Intermittent Fasting 101

In this article we will provide you with an intermittent fasting 101. You will learn what intermittent fasting is and what it isn’t and other important facts. There appears to be a lot of misinformation about intermittent fasting so we wanted to set the record straight here.

Intermittent fasting has grown in popularity very quickly because it gets results. It is important that you know what to expect so we have covered the most important aspects about it in this article. We want you to get good results with it as well so use this information to your advantage.

Intermittent Fasting explained

A lot of people get nervous when they see the word “fasting”. This conjures up all kinds of negativity in their minds. Maybe they have heard of monks going without food for weeks on end. How can they possibly do that?

Well intermittent fasting is nowhere near as severe as that. You are already fasting when you sleep at night. There are also large chunks of time during your waking hours that you don’t eat or think about eating. When you start with intermittent fasting you will just reorganize these chunks of time when you fast.

You enter into a cyclical pattern of eating and not eating. There is a period of time when you will eat followed by a period of time that you don’t eat. It really is as simple as that. It will take you a while to get used to this new routine but after a short while it should become second nature to you.

You must decide on an Eating Window

Your eating window is the most important part of your intermittent fasting journey. This is the period of time when you can eat. So if you decide to start intermittent fasting using the 8:16 method (a very good choice) it means that each day you will eat for 8 hours and fast for 16 hours (8 of those hours you will be sleeping).

Fasting Window Rules

Your fasting window is the time that you must not eat. With some intermittent fasting methods you are allowed to eat small meals that do not exceed 500 calories. But with most methods you must not consume any calories at all.

It is critical that you abide by the rules of the fasting window and do not consume any calories. You can drink water and consume any other beverage that does not contain any calories such as herbal tea and zero calorie sodas.

Intermittent Fasting triggers Ketosis

The weight loss occurs during intermittent fasting through a body process called “ketosis”. This occurs when the body does not have any food to use as energy. If all the food you have eaten has been digested then with ketosis your body will look to your fat stores as an energy source.

The longer that you fast, the more that ketosis will work to raid your fat stores. In time you will lose weight as your fat stores start to diminish. Other diets use the power of ketosis to burn fat such as low carbohydrate diets and ketogenic diets.

Intermittent Fasting is safe for most people

For the vast majority of people, intermittent fasting is safe. We would always recommend that you consult with your doctor before getting started with intermittent fasting just to be sure. It is not always a good idea for pregnant women to do intermittent fasting for example.

The Benefits Of Intermittent Fasting

Losing weight is the primary benefit of intermittent fasting and the reason for its popularity across the world. But burning fat is not the only benefit that intermittent fasting can provide for you.

It is really important that you know and understand all of the major benefits of intermittent fasting. You are going to have some difficult days when you start out with intermittent fasting and if you keep these benefits in mind then it will help you to persist with it and prevent you from quitting.

So let’s take a look at the major benefits of intermittent fasting:

Burning Fat

If you stick with an intermittent fasting method you will lose weight. Your body will run out of food energy sources while you are fasting and it will turn to your fat stores for energy. This is a process called “ketosis”.

You are very likely to experience a boost in your metabolism when you participate with intermittent fasting. When your metabolism is higher you will lose more weight. Intermittent fasting also helps to reduce your insulin levels. If your insulin levels are too high then this can prevent you from losing weight.

Autophagy (Cell Repair)

By using an intermittent fasting method you will increase the cell repair activities in your body. This process is autophagy which breaks down the cells in your body so that it can eliminate waste cells.

Autophagy will also break down and metabolize dysfunctional and broken proteins in your body as well. With this kind of enhanced cell repair triggered by intermittent fasting you will have added protection against serious diseases such as Alzheimer’s and cancer. It will give you more of a chance of a longer and healthier life.

Insulin Reduction

There are far too many people that have type 2 diabetes these days. It is more common with people that are overweight. Diabetes means that your blood sugar levels are elevated and the cause of this is insulin resistance.

Studies have shown that intermittent fasting reduces the amount of insulin in the body. When this happens, blood sugar levels are stabilized. You are much less likely to suffer from type 2 diabetes when you have stable blood sugar levels.

Increased Brain Functionality

You may have heard that when you do something that benefits your body it is very likely to benefit your brain too. Intermittent fasting helps to increase your metabolism which should lead to better brain health.

Some studies show that intermittent fasting can boost nerve cell growth which in turn increases brain functionality. It can also assist with the increased generation of the brain derived neurotrophic factor which helps to prevent depression.

Reducing Inflammation

A common factor in those that suffer from chronic illnesses is that they have oxidative stress. As people age they are more likely to experience oxidative stress as well. The reason that oxidative stress is so bad is that it releases free radicals which can cause inflammation and have an overall negative effect on the body.

A number of studies have proven that intermittent fasting helps to develop the resistance in the body to oxidative stress. Several test show that when someone is intermittent fasting they reduce their inflammation in the body by a significant factor.

So keep these benefits of intermittent fasting in mind so that you can get through the tough times and experience them yourself.

Is Intermittent Fasting Safe?

Everybody is different so it is impossible to say that intermittent fasting will be totally safe for you. The good news is that it is safe for the vast majority of people that participate with it. However, you need to be sure that it will be safe for you.

There are a few cases where intermittent fasting is either not a good idea at all or that caution will be required. It is important that you understand this and make the right decisions. Although intermittent fasting has a lot of health benefits you do not want to put yourself or your loved ones at risk.

Children

If you have a child that is overweight then intermittent fasting could help. But you need to understand that children need calories for their growth and development. It is also essential that they get the right amount of vitamins, minerals and proteins.

You need to be cautious about getting children involved with intermittent fasting. We are not saying that it cannot be beneficial but you need to do it carefully. If a child does not receive the right levels of proteins it can lead to a whole host of health problems.

Diabetics

If you are suffering from diabetes then intermittent fasting can help you but again you need to be cautious. Intermittent fasting can help you by stabilizing your blood sugar levels through the reduction of insulin in your body.

What you need to avoid is your blood sugar levels falling dangerously low during your fasting window. If you are currently taking medication to regulate your blood sugar levels then this is more likely to happen.

It is very important that you consult with your doctor if you are suffering with diabetes and want to do intermittent fasting. Your doctor should be able to recommend and intermittent fasting method that is safe for you. If not then you need to avoid it.

Pregnant Women

Most doctors will recommend that you do not participate with intermittent fasting if you are pregnant. A pregnant woman needs to feed herself and her baby. She needs to consume the right amount of calories here. Nutrients are also vital during pregnancy.

Some pregnant women have used intermittent fasting methods successfully. Usually they achieve this under strict medical supervision. So a discussion with your doctor is essential if you are pregnant and are thinking about intermittent fasting. You may have to wait until your pregnancy is over.

Eating Disorder Tendencies

If you have a tendency towards developing eating disorders then intermittent fasting may not be right for you. Fasting could trigger an eating disorder and if you develop an anxiety about eating then you need to stop fasting.

The trouble with intermittent fasting is that the focus is on not eating. To someone that is disposed to eating disorders this can mean that they start to ignore signals of hunger and it can be very dangerous.

Sometimes, intermittent fasting can lead to binge eating. You have fasted for several hours and now in your eating window you over indulge in food. A lot of eating disorders have this characteristic so intermittent fasting is not a good idea.

You must speak to your doctor before starting with intermittent fasting. They will know you well and any conditions that you have that can make this dangerous for you.

5 Reasons Why Intermittent Fasting Works

Intermittent fasting is now more popular than it ever was. Many people across the world see the power that it has to help with losing weight and the other health benefits that it brings. There have been many studies that support the various benefits of intermittent fasting.

If you are considering intermittent fasting then we believe that it is important that you should know why it is so effective for weight loss and better health. So in this article you will see 5 reasons why this is the case.

1. It helps to reduce Inflammation

You want to keep the amount of inflammation in your body down to a minimum as this is bad for your health. It is one of the major contributing factors to heart problems and other health issues as well.

Diabetes is a common worldwide problem. Too much inflammation in the body can cause this. There have been several studies that show intermittent fasting can really help reduce the amount of inflammation in the body.

By reducing the period of time that you are consuming foods you will help the amount of inflammation in your body to reduce. You are not going to burn fat effectively if your body has a lot of inflammation as cell communication will be impaired.

2. Intermittent Fasting triggers Ketosis to burn fat

Ketosis is the process where your body looks to your stores of fat for a source of energy rather than the food that you consume. A number of diets will trigger ketosis and intermittent fasting will certainly do this.

If you eat continuously through the day when you are awake then your body will have an ample supply of glucose to get its energy from. Most people consume a lot of carbohydrates in their diet which will produce a large glucose source for energy.

This means that your body will never go into a state of ketosis and look to your fat stores for energy. It doesn’t matter if you exercise regularly every day you will not lose the weight that you want because you are constantly providing your body with glucose.

During your fasting window with intermittent fasting your body will use up all of the available glucose sources and go into ketosis. This is what you want as it will then look to your fat stores for energy. Fat burning takes place and you will lose weight.

3. Blood Sugar Stabilization

When you eat food your body releases insulin. If you have too much insulin then this will play havoc with your blood sugar levels. If there is too much insulin in your body then this will prohibit ketosis and the burning of unwanted fat. Intermittent fasting has been proven to stabilize blood sugar levels by increasing insulin resistance.

4. Appetite reduction

Once you get used to intermittent fasting you will notice that you experience a reduction in your appetite. Your body gets accustomed to receiving less food than it normally does and will adjust accordingly.

5. It will increase your Energy

Many studies have shown that intermittent fasting increases energy levels. This is really good as you will have more energy to be more active during the day which will help you to lose more weight by burning calories.

Here's a very interesting article from the New York Times by By Anahad O’Connor  which I recommend you read as soon as you can ...

A diet full of highly processed foods with added sugars and salt promoted gut microbes linked to obesity, heart disease and diabetes.

Scientists know that the trillions of bacteria and other microbes that live in our guts play an important role in health, influencing our risk of developing obesity, heart disease, Type 2 diabetes and a wide range of other conditions. But now a large new international study has found that the composition of these microorganisms, collectively known as our microbiomes, is largely shaped by what we eat.

By analyzing the diets, health and microbiomes of more than a thousand people, researchers found that a diet rich in nutrient-dense, whole foods supported the growth of beneficial microbes that promoted good health. But eating a diet full of highly processed foods with added sugars, salt and other additives had the opposite effect, promoting gut microbes that were linked to worse cardiovascular and metabolic health.

The researchers found that what people ate had a more powerful impact on the makeup of their microbiomes than their genes. They also discovered that a variety of plant and animal foods were linked to a more favorable microbiome.

One critical factor was whether people ate foods that were highly processed or not. People who tended to eat minimally processed foods like vegetables, nuts, eggs and seafood were more likely to harbor beneficial gut bacteria. Consuming large amounts of juices, sweetened beverages, white bread, refined grains, and processed meats, on the other hand, was associated with microbes linked to poor metabolic health....

Read in by clicking here

The place that your health is in right now can be attributed to the sum of your habits. If you want to change them to better your health it’s going to take some deep understanding and more important action. The following checklist can be used a guide to help you on your way:

1.Keep a log of your daily behaviours for a week or two so that you can source where your potential triggers are coming from.

2.Once you spot a trend, record where you are, who you are with, what you just did, the time it was and the likely emotion you were feeling. After a few weeks see which cue stands out. This is most likely what is triggering you to do a habit.

3.To change a bad habit, consider can you choose a better alternative, increase the friction so that it makes it harder for you to do, avoid it completely by changing your environment or by building accountability.

4.To build a good habit, make it easy, make it attractive to do, reward yourself for doing it or join a culture that is already doing the habit you want to do more of.

5.Before picking where to start, clarify the exact goal such as “I want to lose 10 pounds” or “walk 5,000 steps a day”.

6.List all the potential behaviours that you think could work toward your goal.

7.Keep the behaviours that you think can realistically work for you right now considering your current abilities and commitment. Get rid of the ones that don’t “match” very well for you right now.

8.Pick a prompt that is likely to remind you to do your new habit. Think, alarms, post it notes or add it to a behaviour you already do.

9.Track your progress each day using a habit tracker, digital or physical can both work. If you notice you’re not doing them consistently, make them easier to do until the consistency improves.

10. Accept that habits take time to form and you will have to patience. Keep putting your reps. Every one you do moves you closer to making a new behaviour last.....

While one habit that may not be so healthy for one person may actually be a healthy behaviour for another person. For example while watching box sets for hour may not be the best idea for someone who wants to lose weight, it might the only thing that helps someone with high stress to unwind. What you’re really trying to do when trying to break a bad habit is move your behaviour towards a different place.

Habits aren’t “bad” per SE, it’s the consistency of their effect on the person that’s doing them that causes the most harm. So in essence habits only become “bad” when they’re done for a long a period of time.

There are some real practical steps you can take to break the cycle. Below are the most common and effective ways to approach it.

Limit Your Exposure

One of the best ways to start is to limit your exposure to the triggers may be causing you to do a habit over and over again. For example, if your goal was to eat less to lose a few pounds and you find when you drink more than a couple of drinks of alcohol it leads you to binge on fast food on the way home.

Then limiting your exposure to alcohol or at least keeping it conservative is a good idea. Similarly, if you find yourself getting the urge to grab a kebab with all the trimmings each day from the local fast food joint, you’ll likely benefit from taking a different route home thereby limiting your exposure to the temptation.

Choose A Better Alternative

This one might seem obvious but it’s often an overlooked effective strategy. One of main reason e cigarettes have taken off is that have provided an alternative to smoking real cigarettes. Albeit the research isn’t clear of there long term effects, it is clear that that the uptake in them has grown massively since their existence.

This is largely because people can still practice their smoking habit but in a different way. Therefore, it makes change easy for people to switch and one of first rules you can stick buy when starting a new habit is make it easy (more on this later).

There are many ways to make things better than they were while forming a better habit at the same time. For example, many people would do well to switch to lower calorie options if there goal were to lose weight. Going from coke to diet coke, crisps to quavers, large to small portions and so on. If it is better alternative but only a slight change then this is another good place to start....

In order to form healthier behaviours and break unhealthy ones, we need to be able to become self-aware how behaviour works, habits, of course, are just learnt behaviours that we’ve become accustomed to doing overtime, and most of the time we don’t realise we’re actually doing them. Therefore, journaling by looking back over your day and writing down everything you did during that time is the best way to source what could be triggering you to behave a certain way that’s impacting your health.

To illustrate the point, I want you to think of a habit right now that you feel is not helping your health. It could be anything like sitting down for most of the day, buying unhealthy snacks to what you do at the weekend.

Ready? good, grab a pen and paper now and insert the habit

Now answer the following questions:

>What time does this usually happen? ________________________

>Where are you when this happens? ___________________________

>Who is there with you? _____________________________________

>What did you just do? ______________________________________

>What are you usually feeling? ______________________________

One of the above 5 is the CUE.

According to leading professor Charles Duhigg. The two most common cues are TIME and ENVIORNMENT, pay attention to these.

For example, if you wrote that eating too much cookies was the habit you want to change, and you are usually in the kitchen when you eat them, then the way the kitchen environment is designed is likely the cue.

The cookie jar may even be positioned at a place where you notice instantly when you step inside this location, like on the counter tops or next to the kettle. 

This visual trigger leads to a physical trigger and a routine evolves. Every time you enter the kitchen, make a cup of tea (or both), you grab a cookie at the same time. The combined taste of sweetness, sugar and fat lights up the reward sensors in the brain the neurological loop get reinforced (this is worth it) once again....

So how do we actually form habits then? Well, first we need to understand how habits work because if we don’t then it’s very difficult to build ones that last. Essentially all habits work the same way, it all starts with a cue, something that triggers a response in which we act on that leads to some sort of reward. This is known as the habit loop system and the more we do the behaviour the more the “loop” gets reinforced until eventually, it all becomes automated.

For example, consider someone who’s walking down the street and suddenly they sense a smell (Cue) of their favourite food, the smell triggers a craving to seek out the food and before you know it, they’re getting stuck into a full-size pizza! (reward).

Now consider if the same person, walks the same street and every day gets triggered by the same cue, can you see how easy it is to fall into the same patterns of behaviour and eventually form an unhealthy habit?

This is why it is important to notice the cue that trigger us during our day, cues can be many things, emotions we feel, the people we are with to the environments we spend most of our time in – All can impact how we behave and how we act overtime. That’s why it’s important to notice what the cues are first and set your own triggers that are align with your goals.