Are you fed up with your excess weight and have tried a variety of methods to lose it? Has the term “intermittent fasting” ever occurred to you? Have you ever used this method to get rid of unwanted waste? Yes, intermittent fasting is an excellent way to eliminate unwanted waste from the body, as well as a means of maintaining good health and living a healthy lifestyle. You may be unaware of the health benefits of intermittent fasting, which is why we will discuss them in detail in this article.

What is Intermittent Fasting?
Intermittent fasting is a modern technique of switching between eating habits and fasting. People use this technique to control their weight, become healthy and live a balanced life. It doesn’t actually specify what you should eat. Instead, it specifies at what time you should eat.
It is not a diet plan, yet it can be considered a guide to a change in eating habits. There is significant scientific evidence that intermittent fasting can benefit one’s health in several ways, such as fasting for a specified number of hours each day or eating only one meal a couple of days per week can aid in fat loss. Intermittent fasting has also been shown to have beneficial effects on brain and body functions that can contribute to living a long and healthy life. How so? Let’s break this down into some specifics.

Benefits of Intermittent Fasting:
Intermittent fasting has many benefits and research has proven it. Here are some of the benefits of intermittent fasting:

1- Weight Loss:
Intermittent fasting can help you achieve incredible weight loss and research has shown that intermittent fasting can help you lose weight quickly. According to research done on some students for a trial of 2-weeks, a 1.3% weight loss was seen. A subsequent trial of 8-weeks showed a weight loss of 8%. What this translates to physiologically is that short term fasting helps in the improvement of your metabolic rate which in turn aids in faster weight loss.

2-Changes in functions of hormones, cells and genes:
Intermittent fasting has many health benefits and one of them is when you start switching your meals. This is when many hormonal changes occur in your body. Let’s have a look at those:

● Insulin levels: The level of insulin in blood drops. This facilitates fat burning

● Cell repair: Many cell repair processes take place in the body such as removing waste materials from cells.

3-Lowers risk for Diabetes Type 2:
Diabetes type 2 has become very common throughout the years and anything that causes a reduction in insulin resistance should aid in lowering blood sugar levels too. Intermittent fasting has been shown to cause a major reduction in insulin resistance and at the same time, cause a lowering of blood sugar levels.
One specific supportive research study performed on mice showed that intermittent fasting lowered blood sugar and also protected the mice against diabetic retinopathy. Diabetic retinopathy leads to blindness.

Takeaways:
Intermittent fasting can be done in a many ways. Some methods entail fasting during specific hours of the day and other methods entail fasting on specific days of every week. The approaches and the outcomes vary.

If you’re interested in beginning intermittent fasting, follow up with Dr. Anastasia and be sure to check out next month’s blog where Dr. A shares how she dropped 70 pounds in ten months with intermittent fasting.