Are you someone who wants to lose weight, or maybe just an average 24/7 employee who has too little time for personal healthcare, but still wants to find a quick but effective method to control their health?
Fasting may be the perfect solution to your problems.
What is fasting?
Fasting or Intermittent Fasting (IF) is a health trend used by many people, especially celebrities, for its effective weight-loss and health benefits. This method puts the emphasis on the time that you eat rather than the types of food you eat. In this sense, it’s more accurately described as an eating pattern, where the body cycles between periods of eating and fasting. During fasting, you either eat very little or nothing at all. After hours without food, your body exhausts its sugar reserves and starts burning fat. We call this process “metabolic switching.”
One of the most common fasting methods is the 16/8 method, where you skip breakfast and restrict yourself to only eating in a window period of 8 hours, and then fast for the remainder of 16.
Now that we have explained the general idea of fasting, let’s look at some health benefits that it could bring:
- Weight-loss
It’s to no one’s surprise that weight loss is at the top of the benefit list. Generally, fasting will make you eat fewer calories than usual. This is a great way for people to lose weight without relying on other supplements, remedies, or spending time going to the gym. Studies have shown that intermittent fasting could help reduce weight, body mass index (BMI), body fat, and “bad” cholesterol.
- Chronic-disease prevention
When your body is in the state of constantly consuming fat and other metabolic substances, it helps recycle redundant or unwanted chemical compounds in your body. This leads to many benefits for your health, preventing chronic diseases like type 2 diabetes, heart disease, cancers, or internal inflammatory diseases.
- Extends life-span
Research shows that intermitten fasting is a major factor in extending life expectancy. It is common knowledge that, by limiting the ability to eat more food throughout the day, individuals will have a healthier lifestyle by not consuming the everyday modern fast food, which contains a lot of fat and additives.
- Cognitive benefits
Intermittent fasting is a fantastic way to keep your brain healthy. Metabolic switching increases neuroplasticity in the brain and slows the aging process. This improves brain function while also strengthen the brain’s resistance to injury and disease. Intermittent fasting also activates a process known as autophagy, which helps to prevent Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease.
