Intermittent fasting is a diet program that varies between fasting and eating daily. Intermittent fasting is all about controlling your weight.
What is intermittent fasting all about?
Many types of diet programs define things to eat and not to eat, but intermittent fasting is more concerned with the food. For intermittent fasting, you could only feed within a certain period of time. Eating only one meal a few days a week or fasting for a few hours a day, will help the body burn fat.
Advantages of intermittent fasting
You will benefit from an intermittent fasting schedule in the following ways:
- It guarantees the loss of weight: Whether you adopt a daily diet, or if you count every calorie you take, it can lead to frustration and make you jump off the dietary bandwagon. This optimizes the hormones that help you lose weight and allows you to take fewer calories because you’re eating fewer meals!
- Risk of type 2 diabetes is reduced: Intermittent fasting may reduce type 2 diabetes risk in pre-diabetic people. This is because, with IF, the intake of food is controlled.
- Helps to control the weight you’ve lost: Research performed found that when IF was combined with a low-calorie diet and a high protein, the individual regained less weight. That also shows how crucial it is to maintain the consistency of your diet when you’re fasting!
- Reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease: One study showed that every other day fasting actually helped to prevent the development of heart disease. Fasting here meant that they reduced the amount of food they consumed and did not fully avoid consuming food.
- This will help prevent Alzheimer’s disease: Alzheimer’s has no remedy yet, but stopping it as long as possible is the best approach. Research has shown that intermittent fasting can postpone the onset of Alzheimer’s disease at all. However, more research needs to be done to prove this irrevocably.
This can support someone who’s reached a weight-plateau
If you find that diet and exercise activities have stopped generating results, it may be that your body wants a break from the weight-loss cycle. Intermittent fasting will help move beyond problems such as adjusting the pacing of your diet and improving your body’s metabolism. This can even help with the stomach issues you ‘re having. Importance of body’s metabolism and digestion have been also talked about in this blog on Ayurveda by Dr. Ankit Pandey.
Effects of intermittent fasting on the body and how it leads to weight loss
Your body usually exists in two states – feed or fasting. Insulin, a central hormone in the food storage cycle, rises as we eat. Since there is insufficient storage space in the liver for the storage of sugar, surplus glucose is converted to fat. Some of it is retained in the liver itself, while the remainder travels to other fat deposits in the body.
On the other hand, fasting means that the body doesn’t get the energy to use immediately because there’s no food coming in. Insulin and blood glucose levels drop, which sends a message to the body to start consuming stored fat by taking glucose out of storage. Fasting, thus, gives the body a break from the daily consumption of calories and allows it the chance to use stored fat, which in turn helps you lose weight.
Intermittent fasting results in weight loss as you take lower calories over a while and optimize the insulin, human growth hormone, and norepinephrine hormones that help you lose weight.
How to Manage Intermittent Fasting
Don’t continue with an intermittent fasting schedule without enough physical and mental planning. Pick the most suitable plan from the various ones out there, the food you need to consume, or stop and remember to keep going slowly at the beginning so that your body can get used to this new routine.
The bottom line is you need to pay attention to the clues your body offers you. Pick the best time for eating and fasting, depending on your daily schedule, and don’t get too hard on yourself at the beginning. When you find that missing meals do more harm than good to you, stop right away and give your body the meals. But if it works well and helps you feel better physically and mentally, then, by all means, stick doing it!