Unless you live under a rock, you must be aware of or atleast heard about the popular fitness/wellness trend known as intermittent fasting. Intermittent fasting is not your typical fasting where you don’t eat anything nor it is a diet; rather it is a pattern of eating. It is a process of scheduling your meals, which involves cycling in and out of eating and not eating within a day or week.
Basically, when you are intermittent fasting you don’t eat for anywhere from 16-48 hours. It doesn’t specify what foods you should eat, it only changes when you should eat them.
There are several different methods of intermittent fasting. These include:
- The 5:2: with this method, you eat normally for 5 days of the week and fast for the remaining two days. You do get to eat, although with a restriction of 500-600 calories for the two non-consecutive days you choose.
- The 16/8 method: in this, you usually skip breakfast and limit your eating period to a six or eight-hour window every day. This way you’re essentially fasting for 14 to 16 hours. This method allows you to pick your hours, for example 1-9 pm when you can eat and then fasting for 16 hours in between. The 16/8 method is also called Leangains method.
- Eat-stop-eat or Alternate day fasting: this involves to fast every other day or 1-2 times a week.
This method of intermittent fasting is the strictest of all and so not recommended for everyone. If you want to try out this one, make sure you’re under the advisement of a doctor and a dietitian.
Intermittent fasting or IF is used the most for weight loss or weight management. Since it’s all about timed eating and requires little lifestyle change and not about checking your calorie intake, intermittent fasting is one of the simplest approaches for taking the bad weight off, while maintaining the good weight. There are some other health benefits of IF too other than just weight loss. Let’s look at some of them.
Health Benefits of Intermittent Fasting (IF)
Studies say fasting may be the answer for long-term health.
- IF helps prevent inflammation
The reason why fasting is good for us is because it helps fight inflammation. A break from regular eating can help with monocytes, a type of immune cell. Monocytes are inflammatory and can accumulate in fat tissue, leading to chronic diseases.
Intermittent fasting helps these cells to calm down, making them less active. Evidence say that when we eat every day, we set the inflammatory monocytes in overdrive in the body, which can contribute to diseases like diabetes, heart disease, and liver issues, especially if we run on lots of sugar.
- Weight loss
Intermittent fasting helps with weight loss by helping you eat fewer and burn more calories. Your body changes hormone levels when you are fasting, leading to an automatic weight reduction. IF drives weight loss by lowering insulin levels, increasing growth hormone levels and increasing the release of the fat burning hormone known as norepinephrine (noradrenaline).
Studies show that this fasting pattern can be a very effective weight loss tool. Intermittent fasting can cause significant weight loss of 3–8% over 3–24 weeks. It also causes less muscle loss than other methods of calorie restriction.
- May help reduce risk of Cancer
Restrictive diets like intermittent fasting may help reduce the risk of cancer. Although there hasn’t been much extensive research done into understanding the links between intermittent fasting and cancer in humans, few reports does support this theory. According to the study, intermittent fasting has shown to delay the onset of tumors. It can also lower several biological factors with links to cancer, such as insulin levels and inflammation. Additionally, IF reduces the risk of cardiovascular diseases too.
- Improved brain strength
Being on intermittent fast can help better learning and memory. It affects the neurological conditions, as it suppresses inflammation in the brain. Other studies believe intermittent fasting
can also reduce the risk of neurological disorders, including stroke, Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease.
Should you intermittent fast?
While intermittent fasting has several health-related benefits, any form of fasting should be done with prior discussion with a dietician or doctor. Fasting does not mean to starve yourself, so do your research before diving into it. People with diabetes, ongoing illness and pregnant women should not fast.
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