Is intermittent fasting a quick fix | Intermittent fasting
Intermittent fasting Surprising update!
the main reason people try intermittent fasting is to lose fat.
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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.
Why is it worthwhile to change when you’re eating?
Well, most notably, it’s a great way to get lean without going on a crazy diet or cutting your calories down to nothing. intermittent fasting is a good way to keep muscle mass on while getting lean.
Intermittent fasting Weight Loss
To understand how intermittent fasting leads to fat loss we first need to understand the difference between the fed state and the fasted state.
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Is intermittent fasting a quick fix | Intermittent fasting |
Your body is in the fed state when it is digesting and absorbing food. Typically, the fed state starts when you begin eating and lasts for three to five hours as your body digests and absorbs the food you just ate. When you are in the fed state, it’s very hard for your body to burn fat because your insulin levels are high.
Intermittent fasting Weight Loss
After that timespan, your body goes into what is known as the post–absorptive state, which is just a fancy way of saying that your body isn’t processing a meal. The post–absorptive state lasts until 8 to 12 hours after your last meal, which is when you enter the fasted state. It is much easier for you body to burn fat in the fasted state because your insulin levels are low.
When you’re in the fasted state your body can burn fat that has been inaccessible during the fed state.
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Because we don’t enter the fasted state until 12 hours after our last meal, it’s rare that our bodies are in this fat burning state. This is one of the reasons why many people who start intermittent fasting will lose fat without changing what they eat, how much they eat, or how often they exercise. Fasting puts your body in a fat burning state that you rarely make it to during a normal eating schedule.
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The Benefits of Intermittent Fasting
Fat loss is great, but it isn’t the only benefit of fasting.
1. Intermittent fasting makes your day simpler.
I’m big on behavior change, simplicity, and reducing stress. Intermittent fasting provides additional simplicity to my life that I really enjoy. When I wake up, I don’t worry about breakfast. I just grab a glass of water and start my day.
I enjoy eating and I don’t mind cooking, so eating three meals a day was never a hassle for me. However, intermittent fasting allows me to eat one less meal, which also means planning one less meal, cooking one less meal, and stressing about one less meal. It makes life a bit simpler and I like that.
Intermittent fasting Weight Loss
2. Intermittent fasting helps you live longer.
Scientists have long known that restricting calories is a way of lengthening life. From a logical standpoint, this makes sense. When you’re starving, your body finds ways to extend your life.
There’s just one problem: who wants to starve themselves in the name of living longer?
I don’t know about you, but I’m interested in enjoying a long life. Starving myself doesn’t sound that appetizing.
The good news is that intermittent fasting activates many of the same mechanisms for extending life as calorie restriction. In other words, you get the benefits of a longer life without the hassle of starving.
Way back in 1945 it was discovered that intermittent fasting extended life in mice. (Here’s the study.) More recently, this study found that alternate day intermittent fasting led to longer lifespans.
3. Intermittent fasting may reduce the risk of cancer.
This one is up for debate because there hasn’t been a lot of research and experimentation done on the relationship between cancer and fasting. Early reports, however, look positive.
This study of 10 cancer patients suggests that the side effects of chemotherapy may be diminished by fasting before treatment. This finding is also supported by another study that used alternate day fasting with cancer patients and concluded that fasting before chemotherapy would result in better cure rates and fewer deaths.
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Finally, this comprehensive analysis of many studies on fasting and disease has concluded that fasting appears to not only reduce the risk of cancer but also cardiovascular disease.
4. Intermittent fasting is much easier than dieting.
The reason most diets fail isn’t that we switch to the wrong foods, it’s because we don’t actually follow the diet over the long term. It’s not a nutrition problem, it’s a behavior change problem.
This is where intermittent fasting shines because it’s remarkably easy to implement once you get over the idea that you need to eat all the time. For example, this study found that intermittent fasting was an effective strategy for weight loss in obese adults and concluded that “subjects quickly adapt” to an intermittent fasting routine.
How do I try intermittent fasting?
There are four popular fasting approaches periodic fasting, time-restricted feeding, alternate-day fasting, and the 5:2 diet. Time-restricted feeding, sometimes called daily intermittent fasting, is perhaps the easiest and most popular fasting method. Daily intermittent fasters restrict eating to certain time periods each day, say 11 in the morning to 7 at night. The fasting period is usually around 12 or more hours that, helpfully, includes time spent sleeping overnight. Periodic fasting will feel most familiar: no food or drinks with calories for 24-hour periods. Another type of fast, alternate-day fasting requires severe calorie reduction every other day. Lastly, the 5:2 method was popularized by author Kate Harrison’s book “The 5:2 Diet” and requires fasting on two nonconsecutive days a week.
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Is fasting an effective weight-loss method?
If you are obese or overweight, fasting is an effective weight-loss method, if you stick to it. But it is no more effective than a diet that restricts your daily calories. We know this because there were no additional weight-loss or cardiovascular benefits of fasting two days per week, over an ordinary calorie-restriction diet, in a study of 150 obese adults over the course of 50 weeks.
But you should also consider how difficult the diet will be to stick to. In a study of 100 randomized obese and overweight adults published in 2017, the dropout rate was higher with those who were fasting, 38 percent, compared with 29 percent for calorie restrictors, and 26 percent for those who kept eating as they normally did.
“Some people really struggle with having to monitor their intake and constantly record food in an app every day. So the takeaway of the study was if daily calorie restriction doesn’t work for you, maybe alternate-day fasting would be a little easier,” said Krista Varady, Ph.D., professor of nutrition at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the senior author of the study. “There’s nothing magical here. We’re tricking people into eating less food, in different ways,” she said in 2017.
There is some new evidence that shows different forms of fasting are not equal — in part because some are easier than others, but also because some forms of fasting better match our body’s natural circadian rhythm, thus lowering insulin levels, increasing fat-burning hormones and decreasing appetite.
Intermittent fasting Weight Loss
Basically, because our metabolism has evolved to digest food during the day and rest at night, changing the timing of meals to earlier in the day may be beneficial.
In a study done in Dr. Peterson’s lab, 11 adults did time-restricted feeding (eating from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m.) and a control 12-hour eating period, for four days each. On the last day of each session, researchers measured energy expenditure and hunger hormones and found that time-restricted feeding improves the appetite hormone ghrelin and increases fat burning. “It’s shown to reduce the amount of fat in the liver, which is a risk factor for diabetes and cardiovascular disease,” said Dr. Peterson.
Bottom line: If you want to lose weight and are someone who hates counting calories, you might consider fasting, as both methods offer similar weight-loss benefits.
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Is intermittent fasting a quick fix | Intermittent fasting |
Intermittent fasting Weight Loss
Should I try intermittent fasting?
The most effective diet is the one you can stick to while still living your best life. It’s hard to know which will work best before trying, but doctors and recent studies offer some guidance. Dr. Peterson said that complete, zero-calorie fasts generally prove to be too difficult to maintain. “People stick with them maybe for the short-term, but they get quite hungry in the long-term,” she said.
Time-restricted feeding — fasting overnight and into the next morning — is likely the easiest form of fasting to comply with. A longer than normal fasting period each night allows you to burn through some of your sugar stores, called glycogen. That does a couple of things. It gives your body a little bit more time to burn fat. It also may help your body get rid of any extra salt in your diet, which would lower your blood pressure, Dr. Peterson said.