Beginners Guide To Intermittent Fasting

In the fast-paced life of today’s, not everybody gets time to exercise or burn the calories they consume in a single day. Even the once going to gym or other such places face difficulty in maintaining their body weight and avoid obesity at some stage.

It is a reason why a lot of people today depend on a dieting plan for staying healthy. One of the most popular of these dieting techniques is the intermittent fasting diet. The following guide will share more about this specific diet and also tell you about different aspects related to it.

What Is Intermittent Fasting?

Intermittent fasting, otherwise known as the intermittent energy restriction, is a way of regulating your body intake. Here you cycle between the time of eating and the gap between meals to enhance your metabolism rate.

The main concept of this method is to focus on the time of eating rather than what you eat. It divides the day or the weeks into two different parts, the eating section, and the fasting section. In the first part, you are free to eat as per your regular diet. This section also doesn’t possess any restriction on the type of food you eat.

After this section comes the fasting part. This part is entirely up to your endurance and will keep on changing with your fitness level. You can start by fasting for a few hours and then move to as long as 16 with time.

This way, your intake a certain amount of energy or calories in the eating part and then use them to run yourself for the rest of the day. This way, you don’t just get rid of your body fat, but also get enough nutrients to build muscle fibers.

What Are The Benefits Of Intermittent Fasting?

The main motive of intermittent fasting is to prevent the accumulation of extra fat on the body. However, it serves a lot more purpose than just fat reduction. Here’s a list of its other benefits. 

• Prevent Heart Disease: One of the most common reasons for heart diseases, including the heart attack, is clogged veins. Intermittent fasting can help you to prevent most of these issues by eliminating the cholesterol responsible for the clogging. It ensures that everything that you eat gets digested and properly absorbed into your bloodstream and also reduces body fat for this task.
• Anti-aging: As the fat and cholesterol level of your body starts to fall, the body becomes more active. Its blood circulation and metabolism rate also increase. The detoxification rate of the body and the supply of oxygen-rich blood to the skin also increases. Hence, the skin cells get activated, which in turn makes your skin youthful, radiant, and wrinkle-free. 
• Reduces Cancer Risks:  The cancer-curing effect of intermittent fasting is a controversial topic, as research in this section is very limited. However, the results of the initial experiment in this part are promising. They have stated that the fasting technique can not only reduce side effects but can also speed up the curing rates and reduce death possibilities. 
• Easier Than Dieting: The traditional dieting techniques are good on the result, but they are difficult. Sometimes they even drain the body energy to a level where the person feels unable to continue the normal lifestyle or fall sick. These kinds of problems don’t exist in intermittent fasting techniques. It burns your body fat but at the same time also makes sure you have adequate nutrients to keep the body healthy. Since you don’t have to eliminate the food completely, this technique is also easy to adapt and use in long terms.
• Reduce Diabetes: After 12-14 hours of fasting, your body goes into an absorption cycle in which it starts to use the deposited energy and fats. The body also begins to produce a lot more growth hormone than it generally does. As a result, the body sugar level and insulin content start to decrease, along with the risk of diabetes.

Different Types Of Intermittent Fasting

Depending on the fasting time and the span of your plan, there are three main types of intermittent fasting.

1. Daily Intermittent Fasting: This is a short period fasting that divides the 24 hours of the days into the two required parts in a ratio of 2:1. You are free to eat anything for 8 hours per day and have to spend the other 16 hours fasting. The fasting type is also known as the 16/8 fasting technique due to this division.
2. Weekly Intermittent Fasting: If you are planning to go long term with intermittent fasting them weekly cycle is the best option. In this case, you have to fast for 24 hours per week. Most users prefer to fast from Monday lunch to Tuesday lunch, but you can adjust it for your schedule as long as the 24 hours fasting is continuous, the day or time won’t matter. 
3. Alternative Days Intermittent Fasting: This type works by incorporating long term fasting cycles on alternative days. In simpler words, you have to fast for 24 hours then eat for 24 and then again fast for 24 hours. The start and end of the fast are upon you, but you need to have a 24 hours gap between each transaction.  

Eatables Allowed While Fasting Period

The fasting techniques don’t restrict you from eating anything during the eating period, but the fasting time will be totally eatable-free. You cannot even eat a small candy or chocolate bar during this period.

However, if you feel hungry or weak, you can consider liquid to maintain energy. You can drink water, coffee, tea, or any other non-alcoholic beverage during this time. You can also consider a supplement, but it has to be a zero-calorie variant.

Who Should Avoid It?

Like every good thing, intermittent fasting also comes with some minor cons. Therefore, it’s not safe for everyone. Here’s a small list of people who should avoid it.

•       Underweight or underage people (under 18)
•       Pregnant and breastfeeding
•       People with anorexia or other similar disorders
•       People with diseases like diabetes, liver or kidney diseases and heart disease

Intermittent fasting is a quick and effective way to deal with the eve bothering fat. It doesn’t need any equipment or extra time, but still offers you excellent results. Sure, it has risks like weakness and low BP, but they are avoidable.  So, if you are looking for a minimal effort way to reduce your weights, then intermittent fasting is your best shot.