Intermittent fasting is a phenomenon that is currently a very popular health and fitness trend. It involves alternating cycles of fasting and eating instead of eating all hours of the day, and it’s not a diet but rather an eating pattern. It doesn’t include any rules about what foods to eat, but rather when you should eat them.
And I was quoted by time magazine.
“Intermittent fasting is becoming so popular because of one reason it works. It works whether you’re trying to lose weight or just improve your biomarkers to achieve optimal health. It is the way that we were designed to eat because what it does is it allows us to use our fat as our primary fuel instead of carbohydrates by adapting the way that our ancestors used to eat.”
The majority of Americans do not intermittent fast, and this could be a coincidence, but in 2014 the obesity rate among American adults was 30% that’s a 3% increase in just two years. What we’re doing is obviously not working.
One thing that I really like to dive into our human studies and research done by scientists, so for instance, did you know that your metabolic rate actually increases short term after fasting studies concluded right after a fast, there’s a metabolic rate increase of near four to 14% for up to 48 hours.
Now, this is because the body will actually release the stress hormone adrenaline to help sharpen the mind and give us energy. This hormone tells your fat cells to break down body fat and stimulate your metabolism. Good stuff, right? Another study that I found was that the average cost to lose roughly just 11 pounds ranges from $755 for joining a group that counts points to $2,700 for the weight loss medication Orlistat.
Unfortunately, the end result for the majority of these people on these diets is they end up spending thousands of dollars pursuing weight loss without having any long term success.
However, intermittent fasting has been proven to be a safe and effective approach that promotes not just fat loss, but actually improves overall health in the ways that no other lifestyle modification can do.
Now, what differentiates intermittent fasting from any other diet is an extreme abundance of high-quality research to back up all of its claims and its results. It also serves as the way humans were physiologically designed to eat, period.
Now, Mark Madsen, who was the senior investigator for the National Institute on Aging, he says during the fasting humans are under mild stress and they respond to the stress adaptively by enhancing their ability to cope with stress and maybe resist disease. That’s huge.
There’s considerable similarity between how cells respond to the stress of exercise and how cells respond to intermittent fasting, and that’s really exciting news. We have long known that continuous fasting offers tons of health benefits, but realistically, who’s going to do this?
Who’s going to have multiple days of caloric restriction to obtain such positive benefits? I know I wouldn’t.
What makes intermittent fasting so appealing is that it provides nearly identical health benefits and even some better benefits in different categories without being so difficult to implement and maintain. In 2007 there was a study out by the American Journal of clinical nutrition where we searched divided two sets of participants. Each group consumed the exact amount of calories. Now the only difference was that one group consumed all their calories in three meals and the other group, of course, practiced intermittent fasting, consuming all the same food.
What was the discovery? Well, probably what you expect that, I’m going to say, the participants who ate the smaller window of time, they had a significant improvement in body composition, including a substantial reduction in fat mass.
Okay. So personally I’ll do anything to simplify my daily life. It’s pretty busy and intermittent fasting certainly does that for me. I don’t wake up in the morning and think, God, what am I going to have for breakfast and just drink my coffee?
This simplicity is the best reason alone to give this a try. It provides countless health benefits though, without requiring massive behavioral and lifestyle changes. Let me give you just a little list of some of these benefits.
let’s face it, not many people would exercise if they didn’t know the benefits of it for your health. People probably wouldn’t eat healthy foods either if they didn’t know how necessary it was to living a long, healthy life. So I don’t know about you, But it sounds like intermittent fasting is a lifestyle that we all need to adopt.