The term intermittent fasting is quite popular these days, but what exactly is an intermittent fast and how do you do it?
As opposed to other types of dietary strategies, with intermittent fasting, it’s not about what you eat, but when you eat.
Intermittent Fasting for Beginners
I’m here to help you learn more about numerous aspects of this simple health technique so that you can answer the following questions, and much more:
- What is intermittent fasting?
- Why is fasting good for you?
- How to do an intermittent fast?
I’ve been practicing intermittent fasting for over a decade for its health benefits because intermittent fasting works incredibly well with the Keto Diet. Together, they reduce inflammation and improve physiological function in the body and cognitive performance in the brain.
What Is Fasting?
First, let’s start with the basics and answer the question, what is fasting?
According to the National Institute of Aging, one of 27 Institutes and Centers that comprise the National Institute of Health “in a fasting diet, a person does not eat at all or severely limits intake during certain times of the day, week, or month. A practical effect of a fasting diet may be fewer calories because there is less time for regular eating.”1
Fasting simply entails refraining from consuming food for a period of time. This practice was a key component of our ancestor’s lifestyle and I believe that our bodies are built to fast as well.
What Is Intermittent Fasting?
Intermittent fasting is a type of fasting, also known as time-restricted feeding and intermittent energy restriction. The term intermittent fasting refers to various meal timing schedules that cycle between fasting and feeding over a given period of time.2
Robb Wolf states that an intermittent fast is abstaining from food for 36 hours or less, though he also makes the point that this determination is somewhat arbitrary. For our purposes, this is the definition of intermittent fasting that we will use here.3
Starvation and Intermittent Fasting
It is likely that our hunter-gatherer forebears fasted regularly. This was not by design, but because of a limited caloric supply and the unfortunate reality of potential starvation. Food was scarce and not in the abundant supply that it is for many of us today in an industrialized world where grocery stores dot the modern landscape.
Evolution and Fasting
Much of ancestral life revolved around procuring food via gathering, a labor-intensive practice, or hunting which required moderate to great exertion. It is therefore believed that after a big kill, the group gorged on food and then rested, digested and fasted, while preparing to hunt again.
Weight Loss and Fasting
Fasting was a given component of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Because we have not evolved extensively since ancient times, it is logical and very likely that we are not built for three square meals a day, but rather to eat far less, and only when we’re hungry. That’s where intermittent fasting comes into play, especially where weight loss and inflammation are concerned.
