If you’re tuned in to today’s weight loss topics, you may have heard of a practice called intermittent fasting. This practice increases the hours in the day that a person chooses not to eat and is an idea that has been a part of many religious practices for centuries. Intermittent fasting is promoted to change body composition through loss of fat and weight as well as improve markers of health associated with disease such as blood cholesterol levels. Recently, intermittent fasting has gained popularity as a way to lose weight. So how does intermittent fasting fit into a healthy lifestyle?
First, it’s important to understand that intermittent fasting has a lot of variations. Some programs recommend not eating for periods as short as four hours, while others extend that period to more than 12 hours or even alternating entire days of fasting. Waiting this long between food could be bad for some people, such as pregnant women, people with chronic illnesses, such as diabetes, young children, and those on medications that require food intake, so it’s important to check with a doctor before making any big changes to your eating pattern. Intermittent fasting has not shown to improve weight loss over traditional low-calorie diets.
Read the quick facts below to learn more about intermittent fasting and how it can impact your health:
- When you do eat, make healthy choices. We should all do our best to make healthy choices. Fasting and waiting between meals doesn’t give us a free ticket to skip out on healthy choices. When extending the length of time between fueling our bodies, it’s important to choose fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and protein to keep our nutrition goals in line.
- Don’t overindulge. Waiting a long time between meals can lead us to over-eating during mealtime, so it is important to keep portions in mind if you decide to participate in intermittent fasting.
- Listen to your body. While waiting between meals may help you reach your weight loss goals in the short term, it can be a potentially dangerous practice for extended periods of time. Going long periods of time without food can leave your body with too little energy, and leave you with side effects like irritability, headaches and body pains, and issues like low blood sugar levels.
The bottom line is intermittent fasting has been shown to cause weight loss in animal studies, but research has not shown that same results in human studies. More studies in humans need to be done, before we can say intermittent fasting is the way to go for weight loss. If this is something you want to try, speak with your doctor beforehand and remember that intermittent fasting is not superior to traditional calorie reduction diets.
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