By Intermittent fasting is a great way to lose body fat, and preserve your muscle mass. It’s probably the easiest kind of lifestyle plan to follow, and it benefits not only your body composition, but your health and longevity. It makes sense to implement this plan in your life, for the rest of your life in order to benefit long term.
It’s not a quick fix it solution, but it’s a lot quicker, easier and more beneficial than calorie restricted diets short or long term. The problem lies where people are on a mission to find the most fool proof and fastest way to lose weight. Unfortunately, there is no such thing, and the majority of us have to work long term, change eating habits and implementing exercise, in order to see any results. Then it’s really a maintenance strategy moving forward.
With intermittent fasting, it’s possible to lose a large percentage of body fat very quickly, and actually feel amazing in the process. The first stages of weight loss is always water weight, and this may happen in a couple of days, or perhaps a week. The range for pounds lost is between the 1–2 range. This is all dependent on how much weight you have to lose. Leaner people will find it a lot more challenging than anyone who is overweight.
The fasting hours, and how to work with them effectively
Your overall strategy for weight loss with fasting, should be to fast for different periods every day, that will produce the wisest and more profound impact on your body composition. Many people opt to fast between 12–20 hours during the week, and on weekends have a break in order to lead a more flexible lifestyle. This is a great alternative.
Your quality of food intake boosts body fat burning
Another factor that needs to be considered is the quality and quantity of food you consume outside the fasting window. This will also greatly impact the amount of body fat you lose. It’s obvious that eating large amounts of food, and junk food for that matter, will really stall your progress. It may bot even work well for you.
With any healthy eating plan, you must adopt great habits for your diet, as this is key to your results. Think about eating wholesome, whole foods during meal times. This should include the following:
- Green vegetables with every meal
- High quality protein sources from either animal or vegetable sources
- Increasing your fibre intake, by including supplementation
- Limiting your carbohydrate intake to only nutritious forms, such as sweet potato and rolled oats
- Drinking lots of water and herbal teas regularly, especially during the hunger periods when fasting
Lifestyle factors to encourage fat loss
There are also many lifestyle factors to consider, in order to utilise the benefits of fasting. Don’t forget that we activate the GH hormone when, which is responsible for regulating body composition, body fluids, muscle and bone growth, sugar and fat metabolism – even heart function. The longer we can fast, the more of these benefits we will get, therefore the following factors are essential to spur this on.
- Getting enough quality sleep every night
- Eliminating stress as much as possible
- Finding positive ways to deal with stress, such as meditation, or speaking to someone you trust about what’s going on
- Exercising at high intensity – Think HIIT
- Lifting heavy weights regularly, about 3–4 times per week, and with high standards
- Enjoying life and having a laugh once in a while
As you can see, fasting long term can benefit us in profound ways, if we do stick to the plan, and make sure our lifestyle suits the outcome we want. There is never a quick fix solution to weight loss, and we must understand that the work needs to be done, with anything in life, if we want results.
I do hope this helps you, and good luck on your journey.
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