Intermittent fasting is a simple, effective approach to weight management. Fasting for a certain number of hours each day or eat just one meal a couple days a week, can help your body burn fat and boost your metabolism.
Source: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26374764/
Studies have shown that intermittent fasting can be just as effective as a traditional diet with calorie restrictions, if not more. Intermittent fasting can help decrease insulin levels and boost blood levels of human growth hormone and norepinephrine. These changes can help you burn fat more easily and help you lose weight. Diets with calorie restriction over a long period can result in a drop in your your metabolic rate because your body enters “starvation mode” (or “adaptive thermogenesis”). Your body does this to conserve energy as a natural defense against starvation.
While intermittent fasting actually increases a person’s metabolic rate, lessens inflammation, which improves a range of health issues from arthritic pain to asthma; and even helps clear out toxins and damaged cells. Source: https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/intermittent-fasting-surprising-update-2018062914156
There are several different ways of doing intermittent fasting — all of which involve splitting the day or week into eating and fasting periods. During the fasting periods, you eat either very little or nothing at all.
Here are some popular methods:
- The 16/8 method: Also called the Leangains protocol, it involves skipping breakfast and restricting your daily eating period to 8 hours, such as 1–9 p.m. Then you fast for 16 hours in between.
- Eat-Stop-Eat: This involves fasting for 24 hours, once or twice a week, for example by not eating from dinner one day until dinner the next day.
- The 5:2 diet: With this method, you consume only 500–600 calories on two nonconsecutive days of the week, but eat normally the other 5 days.