Intermittent Fasting Overview

There are a lot of diet fads on the web, they are too many that I cannot list them all.

This Intermittent Fasting is one of them. The first time I heard of it, I told myself that it looks hard to do and looks unhealthy because I learned before that you should not deprive yourself if you want to slim down and be healthy. A nutritionist told me that it is advisable to maintain the sugar level in your body for it not to store fats in the system, that’s why you should eat a small amount of food every 2-3 hours.

Intermittent fasting (IF) is an eating pattern that cycles between periods of fasting and eating. It’s currently very popular in the health and fitness community.

Intermittent Fasting Methods

There are several different ways of doing intermittent fasting — all of which involve splitting the day or week into eating and fasting periods.

During the fasting periods, you eat either very little or nothing at all.

These are the most popular methods:

• The 16/8 method: Also called the Leangains protocol, it involves skipping breakfast and restricting your daily eating period to 8 hours, such as 1–9 p.m. Then you fast for 16 hours in between.
• Eat-Stop-Eat: This involves fasting for 24 hours, once or twice a week, for example by not eating from dinner one day until dinner the next day.
• The 5:2 diet: With this methods, you consume only 500–600 calories on two non-consecutive days of the week, but eat normally the other 5 days.

By reducing your calorie intake, all of these methods should cause weight loss as long as you don’t compensate by eating much more during the eating periods.

Intermittent fasting can have many benefits for your body and brain. It can cause weight loss and may reduce your risk of type 2 diabetes, heart disease and cancer. It may also help you live longer.

Many people find the 16/8 method to be the simplest, most sustainable and easiest to stick to. It’s also the most popular. – info via: www.healthline.com

I am doing the 16:8 ratio. I usually start eating around 10 in the morning and stop on or before 6 in the evening. I started my IF at the last quarter of 2018 because I find it hard to wake up early and do my usual exercise. I don’t want to gain so much weight and I know that dieting has a huge factor on losing weight so I tried it. I find it easier than counting my calories intake.

Overall, I can say that it’s effective because even though I am lazy exercising last quarter I did not gain so much weight (but I still gained ha, I can feel it, it’s just that it’s not too much).

This year, I am planning to continue doing it and take lesser carbohydrates (eating rice in particular), plus go back with my usual exercise twice a week (which is Zumba).

I hope that at the end of the year, I could reach my 120lbs goal.

BTW, Intermittent Fasting is not for everybody, there are pros and cons of this practice. You should do more research about it before joining the bandwagon.

If you want to get more information and see some transformations from real people (PINOY), join this group in Facebook https://www.facebook.com/groups/lcifph/