Top 22 Intermittent Fasting Benefits
STORY AT-A-GLANCE
- Intermittent fasting or compression of your eating window time, is a powerful approach that facilitates weight loss and helps reduce your risk of chronic diseases like Type 2 diabetes, heart disease and cancer
- Intermittent fasting covers a variety of different meal timing schedules, but generally speaking involves cutting calories in whole or in part, either a couple of days a week, every other day or daily
- When you eat throughout the day and never or rarely skip a meal, your body adapts to burning sugar as its primary fuel, which downregulates enzymes that utilize and burn stored fat
- Research confirms that fasting can effectively reverse Type 2 diabetes in a relatively short amount of time. Fasting has also been shown to trigger the regeneration of the pancreas in both Type 1 and Type 2 diabetics
- If you're new to the concept of intermittent fasting, consider starting by skipping breakfast; eat lunch and dinner within an eight-hour timeframe, and make sure you stop eating three hours before you go to sleep
Intermittent fasting is a powerful approach that facilitates weight loss and helps reduce your risk of chronic diseases like Type 2 diabetes, heart disease and cancer. Research overwhelmingly supports the notion that ditching the "three square meals a day" approach in favor of intermittent fasting can do wonders for your health, as your body simply isn't designed to be continuously fed.
Research by Dr. Satchidananda Panda suggests 90 percent of people eat across a span of 12 hours a day, and many across even longer timespans. Sadly, this is a prescription for metabolic disaster and will clearly wreak havoc with your metabolism over time.
Intermittent fasting typically refers to not eating for at least 14 consecutive hours a day. However, not eating for 16 to 18 hours is likely closer to metabolic ideal. This means you are only eating your food within a six to eight-hour window.
Why Intermittently Fast?
The cycling of feasting (feeding) and famine (fasting) mimics the eating habits of our ancestors and restores your body to a more natural state that allows a whole host of biochemical benefits to occur. In recent years, it's become increasingly clear that your body cannot run optimally when there's a continuous supply of calories coming in.
For starters, when you eat throughout the day and never skip a meal, your body adapts to burning sugar as its primary fuel, which downregulates enzymes that utilize and burn stored fat. As a result, you start becoming progressively more insulin resistant and start gaining weight, and most efforts to lose weight become ineffective.
It's important to realize that in order to lose body fat, your body must first be able to actually burn fat. Two powerful ways of shifting your body from carb-burning to fat-burning are fasting and/or eating a cyclical ketogenic diet. For optimal results, you'd want to do both,1,2 as these strategies support each other, allowing for speedier results. To learn more about this, see "Why Intermittent Fasting Is More Effective Combined With Ketogenic Diet."
Importantly, many biological repair and rejuvenation processes also take place while you're fasting, and this is a primary reason why all-day grazing triggers disease while fasting prevents them.
The Many Health Benefits of Intermittent Fasting
A large and growing body of medical research supports the use of intermittent fasting, showing it has a wide range of biological benefits. For example, intermittent fasting has been shown to...
https://fitness.mercola.com/sites/fi..._rid=523011306