Intermediate Fasting

From personal experience, that never worked for me. I could never give up eating the foods that made me gain weight. When I wasn’t dieting I’d go back to the same foods like pizza and burgers. You can’t eat pizza and burgers or any of the other high-calorie foods half the time and salads half the time and expect to lose weight.

Among the many strategies for losing weight and aging well – following a low-carb diet, eliminating gluten, getting more exercise – there’s one that’s consistently recommended by researchers: calorie restriction. When you take in fewer calories than you require to maintain, your current body weight, you’ll lose weight. So what does that mean and how much is fewer? First, it doesn’t mean you have to cut the quantity, It means you have to eat foods that have fewer calories. Whole foods have fewer calories than processed foods. So, which ones are processed? I’m simplifying this because I have reads that are confused about what’s whole and what’s processed.

Whole foods are the ones you buy in the produce section of the grocery. They have not been package, nothing has been added, they have never been frozen, they are just the way they can from the farm. Fish is easy to buy fresh, not farm-raised or frozen. Other meats are a little harder to buy fresh, but it’s still possible if you can find a butcher. Try to buy beef that is fresh cut from the butcher, not packaged or frozen.

The big challenge is how to sustain the calorie deficit long enough to see significant results. And remember it only works when you eat food that’s high in nutrients. you can’t just cut back on the chicken wings or use a sauce with fewer calories and think you can lose weight.

A relatively new strategy called intermittent fasting may offer a manageable way of eating less because you’re only required to diet some of the time. Fans say it’s a plan that you can stick with over months, even years. I don’t believe this plan can work because you’ll never lose your taste for greasy fried food, salt, sugar, and the chemical additives in processed food.

A food craving is your body's way of telling you that it needs more nutrition. Eating a bowl of ice cream only fills you up and doesn’t give you any nutrition so in a couple of hours you get more cravings. Humans mistake cravings for hunger pain and just eat more stuff.

Read more: How obesity can affect your liver
What is intermittent fasting?

Intermittent fasting means severely restricting your food intake on one, two or more days of the week and eating normally the rest of the time. The so-called “fast days” aren’t total fasts; rather, you take in about a quarter of your normal calories. For women, that represents about 500 calories, for men, about 600 calories. It’s often referred to as a 5:2 diet, with five normal days and two fasting days; other versions are called 4:3, 6:1, alternate-day fasting (ADF), or the “every-other-day” diet plan.

A 2012 BBC documentary, Eat, Fast and Live Longer, is often credited with bringing intermittent fasting into the mainstream, but it’s been researched longer than that for its potential benefit in reducing breast cancer, heart disease, diabetes, and cognitive decline.

In fact, calorie restriction for longevity has been researched since the 1930s and is so far the only method proven to improve longevity, at least in lab animals.

A Better Kind of Weight Loss

Another promising finding is that intermittent fasting appears to yield the loss of less lean muscle when compared to conventional daily dieting. In a 2011 review, 90% of the weight lost through intermittent fasting was fat; compared with only 75% in daily dieting.

Maintaining lean muscle mass while dieting offers a metabolic advantage for maintaining weight loss because muscle burns more energy than fat even at rest.

Does it Reduce Belly Fat?

Belly fat, aka visceral fat, is the spare tire that surrounds your internal organs, leading to a greater risk of diabetes and heart disease. A 2011 review found that both traditional dieting and intermittent fasting reduce similar amounts of belly fat.

Read more: How do I know which kind of belly fat I have?
Who Shouldn’t Try Intermittent Fasting

Intermittent fasting is not appropriate for Kids and teenagers or pregnant women.

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