Intermittent fasting for beginners

Intermittent fasting is a hot topic in nutrition lately, but the concept itself isn’t new.
Mahatma Gandhi often recommended intermittent fasting as a way to cleanse mind ,body and soul. Most of the Buddhist monk eat once a day. Many religions have fasting as a ritual.

Moreover, Intermittent fasting or “IF” is gaining major traction among celebrities and everyone does things a bit differently for purported health, weight, and cognitive benefits.

You must be curious to know, how is this helping them. So lets dive right into this.

What is it?

Intermittent fasting is a pattern of eating in such a way that you get the most out of it. Most people confuse Intermittent fasting with starving. According to dictionary definition , Starving means to suffer or die by lack of food or hunger whereas Fasting means eat no food for specific time.

Its not only about what you eat but also when you eat. Confused??? It gets easier as you read.

Why How Does it work?

Why it is important to change “when” you are eating?

When we eat food, it’s very hard for our body to burn fat as our insulin levels in body is high.

Body is in absorption state after 8-10 hours.It is much easier for our body to burn fat in the fasted state because your insulin levels are low.

So entering that fast state i.e. 12 hours after meal, is actually what we do everyday i.e. when we eat in the morning, it is breaking the fast, for that reason it is recommended to eat dinner by 7 P:M so that next day if you have breakfast at 8 A:M , you are done with most of the fasting time.

Reason why human body do not loose weight even after eating healthy food is that they consume food late in the night and eat breakfast early , i.e. there is not enough gap in between.

Best Types of Intermittent Fasting

1. 16:8:
   • In this you eat for 8 hrs and fast for 16 hrs.
   • You give your body 16 hrs to burn any carbs first and then start on fat burning process.
   • Recommended:  Eat between 11 AM to 7 PM and fast rest of the time
   • We tend to keep maximum fasting time for night and leave some for morning as well to start that fat burn process.
2. Eat stop Eat:
   • 24 hours fasting once or twice a week.
   • Start with smaller intervals and gradually to full day.
3. 5: 2 Diet:
   • restrict calories to about 25-30 % for 2 days a week and normal other file days. allow one day between fasting days.

What type of fasting you do entirely depends on your body type an how well it adapts.

Benefits:

1. Fastens fat burning process
2. Helps us remain in ketosis longer.
3. Reduces risk of cancer:- check study here
4. Reduced Inflammation
5. Really good for brain function.

While being on fasting you should stick to following items

• Black or Green Tea
• Black coffee (Try out my version of ketone booster coffee)
• Water(with salt) or Sparkling/Soda water
• Coconut oil/MCT oil added to tea or coffee
• 1 or 2 tsp. of creamer(avoid if you can)

I have been doing 16:8 pattern for a while now on keto and have seen some amazing results 

So if you are really interested in IF, give it a try and let me know in comment section if this works for you!!!