Most people don’t know but several fitness enthusiasts consider intermittent fasting as a way to lose weight. For those who never heard of intermittent fasting, it’s a diet plan that runs between the periods of staying without food or reduced calorie intake and a period of unrestricted eating. It’s effective and helpful in changing body composition by losing significant fat and keeping you safe from potential health problems such as blood pressure or cholesterol issues.
Derived from the traditional fasting rituals used for spiritual and health benefits, intermittent fasting doesn’t allow the body to adapt to restricted calorie intake since the cycle brings back normal eating after a brief time.
Let’s see how different types of intermittent fasting can help people with weight loss.
How Intermittent Fasting Works
Fasting on alternate days is the most common method of intermittent fasting. The fasting goes on for the whole day and the process happens in a set time frame until the goal is achieved.
Alternate-Day Fasting: As mentioned above, this is common in intermittent fasting. You can cut down your calorie intake by 25% of the daily need on the fasting days and no restrictions on the other days. For example, fast on Monday-Wed-Friday and eat without restriction on the rest of the week.
Whole-Day Fasting: You can also go for 1 to 2 days of complete fasting every week, with no eating restrictions on the other days.
Time-Restricted Feeding: If you want to separate hours of eating and not eating at all, you can do time-restricted intermittent fasting. For instance, take all your meals from 8 am to 3 pm and don’t eat anything in the remaining hours.
Benefits of Intermittent Fast
Intermittent fasting goes way beyond just fat loss. From balanced blood sugar levels to help with cancer, restricting your eating habits can help you with many other things such as:
Improved Insulin Sensitivity: When you start taking breaks on your daily calorie consumption, it improves your blood sugar levels, thus improving your cells’ insulin sensitivity.
Starts Ketosis: Long hours of fasting can take your body into ketosis. It also improves muscle synthesis and improves your response to post-workout meals.
Mental Clarity: Your mind is a heavy energy consumer which often falls short when you are running on carbs. That’s the reason why high-carb advocates suggest you carry an apple or a chocolate bar with you. Ketones or fat is one of the most energy-efficient fuels and ketosis allows your brain to use it as much as possible for more focus and less mental fogginess.
How it Kickstarts Ketosis
When you start fasting, your body uses reserved glucose (carbohydrates) as body fuel. As you go past 24 hours fasting, your body enters ketosis, a metabolic state where the body starts producing ketones using fat. These ketone bodies are used as energy sources by the cells of your skeletal muscle, heart, and brain since glucose isn’t available readily.
Intermittent fasting, thus, helps kickstart ketosis while also decreasing daily energy consumption and increasing fat loss. You just have to make it through the frequent hunger pangs and cravings that hit hard initially. As soon as your body adjusts to the new eating schedule, these cravings dissipate and your cells start feasting on stored ketones.
Conclusion
Here we conclude the process and benefits of intermittent fasting and how it can take your body to ketosis levels.
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