Overview

Intermittent fasting, a phenomenon involving alternating cycles of eating and fasting, is one of today’s popular health and fitness trends worldwide.

Many people tend to do intermittent fasting as it has numerous potential health benefits to offer.

This article aims to give beginners a guide to intermittent fasting.

What Is Intermittent Fasting?

Intermittent fasting is not a form of diet but rather an eating pattern. It involves scheduling your meals so you get the most out of them. It does not necessarily change what you eat, but instead, it changes when you should eat.

Basically, it’s an easy, non-complex way of getting lean; you need not go on a crazy diet or cut your calories down to nothing. It is indeed one of the best ways to keep your muscle mass on while getting lean.

Thus, people tend to do intermittent fasting to mainly achieve fat loss. Intermittent fasting is one of the simplest and very effective strategies for weight and fat loss, which requires only a little behavior change.

For centuries, fasting has been practiced by various religious groups, including Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism, and for thousands of years, medical practitioners have also noted the potential health benefits of fasting.

How does it work?

To fully understand how intermittent fasting results in weight and fat loss, understanding the difference between the fasted state and the fed state is essential.

Basically, when your body is digesting and absorbing food, it is in the fed state. This state starts when you begin to eat. It takes 3–5 hours for your body to digest and absorb the food you ate. During this state, your insulin levels are high, making it hard for your body to burn fat.

After that time span, your body goes into the postabsorptive state, wherein your body is not processing a meal. It lasts until 8–12 hours after your last meal—and that is when you enter the fasted state. During fasted state, your insulin levels are low, making it much easier for your body to burn fat.

But since we can’t say we are in the fasted state until 12 hours after the last meal, it’s really rare for our bodies to be in the fat-burning state (fasted state).

Fasting puts your body in a fat-burning state that you will eventually lose fat without having to change what you eat, how much you eat, or how often you exercise.

Intermittent fasting benefits

Aside from fat loss, intermittent fasting has several other benefits to offer.

1. Intermittent Fasting Simplifies Your Day.

Intermittent fasting provides simplicity to your daily life. You need not worry about breakfast when you wake up in the morning because a glass of water is enough to start your day.

Remember that planning, preparing, cooking, and eating meals should not be the focus of your everyday life.

2. Intermittent Fasting Promotes Longevity.

Restricting calories has long been known as a way of lengthening life, and intermittent fasting involves calorie restriction. Thus, as you undergo intermittent fasting, you get the benefits of a longer life.

Moreover, a study in 1945 found that intermittent fasting has extended life in mice. And just recently, another study found that alternate day intermittent fasting results in longer lifespans.

3. Intermittent Fasting Reduces The Risk Of Cancer.

Early reports of intermittent fasting to reduce the risk of cancer look positive.

One study of 10 patients suggests that fasting may be able to diminish the side effects of chemotherapy. What’s more, this finding was also supported by the study of Johnson et al. (2009), which used the alternate day fasting method with cancer patients, and results showed that fasting before chemotherapy leads to better cure rates and fewer deaths.

A comprehensive analysis of several studies on fasting and disease demonstrated that fasting reduces the risk of not only cancer but also cardiovascular disease.

However, research on the potential benefits of intermittent fasting on cancer for humans is limited; thus further research is necessary.

4. Intermittent Fasting Is Easier Than Dieting.

Unlike dieting, intermittent fasting is remarkably easy to implement once you already have an intermittent fasting plan in mind. In fact, a study found that intermittent fasting is an effective tool which can be “quickly adapted” by obese adults to lose weight.

Various Intermittent Fasting Schedules

Should you entertain the idea of intermittent fasting, there are different options for working it into your lifestyle.

Daily Intermittent Fasting

The Leangains Model

The Leangains model is the most popular model of daily intermittent fasting. It involves fasting for 16 hours followed by an 8-hour eating window. Martin Berkhan of Leangains.com popularized this model.

When you start your 8-hour eating period does not matter. But choosing an eating window that lets you finish your meals early, like 9:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m., is suggested because as the day goes by, the body becomes less efficient at putting sugar away.

Nevertheless, you can experiment and do whatever works for you. You might want to skip breakfast and eat around 12:00 p.m. and 8:00 p.m. so you can eat lunch and dinner with your loved ones.

One potential disadvantage of using this method is that it becomes more difficult to maintain the same amount of calorie intake during the week as you cut out a meal or two of your day, which leads to weight loss. Well, depending on your goal, weight loss can either be a good thing or a bad thing.

Weekly Intermittent Fasting

An occasional fast is known to have numerous potential benefits, and it is probably the best way to get started with intermittent fasting. Despite not consistently cutting down on calories, you may still experience many other fasting health benefits.

This method allows you to eat every day of the week while still gaining the benefits of a 24-hour fast. You’ll not likely to lose weight as you’re only abstaining 2 meals a week.

This is a great option if you want to keep up your weight while fasting.

Alternate Day Intermittent Fasting

Alternate day intermittent fasting involves extended fasting periods on alternating days of the week.

The good thing about this method is that it gives you longer time in the fasted state as compared with the Leangains style of fasting, which increases fasting benefits.

Intermittent Fasting For Men And Women

When doing intermittent fasting, women may find a longer eating window more favorable as compared with men. Typically, men fast for 16 hours with an 8-hour eating period. Women, on the other hand, may find better results with a 14-hour fast and a 10-hour eating window.

There’s actually a page on Facebook, exclusively for females, that discusses intermittent fasting.

The best thing to do when planning to start intermittent fasting is to experiment and see what works for you. But intermittent fasting is not recommended for people who are underweight, have underlying health conditions, pregnant women, and lactating women, as well as children, because it might cause harm to their health.

Other people might find it hard to skip breakfast. Well, if that’s you, then don’t skip breakfast. You can eat your breakfast foods at 12:00 p.m. each day. If you eat nutritious and filling foods the night before, you’ll have much energy the next morning.

My Intermittent Fasting Experience

Personally, I’ve been intermittent fasting for a couple of years.

I don’t eat breakfast each day, but I would have two meals: the first meal is around 12 noon and the second is around 8:00 p.m. So I have a 16-hour fast until I eat again the following day at 12:00 p.m.

Amazingly, I noticed a 10-pound increase in my muscle mass (from 205 to 215) and a 3% decrease of my body fat (from 14% to 11%) ever since I’ve started intermittent fasting. Also, I’ve become leaner, stronger, and more explosive despite lessened visits to the gym and fewer food intake.

Thus, it can be deduced that intermittent fasting is also an effective tool for weight and fat loss, while maintaining your muscle mass.

Good Resources On Intermittent Fasting

Reading articles about intermittent fasting will help you fully understand the subject. But personally experimenting it is the best way for you to learn what works best for you.

I highly recommend Martin Berkhan’s site on the Leangains version of intermittent fasting (but to start with, you can check this out) and Andy Morgan’s excellent site covering the Leangains model of intermittent fasting.

You’ll also learn more from an active forum on Reddit where people post their success stories or own progress with the Leangains style of intermittent fasting.

Brad Pilon’s good book on intermittent fasting called Eat Stop Eat and John Berardi’s report on intermittent fasting are helpful as well.

Conclusion

Intermittent fasting has indeed numerous health benefits to offer, from weight loss to making your lifestyle simpler.

Depending on your preference, or whichever works for you, there are different options for working intermittent fasting into your lifestyle: daily intermittent fasting, weekly intermittent fasting, and alternate day intermittent fasting.

There are numerous resources on intermittent fasting available online, which will give you ideas on how to intermittent fasting. But it’s still best if you experiment and see what works best for you.

To experience the best intermittent fasting results, make sure you stick to whatever method that works for you.