Diet Trend: Intermittent Fasting

Intermittent fasting is a type of eating strategy that can be used to help you lose weight and provide you with other useful benefits.

In this guide, we will go over how intermittent fasting works, how you can take advantage of it, and demonstrate why it’s popular among millions of people.

What Is Intermittent Fasting?

The idea of fasting has existed for hundreds to thousands of years, and for religious purposes, people would refrain from eating during certain times.

Intermittent fasting can be explained as eating only within certain time windows and then not eating for the rest of it. Although the word “intermittent” can mean sporadic or random, that is usually not the case for fasters, and participants will use regular, but disconnected intervals.

Some people who employ this technique may eat for 5 days out of the week, but fast for 24 hours for the other two.

However, one of the most popular types of intermittent is known as time-restricted feeding. Rather than skipping entire days, individuals may decide to bypass a meal. Breakfast is usually the most favorable one to skip, because it allows the person fast throughout one’s sleep period, and to go up to 12 hours or more without food in his or her system.

When wondering which intermittent fasting method is best, this one is usually well-regarded by people. Even though it can be contingent on how much sleep the person gets; nonetheless, time-restricted feeding is still one of the easier ones to put into practice consistently.

The Benefits of Intermittent Fasting

People who are looking into intermittent fasting are typically doing so because it has a reputation for helping people lose weight.

The primary reason why intermittent fasting works for weight-loss is that it can put you in a caloric deficit because you are reducing your overall food intake, assuming your meals are stable and don’t deviate much or put you in a surplus (i.e., consuming 4,000 calories in a single meal)

On the other hand, if your breakfast, lunch, and dinner meals are about 500 to 1,000 calories a piece on a typical day, skipping that very first meal will put you in a pretty good deficit for weight loss.

There are a few other benefits of intermittent fasting aside from weight loss and burning fat. Studies have shown that it may be helpful in improving one’s circadian rhythm and their metabolic health.

Intermittent fasting is also connected to autophagy, which is the recycling of old, dysfunctional cells into new ones that work.

Finally, there is also anecdotal evidence that fasting may also improve mental alertness and focus, and if performed at breakfast time, this can help you go about your day.

Conclusion

Although it has been around for centuries, intermittent fasting has increased in popularity in recent years because it is practical and relatively easy to get started on it and it yields results when done correctly.

Many people ask, “when intermittent fasting, what can I drink or eat?”, and some ways people new to this dieting strategy can curb their appetite is to drink water, coffee, and some teas – generally anything with basically no calories.

Consuming calories inappropriately will break the fast, and having beverages like these will suppress your hunger without ruining your fasting progress. When it’s time to eat, technically anything goes as long as it’s within your caloric budget though.

Regardless if your personal goals are to lose weight or you just want to experience from some of the other excellent benefits of intermittent fasting, it’s never too late to give it a shot – countless numbers of people swear by it, and you might also.