Intermittent fasting is a tool that does not tell you what to eat, but rather when to eat. It is a pattern of eating that can be used to help with weight loss or other health goals.
Why would you want to do this? Well intermittent fasting triggers two very powerful hormones in your body. One of which is growth hormone. Growth hormone is anti-aging and is the most powerful fat-burning hormone to protect your muscles and to build lean body mass. Additionally, growth hormone helps you to lose actual fat.
The next hormone is insulin. If you want to lose weight, you don’t want to have too much insulin. Insulin is a hormone that helps store fat, so too much of it can cause you to gain weight. In the presence of insulin, you cannot lose weight because it is a hormone that makes you fat.
If you see someone with a fat gut, it’s a sign that they have too much insulin in their body.
Insulin resistance is when the pancreas pumps out too much insulin, five to seven times the amount you need. This happens because when you have too much insulin, the cells start blocking it. Intermittent fasting is a tool or technique that can really help heal insulin resistance.
When you start intermittent fasting, you want to start off slowly. As an example, let’s say you start with five or six meals a day. You have breakfast, lunch, snacks, and dinner. Some people add an additional snack in between breakfast and lunch, or between lunch and dinner.
The principle of intermittent fasting and its hormonal effects is that every time you eat, your insulin levels spike. This is because people have long believed that only when you eat carbohydrates do your insulin levels spike. However, this is not the case—eating any kind of food will increase your insulin levels, even if the food is healthy. DML
Our bodies are not designed to eat and graze all day long. So, we should switch to three meals a day with no snacks in between. This will be the first step. If you want to avoid being hungry between meals, you need to eat more fat. This means adding more fat to your meals.
To take your fat burning to the next level, try a 16:8 fasting to eating ratio. That means you would fast for 16 hours and have an 8-hour window of eating. If you‘re not hungry when you wake up in the morning, don‘t eat. Wait until you‘re actually hungry to have your first meal of the day.
The ideal situation is to wait at least four hours after waking up before eating. If you eat at 10 in the morning, and you got up at 6, that means your last meal will be at 6pm. So we have an 8 hour window. If you get up and eat at 8, and eat again at 8pm, you haven’t given enough time for fasting.
The true power of intermittent fasting lies in the hours spent sleeping and in the morning hours. When the body is at rest and fasting overnight, it can burn through stored energy and fat more efficiently. In the morning, the body is rested and ready to start the day with a clean slate.
If we want to take our fat burning efforts even further, we should go to two meals a day and have a 20-hour fasting window. Just imagine what that would do for your waistline and stomach! Add some exercise to that and you’ll turn into a fat burning machine.
The transition of going from six meals/snacks a day to our 20-hour fasting window example could take a month or two, or even three. But then you‘re really burning fat. I just wanted to cover the power of this, what it is, and how you would do it starting here and gradually over here.
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