Intermittent Fasting 101

The Ultimate Beginner’s Guide

What Is Intermittent Fasting (IF)?

Everyone seems to be talking these days about Intermittent fasting and all its amazing benefits.

So what is Intermittent fasting?

Intermittent fasting (aka “IF”) is an eating pattern that cycles between periods of fasting and eating.

It doesn’t specify which foods you should eat but rather when you should eat them.

In this respect, it’s not a diet in the conventional sense but more accurately described as an eating pattern.

Fasting has been a practice throughout human evolution. Ancient hunter-gatherers didn’t have supermarkets, refrigerators or food available year-round. Sometimes they couldn’t find anything to eat.

As a result, humans evolved to be able to function without food for extended periods of time.

In fact, fasting from time to time is more natural than always eating 3–4 (or more) meals per day.

Fasting is also often done for religious or spiritual reasons, including in Islam, Christianity, Judaism and Buddhism.

The Most Popular Intermittent Fasting Methods

The 16/8 method (Time Restricted): Also called the “Leangains protocol”, involves skipping breakfast and restricting your daily eating period to 8 hours, such as 1–9 p.m. Then you fast for 16 hours in between.

Eat-Stop-Eat: This involves fasting for 24 hours, once a week by not eating from dinner one day until dinner the next day.

The 5:2 diet: With this method, you fast on two non-consecutive days of the week, but eat normally the other 5 days.

Alternate Day Fasting: Exactly how it sounds. You eat one day and fast the next, then eat the following day and fast the next, and so on. 

OMAD: Stands for “One Meal A Day”. You choose which meal to eat and skip the rest. 

By reducing your calorie intake, all of these methods should cause weight loss as long as you don’t compensate by eating much more during the eating periods.

Many people find the 16/8 method to be the simplest, most sustainable and easiest to stick to. It’s also the most popular.

The Simplicity of 16/8

There are also fasts where people choose to abstain from eating for multiple days.

Usually 7-10 days and sometimes even upwards of 30 days or more, but this is a long term fast. It is not considered intermittent. 

The Benefits of IF

The 🔑 Benefits of IF

1. Longevity

When you fast, several things happen in your body on the cellular and molecular level.

For example, your body adjusts hormone levels to make stored body fat more accessible.

Your cells also initiate important repair processes and change the expression of genes.

Here are some changes that occur in your body when you fast:

Human Growth Hormone (HGH): The levels of growth hormone skyrocket, increasing as much as 5-fold. This has benefits for fat loss and muscle gain, to name a few.

Gene expression: There are changes in the function of genes related to longevity and protection against disease.

These changes in hormone levels, cell function and gene expression are responsible for the health benefits of intermittent fasting.

Cellular repair: When fasting, your cells initiate a cellular repair processes. This includes autophagy, where cells digest and remove old and dysfunctional proteins that build up inside cells.

The process is crucial for preventing cancerous growths, warding off infection and, by maintaining a healthy metabolism, it also helps protect against conditions like diabetes.

2. Weight Loss

Aside from obviously lowering your overall caloric intake, fasting also increases the release of the fat burning hormone norepinephrine (noradrenaline).

Because of these changes in hormones, short-term fasting may increase your metabolic rate by 3.6–14%!

By helping you eat fewer – and burn more calories, intermittent fasting causes weight loss by changing both sides of the calorie equation.

A 2014 review study found that this eating pattern can cause 3–8% weight loss over 3–24 weeks, which is a significant amount, compared to most weight loss studies.

According to the same study, people also lost 4–7% of their waist circumference, indicating a significant loss of harmful belly fat that builds up around your organs and causes disease.

Another study showed that intermittent fasting causes less muscle loss than the more standard method of continuous calorie restriction.

3. Reducing Insulin Resistance

Insulin resistance is when the cells of the body don’t respond properly to the hormone insulin. 

Insulin helps control blood glucose levels by signaling the liver and muscle and fat cells to take in glucose from the blood and convert the glucose to energy (burn it).

If the body has sufficient energy, insulin then signals the liver to take up glucose and store it as glycogen or fat.

Insulin resistance is when the cells of the body do not actually realize that there is insulin in the system.

This increases sugars in the blood and is the driving factor that leads to type 2 diabetes, gestational diabetes and prediabetes.

How Insulin Resistance Works

Intermittent fasting is known to improve sensitivity to the blood glucose-lowering hormone insulin.

IF does this by reducing the time one eats food, and that simply reduces the amount of insulin in the system.

Overtime the body stabilizes its insulin load and can become better at optimizing the amount of insulin needed by the body to convert glucose to energy versus fat.

Scientists have also discovered that an intermittent fasting regimen can also lower fatty liver and fatty pancreas.

Some studies have shown that Intermittent fasting can lower blood sugar by 3–6% and fasting insulin levels by 20–31%, which can help protect against and even help reverse type 2 diabetes.

4. Makes A Healthy Lifestyle Simpler

Eating healthy is simple in idea, but it can be incredibly hard to practice or maintain.

One of the main obstacles is all the work required to plan for and cook healthy meals.

Intermittent fasting can make things easier, as you don’t really need to plan, cook or clean up after as many meals as before.

IF is more focused on WHAT TIME you eat versus WHAT you eat, it lessens the ‘work’ of dieting and clean eating.

Note: You will always see better results by combining clean eating with fasting, but results have been seen with just using fasting.

For this reason, intermittent fasting is very popular among the “life-hacking” crowd, as it improves your health while simplifying your life at the same time.

Safety and Side Effects

Hunger is the main side effect of intermittent fasting, and as your body gets used to it, that also diminishes for most.

You may also feel weak at first and your brain may not perform as well as you’re used to.

This is typically only be temporary, and many people claim once their body adjusts they actually find they have increased energy and response time!

If you have a medical condition, you should always consult with your doctor before trying intermittent fasting.

This is particularly important if you:

• Have diabetes.
• Have problems with blood sugar regulation.
• Have low blood pressure.
• Take medications.
• Are underweight.
  Have a history of eating disorders.
• Are a woman who is trying to conceive.
• Are a woman with a history of amenorrhea.
• Are pregnant or breastfeeding.

All that being said, intermittent fasting has an outstanding safety profile. There is nothing dangerous about not eating for a while if you’re healthy and well-nourished overall.

Fasting FAQ’s

1. Can I Drink Liquids During the Fast?

A: Yes. Drinking water is very important during a fast. If you are trying to repair a damaged gut,it is important to ensure your water is filtered of chlorine and fluoride, if possible. Coffee, tea and other non-caloric beverages are fine, but keep in mind you may feel sensitive to caffeine and want to stick to herbal varieties.  

2. Isn’t It Unhealthy to Skip Breakfast?

A: No. The problem is that most stereotypical breakfast skippers have unhealthy lifestyles. If you make sure to eat healthy food for the rest of the day then the practice is perfectly healthy.

3. Can I Take Supplements While Fasting?

A: Yes. However, keep in mind that some supplements like fat-soluble vitamins may work better when taken with meals and certain supplements must be taken with food to avoid nausea. You can adjust your regimen accordingly during a fast. 

Organic Sulfur is a particularly good supplement to take while fasting, as it is a water soluble mineral and it is readily utilized by the body on an empty stomach. It can help increase energy and assist the body in cleansing and repair. 

4. Can I Work out While Fasted?

A: Yes, fasted workouts are fine. Some people recommend taking branched-chain amino acids (BCAAs) before a fasted workout.

You can find many BCAA products on Amazon.

5. Will Fasting Cause Muscle Loss?

All weight loss methods can cause muscle loss, which is why it’s important to lift weights and keep your protein intake high when you are eating. One study showed that intermittent fasting causes less muscle loss than regular calorie restriction.

6. Will Fasting Slow Down My Metabolism?

A: No. Studies show that short-term fasts actually boost metabolism. However, longer fasts of 3 or more days can suppress metabolism.

7. Should Kids Fast?

A: No. Children are in a constant state of growth and should never be subjected to a fast unless under the specific guidance of a doctor or certified nutritionist. 

Getting Started

Chances are that you’ve already done many intermittent fasts in your life.

If you’ve ever eaten dinner, then slept late and not eaten until lunch the next day, then you’ve probably already fasted for 16+ hours.

Some people instinctively eat this way. They simply don’t feel hungry in the morning.

Many people consider the 16/8 method the simplest and most sustainable way of intermittent fasting — you might want to try this practice first.

If you find it easy and feel good during the fast, then maybe try moving on to more advanced fasts like 24-hour fasts 1–2 times per week (Eat-Stop-Eat) or only eating 500–600 calories 1–2 days per week (5:2 diet).

Another approach is to simply fast whenever it’s convenient — simply skip meals from time to time when you’re not hungry or don’t have time to cook.

There is no need to follow a structured intermittent fasting plan to derive at least some of the benefits.

Experiment with the different approaches and find something that you enjoy and fits your schedule.

Should You Try It?

Intermittent Fasting is a great way to reboot the body and encourage cleansing and healing but as with every method of health it is a very personal experience.

If you don’t like the idea of fasting, then you can safely ignore this article and continue to do what works for you.

At the end of the day, there is no one-size-fits-all solution when it comes to nutrition. The best diet for you is the one you can stick to in the long run.

Intermittent fasting is great for some people, not others. The only way to find out which group you belong to is to try it out.

If you feel good when fasting and find it to be a sustainable way of eating, it can be a very powerful tool to lose weight and improve your health.

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Remember, if we are unable to answer your call, leave a message we WILL call you back asap.

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