To understand how intermittent fasting works, you need to know what the body does when in a fed state aka when you just got your grub on. Insulin is a hormone that transfers excess blood sugar to muscles and the liver, and into fat cells.
Eating six small meals each day means that insulin is released over a period of about sixteen hours for most people. Intermittent fasting allows for a much smaller eating window.
With the standard intermittent fasting eating window ranging anywhere from five to eight hours, insulin is only storing fat for five to eight hours, instead of for sixteen hours. If that happens, you might end up losing fat or weight.
As mentioned earlier in this article, intermittent fasting is not a diet. Therefore, you can continue to eat whatever you were already eating before incorporating intermittent fasting into your lifestyle.
Every person should make continued efforts to tweak their food choices for increased energy, health, vigor, and longevity. However, we obviously recommend combining intermittent fasting with a paleo approach to nutrition. You can see a bunch of in-depth examples of IF here. Daily intermittent fasting typically lasts between sixteen and twenty hours. Weekly twenty-four- to thirty-six-hour intermittent fasts are done once or twice each week for a period of twenty-four to thirty-six consecutive hours.
That said, the following checklist should help anyone get off to a great start with intermittent fasting:. All you have to do is fast during your chosen intermittent fasting period for example, 6 pm to 10 am and only eat during your eating or eating window for example, 10 am to 6 pm. Whichever type of intermittent fasting you choose, feel free to gradually work your way up to the standard fasting periods. For example, if you opt for daily intermittent fasting of sixteen hours, you might start by doing only fourteen hours until you get the hang of it.
Likewise, with the weekly twenty-four- to thirty-six-hour intermittent fasting, you might choose to begin with an eighteen- or twenty-hour fast and work your way up to twenty-four- to thirty-six-hour fasts each week. The choice is yours. The body actually adapts to this type of fasting much easier and much more rapidly than most people would imagine.
Good question. Providing your body with a consistent time to eat each day allows it to quickly get use to fasting. Plus, remember that this is how our ancestors ate for years. It will be very easy for your body to snap back into its natural eating state. With daily intermittent fasting, it seems like breakfast has to be skipped.
However, breakfast is simply pushed back a bit instead. Many of those who do the longer fasts like to schedule their workouts or training off days to coincide with their fasting periods.
The key to exercising or training in a fasted state is to schedule your eating window to follow your workout. However, some people find this too difficult. And instead of abandoning intermittent fasting, they simply schedule their workout as close as possible to their eating window. Lower intensity, longer sessions of cardio have been shown to increase hunger and appetite and burn less fat than higher intensity forms of exercise.
Every person and every body type is different. Results vary. Also, the results you get will depend on your goals. Nevertheless, it seems like more and more people are seeing positive results and benefits from simply incorporating intermittent fasting into their lives, without changing anything else. The reason for the drop in energy calorie intake is that carbohydrates normally make up a large part of the Western diet.
Banishing carbs makes it difficult to make up for the lost energy intake because the food industry is geared to providing plenty of carbohydrate-rich foods. Other studies suggest that eating protein and fat keep you feeling full for longer, and may suppress appetite that way. However, more research is needed to prove this theory. There is some evidence that a low-carb diet can help you lose weight, for up to six months.
And a study of people with type 2 diabetes suggests that it can help reduce the need for diabetes medication, even after two years.
The news is not all positive, though. Paleo diets, in particular, can cause side effects, such a diarrhoea, headaches and weakness. And both Paleo and low-carb diets tend to be more expensive than a regular healthy diet as per government guidelines , and require careful planning to meet nutritional needs.
Intermittent fasting diets, such as the diet and the warrior diet, are another recent fad. They usually involve going for 14 to 36 hours with few or no calories. The warrior diet involves eating just one large meal a day. These types of diets have been shown to result in weight loss. Short-term fasting is also useful for power athletes. On the contrary, when you lift in a fasted state, your body uses protein more efficiently afterwards, boosting muscle growth.
First, fasting can help cancer patients. Although the relevant research was conducted on animals, one study showed that rats who fasted every other day showed greater ability to fight off chronic diseases like diabetes and cancer, and improved heart health. In study on humans, scientists found that fasting can also reduce the risk of heart disease.
Fasting also promotes health by reducing oxidative stress. Oxidative stress, or damage to your cells from a harmful build-up of oxidized proteins, is linked to the harmful effects of aging. Fasting helps your cells get rid of these oxidized proteins. As well as benefiting your body, fasting is also good for your brain. On top of its other health benefits, intermittent fasting also helps some people who suffer from troublesome circadian rhythms, since circadian rhythms are even more strongly tied to eating patterns than to light exposure.
Before adding IF to your routine, make sure your body has fully adjusted to eating Paleo. You should not feel sick, dizzy, or inexplicably exhausted during a fast: if you do, eat something.
Think of IF as the cherry on top of your Paleo chocolate pudding : first work on the fundamentals adjusting to the dietary changes, getting enough sleep, and reducing chronic stressors , and then consider adding it to your routine.
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