Intermittent fasting is a new method of eating that’s gaining a lot of attention lately. We’ve all told that in order to lose weight, one must exercise consistently and with a lot of intensity. While it is true that regular exercise is important to maintain health and burn fat, the question arises “is exercise alone really enough?”
In my opinion, no. Without dietary changes, it’s practically impossible to lose weight and consistently keep it off. This is where most people shun away from diet and exercise because conventional wisdom states that you have to deprive yourself of the foods you enjoy in order to lose weight.
But what if you didn’t?
Intermittent fasting weight loss isn’t necessarily a new concept. In many cultures fasting is a regular part of life for both cultural and religious reasons. In these cases, fasting isn’t done for weight loss purposes, but rather to cleanse one’s body. Most cases this method of fasting lasts anywhere from several days up to a month.
What if instead of fasting for days on end, we fast everyday? Intermittent fasting weight loss methods do just that. Instead of fasting for days or weeks, the IF (Intermittent Fasting) practitioner fasts everyday for anywhere form 16 – 20 hours.
A typical day eating day for most people is something like the following:
- 8:00 AM Breakfast
- 12:00 PM Lunch
- 7:00 PM Dinner
- Perhaps a light snack before bed.
This schedule means that eating is spread out over an 12+ hour eating window which allows for a lot of time for overeating
Intermittent fasting allows you to eat relatively the same amounts of food, just within a compressed timeframe. An intermittent fasting weight loss schedule would look something like the following:
- 10:00 AM Breakfast
- 2:00 PM Lunch
- 6:00 PM Dinner
What we’ve effectively done is compress the eating window to 8 hours. Outside of the 8-hour window nothing but water should consumed. This has several major benefits. For starters, you’ll eat a less food because most people typically don’t digest their food quickly enough to where they’re able to consume the same amount of food that they would in a larger eating window.