Are you interested in losing weight? Many diets require you to drastically alter the food you eat. Sticking to a diet can be difficult.
With intermittent fasting 101, you may eat as you wish. Healthy food choices are always a better option. This program of eating means that you alternate between small periods of eating and not eating.
What Is Intermittent Fasting 101?
The intermittent fasting diet isn’t new. This concept has often been used to increase wellness. This can increase your success with weight loss by simply changing when you eat.
Valter Longo and his colleagues at the University of Southern California Leonard Davis conducted a Longevity Institute which won a Nobel Prize. This clinical trial had participants cut back on their food intake only 5 days a month. The results showed decreased age-related illnesses such as diabetes and cardiovascular disease.
With any diet, you will find that it works better if it fits your normal routine. This makes it easier to integrate into your lifestyle. It also becomes more natural to maintain this eating pattern.
One recommended method for intermittent fasting is to follow an 8/16 rule. You eat for 8 hours of the day and fast for 16 hours. For example, you fast from 8 pm until 12 pm the next day.
This allows you to awake in a fat-burning state. If you can do your workout during this time, you increase the fat-burning benefits. Lowering your carbohydrate and sugar intake also benefits weight loss.
What Is Metabolism?
We talk about metabolism, but do you understand what it is? This is the process by which our cells convert the food you eat into energy. Your body uses this energy for breathing, moving, thinking, and doing everything.
Metabolism keeps your body alive. Factors including age, gender, and body size cause natural changes in your resting metabolic rate. This means how many calories we are burning to stay alive.
Does Fasting Increase Your Metabolism?
Our body has chemical messengers called hormones. They coordinate many functions including growth and metabolism. Hormones also play a role in regulating your body weight due to their influence on your appetite.
Intermittent fasting may be linked to an improved balance of the fat-burning hormones. Thus, this can help with weight management.
Hormones involved with fat metabolism include:
- Insulin—tells your body when to start and stop breaking down fat
- Human growth hormone—blood levels of this hormone rise with fasting and promote fat burning
- Norepinephrine—this stress hormone tells your fat cells to release fatty acids and increase fat burning
Thus, intermittent fasting decreases insulin levels and increases human growth hormone and norepinephrine levels. Changes to these hormone levels can increase fat burning and help you lose weight.
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