If you asked me a few months ago about fasting, honestly, I’d have told you that it just wasn’t for me… And yet, here I am now, and I’ve been intermittent fasting for nearly a month and I feel fantastic!
Intermittent fasting is when you choose to eat within a set time window during the day, and you do not eat a single calorie outside of that time window. For beginners it is recommended to start with 8 hours of feasting and 16 hours of fasting. The 16 hours includes the time you sleep, so this is totally doable for most people.
During the feasting, you’re meant to eat all your meals within the 8-hour time window. So if you started at 10am with breakfast, then you’d have to have finished your dinner by 6pm that evening, and then let your fasting begin.
The advantages of eating like this are so many, and the science behind it is frankly fascinating. There are entire webpages and books devoted to intermittent fasting (such as Feast, Fast, Repeat, which I can recommend). But to sum it up quickly for you:
When you eat, your body breaks down the food and starts to burn glucose (simple sugars and the sugars from carbohydrates).
When you stop eating, your body uses the glucose for energy. The glucose from your food should give you 7-9 hours of glucose fuel.
When the glucose is used up, the body switches to burning fat as fuel (called ketosis). As you haven’t eaten in a while, it will go for the visceral fat first (around your organs, in your gut, etc), and then once that’s depleted it can start to go for the subcutaneous fat (the flabby bits).
If you start eating before you get to that part, you will be back in the glucose cycle and your body will continue to burn glucose as fuel and store fat for reserves. That’s why there is the time window.
There are other advantages as well. Once your body has started burning fat for a while, the body then goes into another healing phase called Autophagy where any damaged cells begin to repair themselves. This only starts to happens around the 13th to 15th hour of fasting. So the longer your fasting window, the more healing time you get.
There is really so much I could say about this. But it is still new for me, so I’ll keep posting you here on how I’m getting on. The scale has actually started to move downwards after a month of fasting (which is apparently normal — the scale being the last one to catch up…), and I’m down a few pounds. But people who have adopted intermittent fasting as a lifestyle, some of the testimonies of weight lost are extremely encouraging. Not to mention all of the health stories, such as no more hay fever, or no more food allergies, or reduced need for insulin injections.
Watch this space!