What Happens To Your Body When You Do Intermittent Fasting - Top 6 Intermittent Fasting Methods To Follow

 

Ever feel hungry when you miss a meal? Imagine waiting 16 or 18 hours before eating again. Or an entire day without breakfast, lunch, or dinner. That’s what proponents of intermittent fasting do on a regular basis. 

Intermittent fasting is an eating pattern where you cycle between periods of eating and fasting. It does not say anything about which foods to eat, but rather when you should eat them. There are several different intermittent fasting methods, all of which split the day or week into eating periods and fasting periods.

 

Whenever we eat, the body releases insulin to help cells convert sugars (in particular glucose) from food into energy. If the glucose isn’t used immediately, insulin helps makes sure the excess is stored in fat cells. But when we go without food for extended periods, as people do in IF, insulin is not released. The body then turns to breaking down fat cells for energy, leading to weight loss.

Intermittent fasting can lead to weight loss, stabilized blood sugar, reduced inflammation, improvements in memory and stress resistance, slowed aging, and longer lifespan — all promising health benefits in return for considerable lifestyle changes.

Some IF proponents maintain time-restricted eating, squeezing all their meals into an eight to 10-hour period, followed by a 14- to 16-hour overnight fast. Others rave about the 5:2 diet, which involves eating normally for five days of the week followed by two days of eating 25% of their daily caloric intake (that’s around 500 to 600 calories for most people). 

Others simply restrict food intake completely on certain days of the week, relying on water, black coffee, and tea to stave off hunger cues.  

There are no guidelines or nutritional suggestions for “on days” when eating is unrestricted. But physicians and dieticians suggest eating a nutrient-dense diet full of plants and protein to tide you over through fasting periods.

What happens to your body 

To understand Intermittent Fasting, you have to first understand what happens when you eat. 

• Insulin is a hormone that’s released when we eat, but it isn’t meant to be released all the time.
• “Intermittent fasting is simply letting your insulin level go down to basically normal so that you unlock your fat stores. So nobody’s going to lose any weight unless they get that insulin level down. Which is why eating very small meals throughout the day doesn’t really help with weight loss.”
  

 

 “During exercise, there’s a stress on the cells. They don’t grow and get stronger and bigger during the exercise but during the resting period. So we think that with intermittent fasting — during the fasting period, the cells go in kind of a stress-resistance mode. And then when you eat, they’ve prepared themselves to quickly take up nutrients, proteins, and grow.”

Several methods of this eating pattern exist.

Every method can be effective, but figuring out which one works best depends on the individual.

Here are 6 popular ways to do intermittent fasting.

 1. 16/8 Method

• The 16/8 method involves fasting every day for 14–16 hours and restricting your daily eating window to 8–10 hours.
• Within the eating window, you can fit in two, three, or more meals.
• Doing this method of fasting can actually be as simple as not eating anything after dinner and skipping breakfast.
• For example, if you finish your last meal at 8 p.m. and don’t eat until noon the next day, you’re technically fasting for 16 hours.
• For people who get hungry in the morning and like to eat breakfast, this method may be hard to get used to at first. However, many breakfast skippers instinctively eat this way.
• You can drink water, coffee, and other zero-calorie beverages during the fast, which can help reduce feelings of hunger.
• It’s very important to primarily eat healthy foods during your eating window. This method won’t work if you eat lots of junk food or an excessive number of calories.

 2.      5:2 Diet

The 5:2 diet involves eating normally 5 days of the week while restricting your calorie intake    to 500–600 for 2 days of the week.

 

• On the fasting days, it’s recommended that women eat 500 calories and men 600.
• For example, you might eat normally every day of the week except Mondays and Thursdays. For those two days, you eat 2 small meals of 250 calories each for women and 300 calories each for men.

 3. Eat Stop Eat 

 

• Eat Stop Eat involves a 24-hour fast once or twice per week.
• By fasting from dinner one day to dinner the next day, this amounts to a full 24-hour fast.
• For example, if you finish dinner at 7 p.m. Monday and don’t eat until dinner at 7 p.m. the next day, you’ve completed a full 24-hour fast. You can also fast from breakfast to breakfast or lunch to lunch — the end result is the same.
• Water, coffee, and other zero-calorie beverages are allowed during the fast, but no solid foods are permitted.
• If you’re doing this to lose weight, it’s very important that you eat normally during the eating periods. In other words, you should eat the same amount of food as if you hadn’t been fasting at all.
• The potential downside of this method is that a full 24-hour fast may be fairly difficult for many people. However, you don’t need to go all in right away. It’s fine to start with 14–16 hours, then move upward from there.
  

 4. Alternate Day Fasting

 

• In alternate-day fasting, you fast every other day.
• There are several different versions of this method. Some of them allow about 500 calories during the fasting days.
• A full fast every other day can seem rather extreme, so it’s not recommended for beginners.
• With this method, you may go to bed very hungry several times per week, which is not very pleasant and probably unsustainable in the long term.

5. The Warrior Diet 

 

• It involves eating small amounts of raw fruits and vegetables during the day and eating one huge meal at night.
• Basically, you fast all day and feast at night within a four-hour eating window.
• The Warrior Diet was one of the first popular diets to include a form of intermittent fasting.
• This diet’s food choices are quite similar to that of the paleo diet — mostly whole, unprocessed foods.

6. Spontaneous Meal Skipping

 

• Another option is to simply skip meals from time to time, such as when you don’t feel hungry or are too busy to cook and eat.
• It’s a myth that people need to eat every few hours lest they hit starvation mode or lose muscle. Your body is well equipped to handle long periods of famine, let alone missing one or two meals from time to time.
• Thus, if you’re really not hungry one day, skip breakfast and just eat a healthy lunch and dinner. Or, if you’re traveling somewhere and can’t find anything you want to eat, do a short fast.
• Skipping one or two meals when you feel inclined to do so is basically a spontaneous intermittent fast.
• Just make sure to eat healthy foods during the other meals.

 

If you decide to try intermittent fasting, keep in mind that diet quality is crucial. It’s not possible to binge on junk foods during the eating periods and expect to lose weight and boost your health.