All You Need to Know about Intermittent Fasting

Liv Butler
Authored by Liv Butler
Posted Sunday, July 24, 2022 - 8:21am

Intermittent fasting, or IF for short, is popular in modern health and dieting. It's also one of the fastest-growing weight-loss trends. The concept is straightforward: you fast for brief periods at regular times throughout the day. This practice has several techniques, but the results are generally consistent: you get more fit and lose weight. 

What is Intermittent fasting

Intermittent fasting is eating that alternates between fasting and feeding intervals. Fasting is not eating anything for a set amount of time. Then you will have a feeding window where you can consume anything you want.

With the availability of various apps and software, it's easy to monitor your weight loss progress while fasting. The iOS weight loss app https://lasta.app/features/ will help you track your progress and keep you motivated while fasting. You will be able to see how much weight you have lost so far and how much more weight you need to lose before reaching your goal weight.

You can also measure the ketones in your body and ensure that you are in a state of ketosis. To do this, you should measure your blood glucose levels every day after waking up and before eating anything.

Intermittent Fasting Benefits

Intermittent fasting is very important in treating several diseases, amongst other benefits it offers the body. Below are some of the advantages of intermittent fasting for your body. 

  • Intermittent fasting helps you to lose weight

If you're overweight or just trying to keep in shape, fasting is one of the sure ways to go. When you fast, you allow the body to use the excess calorie reserve in your body. 

Intermittent fasting may help you lose weight and fat faster than traditional diets. This is partly because it helps your body burn fat more efficiently during exercise and improves insulin sensitivity, leading to better blood sugar control over time.

  • Initiates cellular healing processes

Intermittent fasting helps cells to undergo a process known as autophagy, which helps to remove dead cells when dead, and dysfunctional proteins build up over time. This can protect us against various diseases, including cancer and neurological disorders. 

  • It detoxifies the body

Fasting can help improve the capacity of the enzymes that help to detoxify the body. Although no scientific evidence supports that fasting directly detoxifies the body, fasting can help the body improve the efficiency of detox organs such as the liver. 

  • Reduce cravings

If you have an abnormal eating condition, fasting can help you control that, although it will require discipline and time. 

  • Reduced hunger

Intermittent fasting can reduce hunger levels by increasing your metabolism and lowering your body's ghrelin (the hunger hormone) levels. This means you won't feel hungry between meals and should have less trouble sticking to your long-term diet plan!

  • Better sleep

Intermittent fasting can improve sleep quality by reducing cortisol production at night (a stress hormone), lowering blood pressure, and reducing inflammation in the body.

Intermittent Fasting Methods

Intermittent fasting is a diet plan involving eating food in a specific time window during the day. 

There are several different versions of intermittent fasting. Still, the most popular one is 16:8, which means you fast for 16 hours and eat within an eight-hour window each day. This means that you skip breakfast and eat your first meal at noon. The benefits of intermittent fasting include weight loss, improved insulin sensitivity, and reduced inflammation levels.

  • Daily: this is a type of intermittent fasting where you choose a specific hour of the day to eat and the remaining hours to fast. You can choose to eat within 8 hours and fast within the remaining hours. 
  • Periodic fasting: In periodic intermittent fasting, you choose specific days of the month or year to fast. Periodic intermittent fasting can be compared to the fasting seen in the religious circle. 
  • 5-2 days method: The 5-2 days method is a simple type of intermittent fasting where fasting is done for two days. Then, normal meal consumption can be resumed after the fasting days. During the fasting days in this method, you are not allowed to eat carb-based foods. 
  • Alternate day method: alternate between feeding and fasting. 

Bottom Line

As you can see, intermittent fasting is not as weird or foreign to humans as we formerly believed. Given our propensity for feasting and famine, it's not unexpected that our bodies evolved a method of dealing with enormous food influxes (and subsequently, plenty of excess calories that day). 

Intermittent fasting may be adapted to your scenario, whether missing breakfast and keeping your fasting period short, rotating every week, or fasting for many days out of the month. Whatever works best for you and your body, the sacrifice associated with intermittent fasting will be minimal; instead, there will be obvious health advantages. Fast!
 

Share this