Intermittent fasting has become a mad craze on the internet in the last few years. So what’s all the fuss about? I’ve learned there are several interesting benefits of intermittent fasting. After seeing pictures of myself at a recent event I realised that the sedentary lifestyle I had adopted had caused me to put on some extra pounds.
Quite honestly, I was a bit shocked to see myself like it. I had always been in good shape but like many of us, as we get older, it becomes harder to stay active as we get busier.
As usual, I turned to the internet for the answers. Looking over hundreds of YouTube videos and fitness blog articles, I decided to pursue this thing called intermittent fasting. It was something relatively new to me and looked like something I could manage.
Now after two weeks of doing intermittent fasting, I want to talk about the benefits for not only your waistline but also your mind, based on my own experience.
What is intermittent fasting?
Intermittent fasting is when you eat all of your meals within a window of time, leaving your body to enter a hunger state for the rest of the day. Doing so gives your body a chance to fully digest the last meal you had and therefore reaching for your stored fat to use for further energy.
This method is supposed to help you lose body fat over a matter of time. You may choose to take dietary supplements to aid your weight loss. You can check out Nucific reviews to see how this particular dietary supplement is designed to support optimal digestion and a healthy metabolism. Some people lose a lot of weight quickly, some lose it slowly if they have less fat on their body.
People fast in different ways, some use the 16:8 method where your meals are eaten within six hours, leaving you to fast for the other eighteen.
For example, over the last few weeks, I have eaten my meals between 1 pm and 7 pm each day.
Some choose to opt for the 24hr fast where they’ll eat nothing for a full day.
Of course, fasting is nothing new, it has been around for hundreds of years in some cultures and is used by followers to pay respect to religious figures.
These are the benefits I’ve experienced from intermittent fasting
As mentioned, the obvious benefit of intermittent fasting is weight loss. This is simply due to the fact you’re (hopefully) eating fewer calories and also forcing your body to use calories for energy from within your fat stores.
I say “hopefully” because I have remained in a caloric deficit whilst I’ve been doing this which has, of course, helped me lose weight and bloating.
1. Weight loss
Before I started intermittent fasting I always felt bloated and uncomfortable. Even though I was only 207 pounds, (not bad for my height and muscle mass) I knew that the extra beers I had been drinking were causing me to feel overweight.
My diet wasn’t particularly poor but when I did eat, I ate a lot. It turns out that when you reach your late twenties you can’t just stuff your face anymore and hope for the best…
I decided to commit to the 16:8 method and would force myself to stay away from food up until 1 pm each day. The first couple of days were very difficult because I’d got used to eating snacks all throughout the morning.
I had constant hunger pangs that would make me feel as if I was starving. The truth was, I’d never in my life given my stomach a break from digesting food. When you think about it, our stomachs are always working, breaking the last meal down as we start the next meal.
Surprisingly, after a couple of days, the hunger pangs started to decrease. It became easier to get through the morning with no food. In the second week, I barely felt hungry in the mornings. It felt like my body had got itself adapted to this new eating pattern.
There are countless studies I could cite where participants have lost weight this way but I’m just going to share my personal experience. In the first two weeks, I dropped seven pounds and almost all of my stomach bloat.
Of course, when I did eat my lunch and dinner, I wasn’t eating fast food and sugary drinks. I cleaned up everything, making sure I was eating real foods like salads with egg, chicken, beef, turkey, all the veggies under the sun and I also made sure to keep a few starchy carbs in my diet.
If I still felt hungry in the evening, I made sure I had some nuts to snack on. It tried to keep everything as simple as possible.
Generally, my calories were moderate and they were all coming from “real foods”. On the weekends I even allowed myself to have a few beers.
To be honest, the problem with most diets is this (and why they don’t work) –
“People see diets as rigid time frames where they try to reach their target weight withing a time window. They are seen as temporary eating habits, only used for when we want to lose some weight here and there.”
In reality, if you want to lose weight in a healthy way, you have to forget about the word “diet” and view your new eating habits as the new normal for you. It’s no good jumping from diet to diet just to regain the weight after you stop.
Adopting a new mindset is the only way to keep the weight off for life. It’s about re-thinking what normal eating is.
Even hundreds of years ago, we would only eat when we could find food. Human beings might have gone for days before they found a substantial meal to eat.
In 2019, food is overly abundant and cheap. Whilst this had reduced starvation, it has also increased obesity and health risks. Let’s face it, we no longer have to work to get food. Because of this, we’re constantly eating, never giving ourselves a break from “digestion mode”.
We never give our insulin a chance to go back down to normal levels (the hormone that’s triggered by eating and encourages fat storage.)
When we’re constantly eating, we’re constantly telling our bodies to store the calories as fat, especially when we’re not very active. It’s a simple maths equation – if you eat a thousand calories and don’t use them, they get stored for later. If you burn more than a thousand calories during activity, you lose weight.
Weight loss is only one benefit of intermittent fasting…
2. Improved Brain Health
According to this article, intermittent fasting could improve your brain health, ward off some cancers, stave off Alzheimers and repair brain cells.
There have even been some people reporting lower levels of anxiety and depression when fasting. This is thought to be because of reduced inflammation.
This is because eating can cause tiny stresses in the body leading to inflammation. As most illnesses are caused by some kind of inflammation, it makes sense that fasting could lower stresses on the brain.
However, I can only talk from my personal experience. Two weeks is not a long time, but it’s long enough for me to notice a difference in my mood.
During the first few days of fasting I was definitely grumpy and “hangry” (a mixture of hungry and angry). Once I got through this initial starting phase though, I felt noticeably less anxious in the mornings.
It’s hard to say exactly why I have felt less anxious in the mornings but what I do know is this – since forever I’ve felt nervous after eating breakfast. Whilst some people say that “breakfast is the most important meal of the day”, it always leaves me feeling heavy and more tired.
When I fast through until 1 pm, I do not have an energy crash or feel like I have “butterflies.” In fact, when it reaches lunchtime I sometimes don’t even feel like eating because I enjoy feeling lighter and more awake.
My focus is a lot keener than when I eat a decent-sized breakfast. For most of the morning, I hear people talking about how hungry they feel, or how desperate they are to eat. However, I feel freer because I know I’m not having to interrupt my day to eat a meal that my body really doesn’t need anyway.
I feel more focused and my concentration whilst working improves when I’m in a fasted state. I do not have any evidence to back this up and I feel as if doing it for yourself is the only real way to tell if fasting will improve your own mood and focus.
I experience a lot of “bring fog” after eating meals and so it is nice to not have to think about bogging myself down before I even leave the house.
More research is needed on human beings but a study found that mice on alternate day fasting regimes had better endurance than those that did not.
I fast every single day until 1 pm and I can say for sure that my endurance at work has been improved by at least a rate of double.
Intermittent fasting could also have a positive effect on depression too. Whilst it’s been over a year since my last spell of depression and there not being much clinical evidence, it’s interesting to read people’s experiences on sites like Reddit.
It seems to help some people and not do much for others. In reality, intermittent fasting is another tool to reduce inflammation in the body and therefore help you feel better to some degree.
All I know is, fewer calories means less inflammation and my own body and mind seem to respond well to that. This for me is the main intermittent fasting benefit and my main reason for continuing to do it.
3. Time saver
Another intermittent fasting benefit is that it’s a time saver. We spend so much time worrying about what foods we should eat when to eat them and how many of them.
We think we need to spend hours cooking healthy meals and running around the supermarket reading all the labels on every can. Whilst you should still be eating a balanced diet when you’re intermittent fasting, you’ll find it’s much easier to think about and organise only two meals in your day.
I have found that the time I would normally spend making breakfast is now used to put together a healthy lunch. When the evening comes, I know I can afford to eat a big calorie-dense meal to stay full until the next day.
This is one of the best benefits of intermittent fasting. I’ve never been a “breakfast guy”, whenever I’ve had breakfast (especially during the week) I almost have to force myself to eat it, even when I don’t feel hungry.
So far the benefits of intermittent fasting have outweighed the hunger I still feel from time to time so I am going to continue this new way of viewing eating and update this post in the future!