As we make modern medicine advancements, our health is getting steadily worse with increasing heart diseases, diabetes, and cancer. Obesity is at epidemic proportions and worsening. At the same time, we are suffering from malnourishment symptoms even if we get fatter and fatter. Most who lose weight on a traditional diet and up gaining weight than they lost.
Although there are many myths about intermittent fasting, there is no harm in following it. It is an umbrella term for many meal schedules over time. Since 2019, it has become a fad diet, which has attracted many people and celebrities. So, how about we learn what it is?
What Is The Diet Trap?
We ingest all sorts of oil and chemicals to find a way to lose weight. So, going on diets with dieticians’ guidance serve to be a better option. There is concrete scientific evidence that explains why dieting does not work for us, as we do it independently. Our bodies are not intended to lose weight in the manner that traditional diets recommend.
When we find a diet that does work, the overwhelming majority of us end up gaining back all the weight we lost. Or even worse, we end up malnourished and with a slower metabolism than we had before.
What Is Intermittent Fasting?
Intermittent fasting is not a starvation diet. Also, it is not a way to a steady diet of junk food. Intermittent fasting is a planned schedule for eating that allows you to eat a regular, healthy diet. It requires you to spend a short period of time-consuming less food.
Those who fast often indulge in eating high-calorie, high-fat foods thinking that fasting allows them to devour whatever they want. When your body is food-deprived, there is a physiological drive to overeat due to the release of the appetite hormones, including ghrelin, leptin, and excitation of the hunger center in your brain.
Some intermittent fasting plans divide fasting and non-fasting periods into mere hours, such as 8 hours of eating, followed by 12 or 16 hours of fasting. More commonly, intermittent fasts are divided by days of the week.
Methods Of Intermittent Fasting (IF)
There are mainly two methods of intermittent fasting (IF): time-restricted fasting, periodic fasting. Both ways allow the body to rest its digestive tract to perform restoration and repair work lacking in our fast-paced modern world.
1. Time-restricted Fasting
It decreases the time at which you eat each day. Fasting instructors say to delay the first meal of the day and then have juice or a smoothie to break the fast. This feeding has two patterns 12 – 14 hours a day to rest 8 hours diet. Proteins can take more than four to six hours to digest while most carbohydrate foods are digested in three hours or less, some in as little as twenty minutes.
2. Periodic Fasting
It typically calls for the participant to consume approx. 25% of their usual daily calorie intake for hours or days. Every other Day Diet is also known as Alternate Day fasting is where participants reduce calories on alternating days.
Types Of Intermittent Fasting
- 16/8 Method: Fast for 16 days or hours
- 5:2 diet: fast for two days
- Eat – Stop – Eat: do a 24 hour fast once or twice a week
- The Warrior Diet: Fast during the day; eat a huge meal at night
- Spontaneous meal skipping: skip meals when convenient
- Alternate day fasting: fast every other day
- Lunch to lunch and dinner to dinner
Researches of Intermittent Fasting
Although the research on intermittent fasting (IF) is still in the beginning stages, there is sufficient evidence that eating in this way can help you to shed fat, regulate some of the hormones associated with obesity and hunger, and even improve overall cholesterol levels.
