There are many diets that tell you what you can and can’t eat, but intermittent fasting is all about when you eat. With intermittent fasting, you only eat during a specific time, intermittently, hence the name.
The top five popular intermittent fasting patterns are the time-restricted eating, the 5:2 fasting pattern, the eat-stop-eat fasting pattern, the alternate-day fasting pattern, and lastly, the warrior fasting pattern.
Just like our Muslim friends during this Ramadan, who start fasting around 6am in the morning and end their fast around 7.30pm in the evening, this is also known as time-restricted eating. Every day, people who do time-restricted eating fast for 12 hours or longer and eat in the remaining hours.
Another popular example is the 16/8 method, where the person fasts 16-hours a day and has an 8-hour eating window where they can fit in two or more meals. However, they would eat their first meal around 12pm and their last meal by 8pm, and their fast would include their time sleeping.
The 5:2 fasting pattern involves eating as you normally do five days of the week and restricting your calorie intake to 500–600 calories on the remaining two days.
Meanwhile, the eat-stop-eat fasting pattern involves a 24-hour fast once or twice per week, and the alternate-day fast is to fast every other day.
Lastly, the warrior fasting pattern, which is the first popular diet to include a form of intermittent fasting, involves eating small amounts of raw fruits and vegetables during the day and eating one large meal at night.
Intermittent fasting is generally considered safe. However, it is best to use caution when beginning or following the eating routine.
Restricting your calorie intake for an extended period of time could be dangerous for children, women who are pregnant or breastfeeding, people with medical conditions, and people with a history of eating disorders.
For the rest of us, researchers have found numerous health benefits of intermittent fasting and intermittent fasting can be a healthy and sustainable long-term diet for some.
Up until about 12,000 years ago, all humans got their food by hunting, gathering or fishing. As foragers, they would fast until they found, caught or killed their food.
They ate opportunistically, consuming anything they could get their hands on.
There is no scientific basis for our current three meals a day eating pattern, and for the majority of human history, people ate one or two meals per day. Therefore, the time-restricted eating pattern like the 16:8 or one meal a day diet mimics this ancient phenomenon.
During periods without food, the body evolved to tap into fat stores for energy. Some research shows this capability makes us metabolically and nutritionally flexible, which allows us to maintain a sporadic diet.
The main reason why people try intermittent fasting is to manage their weight and fasting or abstaining from food can create a calorie deficit. Fasting for a certain number of hours each day or eating just one meal a couple of days a week can help your body burn fat.
That’s because intermittent fasting can also affect your hormones. The fat in your body is the body’s way of storing energy, so when you don’t eat anything, your body makes several changes to make its stored energy more accessible.
When you eat, your insulin levels increase and conversely, when you fast, they decrease dramatically. And since lower levels of insulin facilitate fat burning, intermittent fasting can help you shed those extra kgs.
Besides that, intermittent fasting boosts norepinephrine, which is also called noradrenaline. The general role of norepinephrine is to mobilise the brain and body for action. When your nervous system sends norepinephrine to your fat cells, it makes them break down body fat into free fatty acids that can be burned for energy, which is why your metabolic rate increases with intermittent fasting.
Intermittent fasting can be a sustainable lifestyle change since it doesn’t typically require calorie counting, watching your macros, eating certain foods that you might not be used to eating, or eliminating certain foods that you otherwise enjoy.
That said, intermittent fasting requires discipline, restraint, and planning ahead. For some people, it might feel unnatural at first. This may be especially true if you’re used to relying on your intuition to decide when to eat.
You may naturally feel unpleasant when you feel the hunger pangs, but once you’ve adjusted to intermittent fasting, you might find it makes you feel less hungry within a month. If you ever feel very hungry, hangry, irritable or light-headed during a fast, you can try drinking some water because a person may think that they are hungry when they are actually thirsty.
However, if that doesn’t work, you can have a small snack. A small low-carb snack is fine to have during a fast, especially when you first start fasting to help you achieve your 12, 16 or 24 hours fast goal.
If you ever feel dizzy or weak, just end your fast early because there will always be another day to fast. If you push yourself too hard, you might find yourself giving up, so note that hunger and frustration are certainly something to expect and be aware of initially.
The act of fasting has existed since the dawn of ages and is an important aspect in most religions. Besides Ramadan in Islam, other religions that practice fasting includes Lent in Christianity, Yom Kippur in Judaism, and ascetic traditions in Hinduism and Buddhism. In many ways, humans have turned to fasting as a way to put their focus back on spirituality.
If you’ve considered fasting before, perhaps now is a good time to start as we join our Muslim friends during their holy month of Ramadan, and look inward and reflect upon our lives.
