Intermittent Fasting for weight loss | Livefitnow

Intermittent fasting is one of the most popular diets for weight loss and is the latest fitness trend.

People are using it for losing weight & living healthy. It is easy to make this diet a lifestyle, unlike a low carb and keto diet.

What is Intermittent Fasting and how it helps in weight loss?

Intermittent fasting is a pattern of eating your meals at a specific time of the day. In simple terms, it is the way of eating your meals on a feeding state followed by a fasting state.

Most common intermittent fasting involves a 16–hour fast followed by an 8–hour eating period.

Well, Intermittent fasting doesn’t change what you eat, but it changes when you eat.

Intermittent fasting helps you eat less which leads to a reduction in overall calorie intake and helps you lose weight.

It promotes low insulin levels and increases growth hormone levels which helps release the fat-burning hormone norepinephrine in the body.

By helping you eating less and burning more calories, intermittent fasting promotes fat loss by increasing your body’s metabolic rate.

This study shows that intermittent fasting can cause 3 – 8% of weight loss in 6 – 12 weeks, which is considered good, as compared to other weight loss studies.

How does Intermittent Fasting work?

To better understand how intermittent fasting helps you lose weight, you must understand the difference between fast and fed state.

The fed state is when you start eating food and lasts for three to five hours until your body digest and absorb the food you just ate.

It’s very hard for your body to burn fat when you are in a fed state because insulin levels are high at this time.

After that period, your body enters the post-absorptive stage or the fasting state. It occurs when the food you ate has been digested. This is the time when your body burns fat because of low insulin levels.

Fasting put your body in a fat-burning state which is not possible during a normal eating schedule.

Benefits of Intermittent Fasting

Apart from weight loss, it has so many other benefits.

• Intermittent fasting makes life healthier and day simpler –

Intermittent fasting is easy to follow. It provides simplicity to your life that no other diet would ever do.

You won’t have to rush and worry about your breakfast anymore on waking up. It allows you to eat fewer meals with the food of your choice.

• Intermittent fasting helps lose weight –

As I mentioned above, intermittent fasting can help in weight loss and belly fat without consciously restricting calories.

• Intermittent fasting is easier than dieting.

Unlike many other diets like low carb diet and keto, intermittent fasting is easy to follow. Most diet fails not because we eat bad food, but because we don’t follow the diet for the long term. It’s not a problem with nutrition, it’s the problem with behavior change.

This is why intermittent fasting is successful because it is very easy to implement this diet and is quickly adaptive.

Types of Intermittent Fasting for weight loss

There are a few different methods of intermittent fasting for working it into your lifestyle.

Below are the most popular methods –

• Intermittent Fasting with the 16/8 method: This method is also called a lean gains model of intermittent fasting, which involves a 16 hour fast followed by 8 hours of eating period.

It doesn’t matter when you start your 8-hour feeding. It depends on you. You can start at 12 pm and end at 8 pm or you can start at 4 pm and end at 12 am. You can do it according to your schedule.

• Weekly Fasting method: This method involves fasting for a whole day twice a week.

For example – One example of how to do weekly intermittent fasting is lunch on Monday is your last meal of the day. You then fast till lunch on Tuesday.

For fat loss, I prefer the 16/8 method because, in weekly fasting method, you are only cutting two meals per week.

Bottom line –

Chances are that you’ve already done intermittent fasting in your life but might not aware of it.

Sometimes we people occasionally eat dinner and sleep late at night, then wake up during lunch the next day. We don’t notice that we have fasted for 16 hours.

Likewise, some people eat this way. They don’t feel hungry in the morning and skip breakfast.

Should you give it a try?

Yes, why not? Anyone can start with intermittent fasting. It is one of the best healthy lifestyle strategies to improve health and fitness.

But, If you don’t like the idea of fasting, you can continue with whatever works for you.

At the end of the day, the best diet is the diet that works for you and which you can do for a long period of time.

Disclaimer –

Always consult your doctor or physician before following any diet. The aim of this article is to educate people about intermittent fasting. Involving in your lifestyle is highly your choice.

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