Let’s talk about Benefits of Intermittent Fasting
Intermittent fasting has been making a big impact on many health and weight loss magazines. It became very popular as a dietary aid in helping to lose that extra fat we always seem to struggle with. Burning fat is one of those functions. Your body has many different roles that it does on its own without any help from us.
What is Intermittent Fasting?
Fasting will give your body a push with the function of burning fat. Your body will suddenly learn how to burn a lot of fat in a short period of time. Intermittent refers to fasting which means not to eat anything and only drink water and caffeine for at least 16 hours. I know it sounds unbelievable as this may seem, Intermittent fasting has been very successful for many of my online training clients in helping them to lose weight and fat and feel better with their bodies in general. It also helps the body with fat burning quickly in several ways. A more efficient way for weight loss, or maintain your weight, is to follow an intermittent fasting approach.
Intermittent is not about starving yourself. It is simply about going without food for a short period of time, then resuming your life normally. Eating like a rabbit all the time is a surefire way to fall off your diet and sabotage your goals. Eating like a rabbit part of the time, and exercising discipline and control is an effective way to improve your weight loss efforts and reach your goals.
Nearly every diet that you will encounter at the bookstore has some trick to get the reader to eat less. Counting calories is tedious, and can be overwhelming. Reading labels and measuring ingredients can quickly take the joy out of preparing a meal. Following a diet plan can be hard enough, but to have to come up with substitutions or sacrifice entire portions of a meal to keep them within a caloric budget is undesirable for most.
Others advocate condensing their total day’s calories into a set window of anywhere from four to nine hours. Again, though, this relies on counting your calories out and sticking to the plan. A smart way to go about this type of approach is to plan your meals several days in advance so that when it’s time to eat, there is no thought involved. Just prepare the meals that have been planned, and carry on.
While both of these approaches are fine and work well for their intended purposes, a looser approach can often be a good jump off point. Many would do fine to simply skip breakfast, eat lunch a little later, and make sure that the first meal is a small one. Drinking plenty of water and caffeine throughout the fasted period often helps to blunt the hunger.
The Role of Hormones
Hormones play a big role in our body. Each hormone has its functions and performance. Our growth hormone is responsible for helping with fat burning. When we are on a fasting diet, our growth hormone starts working overtime with fat burning at a much faster rate. Fasting also keeps our insulin levels to the minimum, so we’re burning the fat instead of storing it in our body.
Fasting is an excellent way to maintain the body and mind healthy and clean. Many people that practice fasting regularly claim they’ve learned a lot about their eating habits as well. The reason is that they have plenty of time to think about food. As a result, foods are craved on their fasting days. A high level of adrenaline in your body is produced and also increases during short-term fasting. As a result, it sets your body’s ability to burn fat overdrive and work twice as hard. Do this combination with your increased metabolism and you can see how losing fat would be so common with this new approach.