Can Intermittent Fasting Help You Lose Weight?

What Are Some Intermittent Fasting Benefits?

What is intermittent fasting? Intermittent fasting allows for people to take periodic breaks from eating for up to 24 hours once or twice a week. Intermittent fasting benefits are shown in weight loss and health improvements. This popularly growing trend is a sort of eating pattern that instead of telling you what to eat, tells you when to. The most common intermittent fasting is either in periods of 16 or 24 hours, twice a week. The big question people often have is this: can intermittent fasting help you lose weight? Find out below!

Are you diabetic and interested in trying fasting for weight loss? Click here to learn the facts about diabetes and fasting.

Can intermittent fasting help you lose weight? The short answer is yes. Depending on how often you use the intermittent fasting technique you can easily shed calories on a weekly basis.

How can intermittent fasting help you lose weight? During the time in which you are fasting you eat very little to nothing at all – although it’s important to drink large quantities of water to not only curb your hunger but to keep you hydrated. Eating very little allows various things to happen in the body leading to the rapid burning of calories. When fasting, you can easily not consume nearly a day’s worth of calories!

It’s important to point out that this method works when you are also watching what you eat when you are not fasting. It is very easy to consume the calories that you fasted away the day before in a large, high-calorie meal. Make sure that when you are not fasting you eat a well balanced diet to ensure that you can successfully see the intermittent fasting results.

Intermittent Fasting Benefits

When the body experiences the change of not eating it causes things to happen. Some of the things that are affected while intermittent fasting has to do with insulin levels, human growth hormone, cellular repair and gene expression. All of these things help the body through their specific results. Insulin levels drop allowing the body to burn fat as well as heightened levels of human growth hormone allow for fat burning and muscle gain. Not to mention that cellular repair happens because fasting allows the body to get rid of waste materials in the cells and grants genes the ability to express themselves protecting the body from disease.

The largest of the intermittent fasting benefits comes from weight loss, as stated above, it allows you to eat less throughout the week. It can also help raise the metabolic rate allowing your body to burn more calories. Thus, the largest of the intermittent fasting benefits is weight loss.

Other benefits of intermittent fasting are:

Help with inflammation in the body
Help with heart help
Cancer prevention
Help with a healthy brain
Help with aging

Intermittent Fasting Results

Fasting is not something new, certain religions have fasted for many years and although our bodies may not believe it, they are able to go for many hours without eating. Intermittent fasting results become prevalent depending on the amount of time you decide to do it for. You may not see results immediately but if you practice fasting 1-2 times a week for a month straight you are bound to see the results. You may notice that your waist size has shrunk, as well as the numbers on the scale. Other things you may notice is that as you go through the weeks, the fasting gets easier. You may feel foggy, or have headaches but as your body adjusts, you will be able to get through your hours not eating more easily. You may also notice that when you are eating, you eat less.

Final Note

If you are unsure about the diet but like the benefits that you read, give it a try. You could try having an early dinner, around 4 or 5 pm and then not eating until around 8 am for breakfast. Or you could eat a late dinner and then not eat until lunch, depends on the type of person that you are. Like any sort of diet, immediate results are not usually seen but with dedication, results will be seen. Stay strong you intermittent faster you!