How Does Intermittent Fasting Help You Lose Weight?
Does intermittent fasting help you lose weight? That is a question that involves careful scrutiny, and we hope to shed some light on the subject for you.
With an increasingly sedentary lifestyle, especially amidst the pandemic, maintaining a healthy weight is difficult. We snack out of boredom or stress and the choice of snacks is not always healthy. One thing we do know is weight loss should be gradual and should focus on losing fat. Often, fast weight loss leads to loss of muscle, bone and water.
Intermittent fasting is an eating pattern that involves short-term fasts to help eat fewer calories as well as improve metabolism. Intermittent fasting has other health benefits too. Here are some things we can say about the eating plan.
How Does Intermittent Fasting Work?
Intermittent Fasting is more about when you eat instead of what you eat. It involves fasting in a regular pattern every day. The science behind it is explained as metabolic switching, which occurs when the body goes for hours without food and burns fat to provide energy after exhausting the sugar stores. (Mattson)
There are several intermittent fasting methods like the 16:8 method, the 5:2 method, the Warrior Diet, Eat Stop Eat and alternate-day fasting (ADF). The popular 16:8 method is promoted as fasting for weight loss. It involves restricting food consumption to a window of 8 hours every day. You are not allowed to ingest calories in the remaining 16 hours of the day. (Gunnars, 2020)
When you opt for intermittent fasting, you do not eat or consume food or beverages that contain calories during the fasting period. Healthy and nutritious foods are consumed during the eating period. These foods should consume complex, unrefined carbohydrates, lean protein, healthy fats and leafy greens. The chances of losing weight are improved if your diet eliminates high-carb junk food and calorie-laden treats. Yes, this matters!
Benefits of Intermittent Fasting
Intermittent fasting doesn’t just help you lose weight but also affects the body and the brain. Research associates the benefits of a longer life, a leaner body and a sharper mind with this practice. (Mattson) Some benefits of intermittent fasting are:
- Obesity and Diabetes: Humans tend to lose weight by intermittent fasting, which can help avoid obesity and issues related to obesity like diabetes and high blood pressure.
- Heart Health: By regulating and improving blood pressure, intermittent fasting leads to a better heart rate and good heart health.
- Tissue Health: Some studies reported reduced tissue damage in animals after surgery and improved results.
- Memory and Mind Health: Intermittent fasting can boost verbal memory in humans and boost working memory in animals.
- Physical Improvement: This method of fasting leads to a decrease in fat without changing muscle mass, which means improved physical performance, especially with resistance training.
Body changes during intermittent fasting can protect organs against chronic diseases, type 2 diabetes, age-related neurodegenerative disorders, irritable bowel syndrome, heart diseases and many cancers. (Mattson)
How Intermittent Fasting Affects Your Hormones
While intermittent fasting does help you lose weight, it also affects your hormones. When fasting, the body makes changes to make the stored energy available, which includes changes in the nervous system activity and changes in levels of certain hormones. When you fast, two metabolic changes occur – a decrease in the levels of insulin, which burns fat and the nervous system sending norepinephrine to the fat cells, breaking them down into free fatty acids that can be burned for energy. (Gunnars, 2020)
Most people opt for intermittent fasting for weight loss while some opt for it to help control IBS, arthritis or high cholesterol. However, certain people should not try intermittent fasting like children or teens below 18 years old, pregnant women or women who are breastfeeding, people with diabetes or sugar problems as well as anyone with a history of eating disorders. However, it is a beneficial lifestyle change for most people. Do consult your general practitioner or inform them before you decide to adopt any kind of fasting or diet.
How to Get Started
The first thing to do is to check with your primary care physician before starting a diet, especially if you are diabetic or have other conditions that affect blood sugar and metabolism.
Health in Progress offers the Prolon Fasting Mimicking Diet solution. ProLon® is a 5-day dietary program carefully designed to nourish and rejuvenate your body while supporting metabolic balance. The ProLon FastingMimicking Diet® gives many of the benefits of a fast while letting you eat delicious food to help fight hunger and lose weight while protecting lean body mass. Get a trimmer waistline and many of the associated benefits of fasting without requiring ongoing lifestyle changes, such as long-term dieting.*
The benefits of the Prolon Fasting Mimicking Diet are well documented. ProLon is the first and only clinically tested, doctor-recommended fasting meal program. ProLon’s breakthrough nutri-technology was researched for over 20 years and developed by Dr. Longo at the Longevity Institute at the University of Southern California. In 2018, TIME nominated Dr. Longo as among the top 50 most influential people in health.
We’ll get you started with the ProLon Fasting Mimicking Diet and help answer questions as you begin the journey. Again, the best results are when you have a plan, a support system and a health care provider available to address questions and concerns. For a free consult, make an appointment using our online portal and get your weight and well-being headed in the right direction.
Works Cited
“Intermittent Fasting: What Is It, and How Does It Work?” Johns Hopkins Medicine, www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/wellness-and-prevention/intermittent-fasting-what-is-it-and-how-does-it-work.
Gunnars, Kris. “How Intermittent Fasting Can Help You Lose Weight” Healthline, Healthline Media, 2020, https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/intermittent-fasting-and-weight-loss#weight-loss
ProLon The Fasting Mimicking Diet® (FMD®). ProLon® Fast. (n.d.). https://prolonfast.com/pages/fasting-mimicking-diet.