There are quite a few different reasons why you may be consider intermittent fasting. Different people are leveraging intermittent fasting differently. Some will take a little food or nutrition in the form of juice; others will stick to only water and herbal tea during the duration of their fast.
There’s been a lot of talk in the alternative health industry about the benefits of fasting. The basic idea is that if we abstain from food for a period of time, our bodies move energy from processing the food we eat to maintenance mode.
What is Intermittent Fasting?
With a traditional fast you usually consume no food and hardly anything other than water for an extended period of time. How long you fast is really up to you, but it isn’t uncommon to fast for 30 days. While there are some definite benefits to this, it also isn’t something that’s easily done.
Sure you’ll do fine for the first day, but as your stomach starts to grumble and you’re getting tired and cold (because your metabolism starts to slow to a crawl) things get a little harder.
And if weight loss is one of your goals, a slow metabolism is the last thing you want. The solution is a method of fasting called intermittent fasting.
Intermittent Fasting for beginners is Simple
The idea of intermittent fasting for beginners is simple. Instead of fasting strictly for days and weeks, you alternate periods of feast and fasting. Think of it as interval training for your metabolism. It’s one of the most effective and quickest ways to burn body fat.
How to Start
You can start intermittent fasting several different ways, but what seems to work best for most people is to skip food for a large part of the day and limit your eating to a few short hours. For example, you could sleep, skip breakfast and all calories just running on coffee, tea and water through lunch and have a meal in the early afternoon, followed by a light snack a few hours later. From there you can easily make it until bedtime and sleep through a large part of your fast.
I wouldn’t suggest this to start. I’d suggest water, coffee and tea in the morning. Eat lunch as late as you. Then have dinner at a normal time.
Intermittent Fasting Success
Intermittent fasting is what has worked for me during my weight loss journey over the last two years. When I started to leverage better eating habits, like plant-based nutrition eating and intermittent fasting results of weight loss were fairly predictable and predictable.
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What I learned over time is that what I needed was to change some basic eating habits and conduct a little research. During the evolution of this process I found my habit modifying my relationship with food. And what I mean by that is intermittent fast changed my relationship with food. Today was a good example. I wanted to take a trip to the coast today during lunch. Living in New Hampshire affords me this luxury. However, I knew I did not want to be hungry when I got the coast has there are many food options. Although a haddock sandwich and small portion of cherry vanilla ice cream would be available to me I knew I would prefer to eat them. So, I ate an apple and a banana before heading out knowing. This puts me in control of my intake of food. You should decide when and where you eat.
This is a long winded way of simply saying intermittent fasting puts you more in charge of food. It gives you the will power to say, “No thank you” if someone is offering you something you really don’t want eat. And intermittent fasting empowers you to do this when it is the best decision.
