The Basics and Benefits of Intermittent Fasting: A Beginner’s Guide

Let’s face it, no one likes to restrict their diet and feel deprived while trying to lose weight. Lucky for you, there’s a well-researched, proven method for weight loss that doesn’t require eating foods you hate or skipping foods you love!

Introducing Intermittent Fasting or IF, a unique and appealing way to lose weight that focuses on your meal timing, not your meal content– how freeing is that?!

You might think that IF is just another weight-loss trend or fad, but it's actually thousands of years old! Intermittent Fasting is not a trend; it's how we're meant to eat.

In fact, that’s how our ancestors ate, and they’re physically fitter, leaner, and less prone to obesity, heart diseases, and stroke than we are!

But despite its popularity, some people are still not fully caught up on the basics of how to properly do Intermittent Fasting (IF). So, whether you’ve been doing IF for a while or just learning about it for the first time, keep reading to get the full story on Intermittent Fasting.

Let’s tackle the basics and benefits of Intermittent Fasting, the challenges that come with it, and the delicious, cutting-edge dietary supplements that amplify IF’s positive impacts on your health!

Intermittent Fasting or IF is when you cycle through periods of eating and fasting— meaning eating little to no food. With IF, what matters is when you eat and not what you eat. So it’s more like an eating pattern than a diet.

Research shows that IF helps people lose weight, reduce inflammation, prevent high blood sugar levels, and enhance cognitive function.

You don’t have to change what you eat within a day when you do IF. You just have to pick a specific time window for eating. 

For instance, if you want to fast for 16 hours, that leaves you an 8-hour eating period. That means you can eat from, say, 1 PM to 9 PM and fast from 9 PM to 1 PM the next day.

Because IF is not about what you eat, it’s a lifestyle-friendly and diet-friendly way of improving your health. You can do IF alongside your vegetarian, vegan, or keto diet. 

Intermittent Fasting has an evolutionary basis. Before humans learned how to farm and build temporary shelters, we were nomadic hunter-gatherers. Finding food was uncertain and even dangerous for us, so we got used to not eating for days or weeks at a time. But we survived!

Therefore, fasting for extended periods of time was more natural to us than eating 3 meals and 2 snacks per day.

But ever since we evolved into more intelligent beings, we learned to create permanent homes and eventually invent the technology that helps preserve and store our food. And just like that, fasting went out the window, and we started to eat whenever we pleased.

Intermittent fasting is very personal. There are several ways to go about it, depending on how you split your day or your week into eating and fasting periods.

Here are the most common methods:

1. Time-restricted Eating

This method is probably the most popular one, especially for IF beginners. Using this method, you get to choose your eating and fasting time windows. The typical ones are:

• 20/4 method— you fast for 20 hours and eat for 4 hours; this method is on the extreme end of the spectrum and is only ideal for those who have been intermittent fasting for some time

• 16/8 method – you fast for 16 hours and feed for 8 hours

• 14/10 method— you fast for 14 hours and eat for 10 hours; this method is ideal for beginners

• 12/12 method— you fast for 12 hours and eat for 12 hours; the minimum fasting period is 12 hours, making this the perfect method for beginners who can’t endure a 14-hour fasting period

These methods allow you to choose which hours you want to eat and fast, depending on what works for you best.

For example, if you follow the 16/8 method, you can try the Leangains protocol wherein you skip breakfast and eat from 1 PM to 9 PM. But if this time frame doesn’t work for you, you may choose different hours, say, fasting from 6 PM to 10 AM the next day.

2. The Fast Diet / The 5:2 Method

The fast diet involves sticking to a 500-calorie diet (if you’re a woman) or a 600-calorie diet (if you’re a man) for 2 days a week and returning to your regular diet for the other 5 days.

You can choose which days you limit your calories as long as you put at least one non-fasting day between those 2 days. For example, you can restrict calorie intake on Mondays and Wednesdays or Tuesdays and Fridays and eat your regular meals for the rest of the week.

3. The Eat-Stop-Eat Method

This method is a bit more extreme. It involves fasting for 24 hours once or twice a week. You can either fast from breakfast to breakfast or dinner to dinner; that’s up to you.

Fasting for one day can cause side effects like headaches and fatigue. So, if and when you try this method, you need to go back to your healthy, regular diet during your non-fasting days.

Intermittent Fasting only has a few simple rules that help you maximize its benefits. These rules help you avoid interfering with your fast and maintain proper nutrition.

1. Establish a fasting and feeding time frame.

Intermittent fasting is all about meal timing and not meal content, so the most basic rule is to determine when and how long you want to fast. Again, the minimum fasting time is 12 hours (12/12 method).

2. Don’t break your fast. Stay under 50 calories.

This may go without saying, but you should fast for consecutive hours. Meaning, for 12 or 20 hours, you should not eat or drink anything that can break your fast. Otherwise, the hunger you’ve been enduring, especially if you’re just starting out, will be for naught.

To avoid breaking your fast, you can either refrain from eating or only eat foods that contain less than 50 calories.

Here are some foods and beverages you can consume without breaking your fast or compromising its benefits:

• Water
• Coffee and tea— black coffee and tea are ideal, but you can add a bit of milk as long as the drink’s total number of calories doesn’t exceed the 50-calorie limit
• Apple cider vinegar (diluted)
• Bone broth
• Low- to zero-calorie supplements

3. Although IF is not a diet, be mindful of what you eat.

Intermittent Fasting is not an excuse to be careless about what we eat. Aside from being a weight management tool, it’s also about building a sustainable lifestyle.

So, even if you’re doing IF, you must still choose to eat healthy, no matter what eating pattern you’re following.

Eat a colorful diet packed with fruits and vegetables. Choose whole foods, nuts, and seeds over processed foods with preservatives.

Aside from the ease and flexibility of Intermittent Fasting, its health and weight loss benefits also encourage people to jump on the bandwagon.

Ketosis

Studies prove that Intermittent Fasting puts your body into ketosis, a process wherein your body burns fat for fuel when it doesn’t have enough carbohydrates to metabolize. Through this, your body fat percentage decreases, and you lose weight.

Ketosis also happens when you’re on a ketogenic diet, a diet consisting high fats and low carbohydrates.

Hormone resetting

Research shows that time-restricted eating— such as Intermittent Fasting— reduces ghrelin (the hunger hormone that increases your appetite) and increases leptin (the hunger hormone that suppresses your appetite).

When ghrelin is reduced, your hunger stabilizes, you feel fuller, and your appetite decreases. The decrease in appetite lessens food intake, supports IF, and leads to more fat loss.

Insulin resistance is a condition where your cells stop responding to the insulin produced by your pancreas and don’t use the glucose (sugar) in your blood. This triggers the pancreas to produce more insulin to force glucose into the unresponsive cells.

Eventually, this leads to the rise of blood sugar levels, putting you at risk of developing Type 2 diabetes.

Intermittent fasting is one of the ways to reduce insulin resistance and your risk for diabetes. Human studies prove that IF lowers insulin levels by 20-31% and blood sugar levels by 3-6%. 

Even though it’s unclear how Intermittent fasting reduces inflammation, a study published in the Cell Press journal shows that fasting and calorie restrictions can calm inflammatory responses without compromising your immunity.

Preventing inflammation helps prevent the development of certain diseases like arthritis, heart disease, cancer, and neurodegenerative diseases such as dementia and Alzheimer’s, to name a few.

By helping you prevent these diseases, Intermittent Fasting may help you live longer. Studies on fruit flies and mice show that IF promotes longevity and overall health. These results may also stand true for humans.

Despite its benefits on our health, Intermittent Fasting also has challenges and adverse effects. Here are some of them:

It’s hard to stick to an eating pattern.

Social interferences like parties or when someone suddenly offers free food can mess with your eating pattern. 

Solution: Aside from relying on your willpower to say “No” to eating during your fast, you can also invite a close friend or relative to do IF with you and be your Accountability Buddy.

This way, you have someone outside yourself to hold you accountable for your commitment to IF and discourage you from slipping. You can also share your progress with this someone to keep yourselves motivated to keep going.

Intermittent Fasting can make you want to binge.

It’s tempting to overeat during your eating period when you’re fasting, especially because IF is not about what you eat. 

But you must remember that crappy food is crappy food, and it’s bad for your health no matter what your eating pattern is. IF can’t spare you from the adverse effects of overeating unhealthy foods.

Solution: Fix your mindset about IF: it’s all about sustainability. While on IF, you must adopt a healthy, colorful diet that supports overall health and healthy aging that you’d be proud to stick to.

Intermittent Fasting can lead to muscle loss which accelerates the aging process.

The biggest problem with IF is nutrient depletion. Because of its design, you may not be able to eat enough nutrient-dense foods during your eating period. This may result in nutrient deficiency and lead to muscle loss.

This is a huge problem because muscle loss is the main culprit of aging. Your soft tissues and skin won’t have adequate support without enough muscle mass and strength. As a result, your skin loses its firmness and becomes wrinkly, crepey, and saggy.

Also, muscle loss can compromise your mobility. And when you, heavens forbid, get injured, your muscles won’t be able to recover quickly and properly. This limits physical ability further and causes continued muscle deterioration.

Solution: Besides eating nutritious foods during your feeding window, you may also take nutritional supplements. Even with 3 full meals a day, it’s challenging to meet our body’s daily nutritional requirement to stay healthy. So taking a food-based, nutrient-dense greens powder to go with your IF would be an excellent choice!

Also, because muscle naturally breaks down as you age, you may opt to take a dietary supplement that’s packed with patented ingredients that promote muscle health.