Intermittent Fasting The Practical Way
What Is Intermittent Fasting
Intermittent fasting is switching between fasting and eating on a determined schedule to prolong the time that your body is no longer using calories consumed from your last meal for energy. Instead, your body resorts to using fat for energy.
There are many ways to Intermittent Fast, but in this article, we are going to focus on the most practical and widely used way; Daily Time-Restricted Fasting.
How to Intermittent Fast
The average person brakes their nightly fast around 8 am with breakfast and starts their fast around 7 pm after dinner. This adds up to an 11-hour eating window and a 13-hour fasting window.
When you Daily Time-Restricted Fast, you shorten your eating window and lengthen your fasting window. The most common ratio is an 8-hour eating window and a 16-hour fasting window.
For example, braking your fast at 11 am and start your fast and 7 pm. This or something similar is the easiest regimen to stick to because keeping your last meal around the same time or slightly earlier enables you to not get hungry before going to sleep.
Also, most people find it easier to push their breakfast back since their body is already in a fasting state. Use these numbers as a guide to working around your schedule and experiment with what will work best for you.
Though it's important to note that you're not skipping any meals, you continue to eat a balanced healthy diet. The only difference is you're pushing the time you eat your breakfast back and the time you eat your dinner forward.
The majority of the time you’re sleeping. During the time you're awake it's important to stay hydrated with water and you can also have zero-calorie beverages like tea. Also, it can take a week or two for your body to get used to this new eating pattern.
Benefits Of Intermittent Fasting
When you intermittently fast, your human growth hormones spike, which has many benefits, like fat loss and muscle growth. You also improve your insulin sensitivity and can regulate your levels, making fat more accessible for energy.
It initiates the cellular repair process more readily, and your genes realize changes in function relative to protection against diseases and increased longevity. Research suggests that intermittent fasting reduces inflammation and improves conditions associated with inflammation, like Alzheimer's disease, Arthritis, Asthma, Multiple sclerosis, and Strokes.
Other studies have discovered that intermittent fasting boosts working memory and verbal memory and is also known to improve blood pressure, resting heart rates, and other heart-related measurements.
Always check with your dr before making any changes to your eating patterns. Some people who should steer clear of trying intermittent fasting are children and teens under age 18, women who are pregnant or breastfeeding, people with type 1 diabetes who take insulin, and those with a history of eating disorders.
My Experience With Intermittent Fasting
When I decided I wanted to lose weight, I started doing research, eating healthier, cycling, and intermittent fasting with the 16/8 method. It happened relatively quickly and felt like the weight was melting off me.
I never really weighed myself during this time because the number didn't matter to me, it was more about how I looked that I wanted to change. After sticking to this plan for a few months, I was happy with my appearance and had lost about 50 lbs.
By the end of my weight loss journey, I was down the weight and had switched to a whole food plant-based diet. Now I just wanted to maintain my weight. But then I saw a photo of myself where I looked too skinny and knew that now I needed to start working on building more muscle.
I decided to stop fasting because my whole food plant-based diet made it a little harder to get in all the calories I needed in a small window with my elevated activity level. I used it as a tool successfully, and whether you do the same or decide to adopt it as a new lifestyle change, you're likely to see many benefits.