If you are someone who has thought about losing weight or wanted to be healthier in recent years, you have probably come across these two words: intermittent fasting.
From celebrities to fitness enthusiasts, intermittent fasting has many thousands of loyal advocates online, who claim that this way of eating has helped them lose weight better than other diet methods.
It’s easy to see the appeal of intermittent fasting as a weight loss method. It’s not only simple, it’s also flexible, easily adaptable to each person, and doesn’t require you to cut out food or count calories.
But despite its popularity, intermittent fasting may not actually be better than other diet methods when it comes to weight loss.
To date, numerous studies have shown that intermittent fasting is as good as counting calories when it comes to weight loss, including a recent studywhich followed the participants for more than a year.
This has even been shown with many different types of intermittent fasting, including alternate day fasting (where you fast or restrict calories every other day), 5:2 diet (eat normally five days a week, then fast or restrict calories for two days) and time restricted feeding (where you eat all of your day’s calories within a set period of time, such as eating only for an eight hour period and then fasting for 16 hours). But no study has yet shown that intermittent fasting is better than conventional diets.
intermittent fasting reduce the amount you eat, but may have a drawback. Both reduce the amount of physical activity we doY reduces the force with which we push during exercise.
This is true regardless of type flashing fasting what are you doing. This suggests that when calorie intake is substantially reduced, even for a short period of time, the body adapts by reducing the amount of calories used during exercise. However, researchers aren’t entirely sure why this happens.
While this may not necessarily affect weight loss, lower levels of physical activity can have other negative health effects.
For example, a recent alternate day fasting study found that even three weeks of this diet reduced physical activity levels and led to greater muscle loss than a daily calorie-restricted diet. The fasting diet was also less effective than daily calorie restriction for fat loss.
Muscle mass is crucial for many reasons, including regulate blood sugar levels Y remain physically able as we age. Therefore, it is best to avoid diets that cause muscle loss.
However, combining intermittent fasting with exercise programs: like resistance training – can help people better maintain lean muscle mass while promoting fat loss.
Are there other benefits of fasting?
While intermittent fasting may not be a silver bullet when it comes to weight loss, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have other health benefits.
A recent review on intermittent fasting found that it improved blood pressure, insulin sensitivity (how effectively the body regulates blood sugar), and lowered cholesterol levels to a similar degree as daily calorie restriction.
This effect is likely due to weight loss. But since few studies have followed participants for more than a year, it’s hard to know if these effects persist.
Some research also suggests that how you fast may also be key. A number of studies have shown promising results of time-restricted early feedingwhich involves eating all the calories for the day in the first part of the day and fasting at night, usually from 4:00 p.m.
Eating early in the day aligns food intake with our natural circadian rhythms, meaning nutrients are processed more efficiently.
Early time-restricted feeding has also been shown to improve several health markers, such as insulin sensitivity, which is a key risk factor for type 2 diabetes. These improvements were seen even no weight loss.
There is also evidence that the results of the 5:2 intermittent fasting diet can be improved by placing the two very low or no calorie diet days back to back. This can lead to improvements in insulin sensitivity greater than would be seen with practice. daily calorie restriction.
This could be because you spend more time fasting, which increases the amount of body fat you burn. Interestingly, exercising on an empty stomach can also help you burn more fat and improve insulin sensitivity.
So while intermittent fasting may not be better than other weight-loss diets, making changes to the way you do it, like fasting overnight, may help you see other health benefits.
For people who struggle to stick to calorie-restricted diets, intermittent fasting is safe and can still be effective. It’s also worth noting that it’s best to combine intermittent fasting with exercise to experience the best results.
David ClaytonFull Professor of Nutrition and Exercise Physiology, Nottingham Trent University
This article is republished from The conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the Original article.
