Fasting is just going without food for a certain period of time.
Intermittent Fasting means eating all of your day’s food within a shorter than normal period of time. For example, if you eat breakfast at 7:00am and then dinner at 7:00pm and nothing afterwards, your eating window of time is 12 hours. You have eaten all of your day’s food within a 12 hour window.
With intermittent fasting, you would typically eat all of your food within an 8 hour window, and some even do it within 2 or less.
Basically it means skipping breakfast
The amount of calories you eat throughout the day stays constant so you would eat a bit more at lunch and a bit more at dinner to compensate for the calories you didn’t eat at breakfast.
Those who skip both breakfast and lunch usually have a MEGA sized dinner.
Why do it?
1- WEIGHT LOSS
2- HEALTH
Intermittent Fasting is a new dietary practice that is quickly gaining momentum because people are reporting exceptional results with it (especially when combining it with a Ketogenic diet).
Most of the focus and motivation for eating this way is weight loss. I’d say it’s at least 95% of the reason why people do it. Sounds counter intuitive because you’re eating the same quantity you always do, but that doesn’t seem to matter.
INSULIN
The current understanding of what the mechanism is that allows a person to lose body fat with intermittent fasting (IT) is that it affects your insulin sensitivity.
The longer you go without food, the more sensitive to insulin you are and the more fat you can burn and therefore the more weight you lose.
This effect on insulin sensitivity is also responsible for the health benefits people get from IT, which basically is lowered risk of heart attack, strokes, eye, foot and skin problems, and Alzheimer’s. In short, it moves your body physiologically, in the OPPOSITE direction to that of a diabetic.
But, like I mentioned, people are mostly motivated to adopt this diet plan to lose weight and find that after a few weeks (or less) of getting used to skipping breakfast, that they can easily stick to it, and that it is not at all that bad.
That, is intermittent fasting in a nutshell and yes, it does work.
***Note: Intermittent fasting (IT) is a catch-all term for fasting that can take on many forms such as, fasting on alternate days, for many days in a row etc. The fasting style described in this blog post is technically called “time restricted eating” but it’s most commonly called IT throughout the web, in the same way people say KETO when they really mean low-carb.
– SolidWeightLoss
