Methods

People are using intermittent fasting to lose weight, improve their health and simplify their lifestyles.There are many methods of fasting you can try out. Of course, it's best if you start slow in order to help your body get accustomed to the changes and patterns of eating.

Every method can be effective, but we display all three to figure out which one works best for you.

• The 16/8 method:  This involves restricting your daily eating period to 8 hours, such as 1–9 p.m. Then you fast for 16 hours in between. It is recommended to skip breakfast. Many people find the 16/8 method to be the simplest, most sustainable and easiest to stick to.
• Eat-Stop-Eat: For 24 hours, once or twice a week, for example by not eating from dinner one day until dinner the next day. This plan is best to be followed after trying and accustoming your body to the 16/8 method.
• The 5:2 diet: In this intermittent fasting technique you consume only 500–600 calories on two nonconsecutive days of the week, but eat normally the other 5 days.

All of these methods should cause weight loss as long as you don’t eat too much more during the eating periods. This could also stimulate an internal cleanup process known as autophagy, which reduces inflammation throughout the body and losing weight in just 15 days.

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Extending Quality Lifespan

Autophagy is the body’s way of cleaning out damaged cells, in order to regenerate newer, healthier cells, according to Priya Khorana, PhD, in Nutrition Education from Columbia University.

“Auto” means self and “phagy” means eat. So the literal meaning of autophagy is “self-eating.”

Autophagy is an evolutionary self-preservation mechanism through which the body can remove the dysfunctional cells and recycle parts of them toward cellular repair and cleaning, according to board-certified cardiologist Dr. Luiza Petre.

The process is responsible for recycling and cleaning the old dysfunctional cells of your body at the same time. It promotes survival and adaptation as a response to various stressors and toxins accumulated in our cells.

SKIPPING BREAKFAST:  Having carbs such as cereal in the morning triggers a flood of the storage hormone insulin, which causes your body to hold on to fat. This effect is amplified when the stress hormone cortisol peaks as soon as we wake up.

Fasting Benefits

The main benefits of autophagy seem to come in the form of anti-aging principles. In fact, Petre says it’s best known as the body’s way of turning the clock back and creating younger cells.

Khorana points out that when our cells are stressed, autophagy is increased in order to protect us, which helps enhance your lifespan. When your body enters autophagy, it removes toxic proteins from our cells. These proteins can cause a huge amount of damage to our body and attribute to neurodegenerative diseases such as  Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s disease. In addition, autophagy provides the right amount of energy to repair cells and even boosts regeneration of new healthy cells.

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When you eat, a lot happens in your body:

1. Your pancreas produces a hormone called insulin.
2. Insulin tells your cells to fuel up on glucose as your gut breaks down your food.
3. Your body releases hormones like cholecystokinin (CCK) and leptin, which signal when you’re full.

However, when you eat a lot of carbs and sugar your body struggles to keep up and cannot process all that glucose which is then stored as glycogen and then - body fat.

Over time, those factors can increase your risk of weight gain, insulin resistance and higher chance to chronic diseases such as diabetes and cancer.

Intermittent fasting gives your body time to reset. When you take a break between meals, your glucose levels remain stable, your insulin levels drop and your body has a chance to clean up.

In addition, 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.
• Insulin: Insulin sensitivity improves and levels of insulin drop dramatically which make stored body ready to be metabolised.
• Cellular repair: When fasted, your cells initiate cellular repair processes. This includes autophagy, where cells digest and remove old and dysfunctional proteins that build up inside cells.
• Gene expression: There are changes in the function of genes related to longevity and protection against disease.
• Insulin resistance: Intermittent fasting can reduce insulin resistance, lowering blood sugar by 3–6% and fasting insulin levels by 20–31%, which should protect against type 2 diabetes (1).
• Inflammation: Some studies show reductions in markers of inflammation, a key driver of many chronic diseases (17Trusted Source, 18Trusted Source, 19Trusted Source).
• Heart health: Intermittent fasting may reduce “bad” LDL cholesterol, blood triglycerides, inflammatory markers, blood sugar and insulin resistance — all risk factors for heart disease (1, 20Trusted Source, 21).
• Supports healthy aging: Studies show that intermittent fasting can help protect your cardiovascular system and your insulin sensitivity to support healthy aging. It even helps promote feelings of tranquility and alertness.   In rodent studies, intermittent fasting has been shown to increase lifespan and protect against disease.

It was discovered that limiting calories enhanced energy production and lowered the risk of chronic diseases, such as heart disease, diabetes, and cancer. In addition, a caloric deficit due to fasting caused decreased cellular damage and helped maintain healthy DNA. These are two key factors in fighting aging, because damaged and inflamed cells lead to chronic disease, while aging starts when DNA wears down.

SUMMARY: Intermittent fasting can have many benefits for your body and brain. It can cause weight loss and may reduce your risk of type 2 diabetes, heart disease and cancer. It may also help you live longer.

What Science Says

The most common reason people intermittent fast is because of weight loss.

Additionally, intermittent fasting changes hormone levels to facilitate weight loss by many ways including helping you maintain a caloric deficit.

In addition to lowering insulin and increasing growth hormone levels, it increases the release of the fat burning hormone norepinephrine (noradrenaline).

Because of these changes in hormones, short-term fasting may increase your metabolic rate for as much as 14%.

A recent study found that fasting can cause 3–8% weight loss over 3–24 weeks and 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.

However, keep in mind that the main reason for its success is that intermittent fasting helps you eat fewer calories overall. If you binge and eat massive amounts during your eating periods, you may not lose any weight at all.

Intermittent fasting may boost metabolism while helping you eat fewer calories. It’s a very effective way to lose weight and belly fat without losing muscle mass.

Makes Your Healthy Lifestyle Simpler

Eating healthy is simple, but it can be incredibly hard to 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 need to plan, cook or clean up after as many meals as before.

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.

With Basis, you never have to worry about when or what to eat. Let's put your nutritional health on autopilot by allowing us to find the perfect times, meals and delivering them to you wherever you may be!

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