Intermittent fasting is one of the hot topics in the health and wellness industry. However, it’s not uncommon to hear that intermittent fasting can be both good for you and bad for you. This is because there’s a lot of misinformation about how the practice is done.
Understanding intermittent fasting can be powerful for those on a health journey. It’s also important to have assistance when keeping track of a new diet. Choosing a popular fasting tracking app can be a fast-track to doing it right.
Let’s talk about the best way to practise it, as well as some of the myths behind it.
What is Intermittent Fasting?
One of the first things to know about intermittent fasting is that there is no one way to do it. There are a few different methods that can be followed to determine what best suits you and your fitness journey.
The concept of intermittent fasting simply means eating during a time period and refraining from consuming food that contains calories outside of that duration.
A Few Methods
- The 16/8 follows a 16-hour fast with an eight-hour eating window. The window between 10 AM and 6 PM is the most popular. Our bodies digest food best during this time.
- The 5:2 diet focuses on calorie restriction. For five days of the week, your diet remains unchanged. The other two days are for calorie restriction by a significant amount.
- The Warrior Diet involves eating raw fruits and veggies throughout the day and a bigger meal at night.
Depending on how active your lifestyle is, choosing a fasting method will be very important for supporting appropriate nutritional intake. A rigorous workout diet won’t support a low-calorie intake day after day.
Benefits of Intermittent Fasting
There are a lot of benefits of intermittent fasting when it comes to a weight-loss or fat-loss journey. Fasting can help kick our body into fat-burning mode. Let’s look at some of the more common benefits of intermittent fasting.
Weight Loss
Intermittent fasting is a disciplined approach to losing weight. This is because we can count on two major benefits. Our body turns to fat-burning mode during the fasting state because it thinks we are starving. It’s important to note that we do not starve ourselves, as eating during the eating window is important.
The second part is that naturally, during fasting, we restrict our calorie intake. This is more applied to weight loss than those who are strictly trying to achieve fat loss while gaining muscle will need higher protein intake.
Blood Sugar Regulation
Most people struggle with blood sugar regulation in the fitness community. Intermittent Fasting can contribute to insulin sensitivity because our glucose is regulated. Glucose isn’t released as reg into the bloodstream because we are limiting our intake and containing it for a specific period of time.
Increased Discipline
One of the most important factors when it comes to working out is having the discipline to continue doing so. Intermittent fasting only works if one is consistent with the process; this is because our body enters a specific state of fat-burning or autophagy.
Our body continually gets used to the regimen, which is why working out and intermittent fasting goes hand-in-hand together
The Role In Functional Fitness
Functional fitness is the art of looking at fitness as something more practical as we age. This means having good balance and being able to be confident that our body will age gracefully without too much wear and tear.
Intermittent fasting is meant to spark cell turnover and regeneration, which is exactly why it works well with the functional fitness community. Many think it’s impractical to write fasting that is practised correctly is just the opposite. In fact, it can fit right in with functional fitness goals and methodology.
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