of eating. It's a way of scheduling your meals so that you get the most out of them. Intermittent fasting doesn’t change what you eat, it changes when you eat. Common intermittent fasting methods involve daily 16-hour fasts or fasting for 24 hours, twice per week.
How does Intermittent Fasting work?
Most people already “fast” every day, while they sleep. Intermittent fasting can be as simple as extending that fast a little longer. Then you're technically fasting forr
16 hours every day and restricting your diet to only 8 hours per day. This also involves not eating anything post eating period. (That is, having lunch the next day directly after dinner the previous night).
Despite what you may think, intermittent fasting is actually fairly easy to do. Many people report feeling better and having more energy during a fast.
What can you eat during the eating period?
There is no compulsion to not eat any specific food. As said above, It does not say anything about which foods to eat, but rather when you should eat them. Non-caloric drinks like water, green tea, coffee are allowed during the fasting period. Taking supplements is generally allowed while fasting, as long as there are no calories in them.
Types of Intermittent Fasting
The 16/8 Method- This method involves fasting for 16 hours and having an 8-hour eating window. This is one of the most popular types of Intermittent Fasting.
The 5/2 Method- This method involves eating normally for 5 days and then only consuming 500-600 calories the next two days.
The Eat-Stop-Eat Method- This method is having a 24 hour fasting period every once or twice a week. For an instance, don’t eat anything from dinner one day, until dinner the next day (a 24 hour fast).
Overnight Fasting Method- This approach is the simplest of the bunch and involves fasting for a 12-hour period every day. For example: Choose to stop eating after dinner by 7 p.m. and resume eating at 7 a.m. with breakfast the next morning.
Benefits of Intermittent Fasting
Intermittent Fasting helps to slightly increase metabolism because of the limited calorie intake. This can help you lose weight and extra fat in the body.
Intermittent Fasting helps to make your days better. This also helps to reduce stress and provide positive additional changes in your life.
This also helps to balance hormones in our bodies. Studies show that Intermittent Fasting helps in maintaining normal hormone balance which promotes health.
Fasting helps in decreasing insulin levels in our body which can aid in weight loss.
The Bottom Line-
Perhaps most importantly, intermittent fasting is one of the simplest strategies we have for taking bad weight off while keeping good weight on because it requires very little behavior change. This is a very good thing because it means intermittent fasting falls into the category of “simple enough that you'll actually do it, but meaningful enough that it will actually make a difference.”
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