What Is Intermittent Fasting & How It Works!

intermittent fasting

Intermittent fasting is when you alternate between periods of eating and fasting. This type of eating is often described as "patterns" or "cycles" of fasting. Also, intermittent fasting is an eating plan that focuses on when you eat, rather than what you eat. The concept is simple you set a window time during which you can eat each day and you fast the rest of the time. 

Intermittent fasting isn't about starving yourself, it's about cutting way back on calories for a short time period. And yes, it is claimed to be an effective way to manage weight loss. A lot of people found it effective but it's very personalized. It's not a magical cure that will work for everyone, studies show a success rate for intermittent fasting that is about the same as other diets. 

How Intermittent Fasting Works: 

Experts are still researching, but it may be beneficial to give your digestive system a regular break from processing the food you eat. There are several effective approaches but it all comes down to personal choices, if you want to give intermittent fasting a try, then be prepared and figure out what works best for you. 

There are variations of intermittent fasting and nearly too many options to recognize to your preference. Some people find it easy to fast for 16 hours and confine meals to just eight hours of the day like 9am to 5pm. In one variation of intermittent fasting called 5/2 people to choose two days per week when they only eat a single small meal while eating regularly the other five days of the week. So, you can pick the eating and fasting window that works best for you. 

Types Of Intermittent Fasting: 

Intermittent Fasting may be sustainable for some people, and not approachable for others. The Intermittent fasting is important because you need to maintain proper nutrition in your diet. If you want to do this fasting then you firstly need to figure out that how you are going to implement the style of eating into your life. 

Here are some popular intermittent fasting methods: 

1) Substitute Day Fasting: 

This variation includes modified fasting each day and every day for example, limit your calories on fasting days to 500 or about 25% of your typical intake. On non-fasting days, continue your regular diet and there is also strict variations to consuming 0 calories on alternate days rather than 500. 

2) 16:8 Fasting:

The 16:8 method includes fasting for 16 hours and eating your normal food for 8 hours. For example, you start at noon and stop at 8 pm and then fast till the next day at noon. Drinking coffee, water, or green tea is allowed which can help to your hunger. 

3) Overnight Fasting:

This one is the simplest of all. It involves fasting for 12 hours every day. This means if you have your dinner at 8 pm, you can resume eating only after 12 hours that is at 8 am the next morning. Since this method is almost possible to achieve, it is one of the most popular ones too. But it may provide milder cellular benefits as compared to the others.

4) Eat-Stop-Eat:

As the name suggests, you eat and then choose two days out of 7 days a week. So, you fast from dinner one day to the next day at dinner time. It depends totally on how you wish to choose the distance, whether it is from one breakfast to another breakfast or lunch to lunch. Water, coffee and tea are allowed which do not add any calories to your diet.

 5) Fasting:

One of the most popular IF method. The main purpose of 5:2 is that 5 days you eat your normal food without counting any calories and other 2 days, you have a calorie-restricted meal. For a woman, it is set at 500 kcal and for a man, it is 600 kcal.