If you want to lose weight and don't want to follow a strict diet, you should try intermittent fasting. Think of it less as a diet, but more like a lifestyle that gives you incredible health benefits. Intermittent fasting curbs the feeling of hunger and is a good way to boost fat burning and increase performance.
Do you know that? You have tried countless diets, drank shakes and ate cabbage soup in order to reduce your calorie intake and be able to lose weight. But the yo-yo effect strikes with full force every time. Many people know only too well that most diets are not suitable for losing weight. Intermittent fasting works very differently.
The point here is that the meal times are adjusted and that you still consume enough calories, just in a smaller time window. With the help of this form of nutrition, you can still enjoy delicious food and still boost fat burning. You will now find out what you have to pay attention to and what different forms there are.
What does intermittent fasting mean?
Intermittent fasting is a nutritional strategy that alternates meal times with a period of fasting. This interrupts the natural rhythm of calorie intake. Intermittent fasting is also known as interval fasting, therapeutic fasting and alternating meals can take either several hours or several days.
With intermittent fasting, you don't have to count calories every day. However, a healthy diet is part of it - The secret recipe, however, lies in abstaining from food during Lent. The big advantage is that there is no exact list of which foods you can or should not eat. This means that everyone can design their diet in a variety of ways in order to absorb sufficient vitamins and minerals.
What you do with a Mineral deficiencies you can find out in the Academy. Intermittent fasting is a good start for newbies and for people who are looking for a flexible form of nutrition through a stressful everyday life.
However, once your metabolism has got used to intermittent fasting, it's not that difficult. Did you know that you are already using the fasting method when you sleep? If you have late breakfast or lunch the following day, you have already had a fasting period of up to 16 hours. It doesn't sound that difficult, does it?
How does intermittent fasting work?
Intermittent fasting is that conscious renunciation of calorie intake. As with conventional autophagy Intermittent fasting relieves your metabolism. Autophagy involves abstaining from food for one or more days as a purification.
The fasting method helps your organs and body cells to regenerate and repair themselves better. Intermittent fasting is thus a kind of body therapy in order to Prevent diseases and Lose body fat.
Performing autophagy is relatively easy, precisely because there are so many different types of meal breaks. Basically, it does not depend on what you eat, but in what rhythm you take your meal.
However, there is more to intermittent fasting than eating breaks or a simple calorie restriction. The fasting and non-fasting phases are constantly alternating. The fasting periods last between 14 and 36 hours for short-term fasting.
What happens in the body
- cellular repair processes
- Change in hormone levels
- Insulin levels drop
- Boost fat burning
- Muscle building is promoted
- increased breakdown of body fat
- easier energy consumption
If you don't eat for a while, your body stimulates important ones cellular repair processes so that, for example, waste is removed from cells. In addition, your hormone levels change to make the stored body fat more accessible.
Your Insulin levels drop in the blood, causing the fat burning is facilitated. Also the Blood growth hormone levelswhich can increase up to 5 times, promotes fat burning and muscle building. The increased amount of norepinephrine increases the breakdown of body fat and facilitates energy consumption. To burn even more calories, intermittent fasting increases your metabolism by 3,6-14%.
Who is intermittent fasting suitable for?
In contrast to conventional fasting phases, there is intermittent fasting without hunger and feelings of weakness out. So you don't have to go without all the goodies. Intermittent fasting is generally suitable for people who
- Want to lose a few pounds with a healthy diet
- want to live healthier from now on
- stimulate the fat metabolism and thus want to be fitter
Intermittent Fasting: What Methods Are There?
There are many types of fasting, which differ in the length of the fasting or eating time, the amount of calories and the timing of the eating phases. You can find out which form of part-time fasting suits you best through a personal nutritionist or in a self-experiment. You decide how long the fasting period is.
You can try these intermittent fasting methods:
- 16: 8 fasting period (Leangains method)
- 36:12 fasting period
- 20:4 fasting period
- individual fasting days
- Intermittent fasting and ketogenic diet
16: 8 fasting period (Leangains method)
The Leangains Method is suitable especially for beginnerswho are new to intermittent fasting. In addition to athletes who want to stimulate fat burning and muscle building, people who like to skip breakfast also benefit. A lean muscle mass can be built up in excess of calories.
Intermittent fasting takes 14 to 16 hours, with fasting starting after the last meal of the previous day. This means that if you get up in the morning and eat your breakfast around noon, 14 to 16 hours have already passed since you have fasted. Of that, you slept between seven and nine hours, so that it is not too difficult for you to go without food.
Our tip: As soon as you need a quick energy boost after fasting for 14 to 16 hours, you should have a butter coffee (Bulletproof coffee) to start the day. A buttered coffee made from coffee, butter, and coconut oil or MCT oil. It is important that you focus on the quality of the MCT oil pay attention, as C8 (caprylic acid) favors the production of ketone bodies the most.
Since you are not eating foods rich in carbohydrates, your blood sugar level will not rise either, which is why you will not experience food cravings. As a morning routine, butter coffee is a real secret weapon against fatigue.
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36:12 fasting period
With this interval method, the No food every other day instead of. This means that your calorie intake is normal for one day during the fasting period while you are Fasting the next day and thus setting your body back to its natural fat burning. Intermittent fasting ends with breakfast the following day before restarting after dinner.
20:4 fasting period
This form of intermittent fasting is only suitable for a short period of time. 20: 4 means intermittent fasting 20h lasts before a four-hour meal break follows. Because of the long pause, the method is above all suitable for people who have fasted before.
Individual fasting days
This type of intermittent fasting involves fasting one or two days a week. Anyone who can cope well with 16: 8 intermittent fasting will have no problems with individual fasting days. Many users even report that they generally feel less hungry and increase their energy levels.
Beginners can also reduce the calories with intermittent fasting if they do not want to skip their meal altogether. Reduced calories means about a fifth of your normal calories. That's between 400 and 500 calories a day, which is why 16: 8 intermittent fasting is rather unsuitable for athletes.
Single or multiple fasting days have the great advantage that you can do your Relieve the digestive tract for several weeks can and stimulate fat burning.
Intermittent fasting planner
Download ours now Intermittent fasting plannerto get through Lent better. Easy to print.
Here you can fill out the following areas:
- Mahlzeiten
- Drinking behavior
- Mood
- Satisfaction scale
- Sleep duration
- thoughts and feelings
- To-do's
- Daily goals and achievements
Intermittent fasting and ketogenic diet
Intermittent fasting boosts fat burning especially when you combine intermittent fasting with a ketogenic diet. Ketosis is also often referred to as starvation metabolism in the medical field. He occurs when we fast or reduce our intake of high-carbohydrate foods and deplete our glycogen stores.
Normally, when your body is not in ketosis, it gets its brain power from glucosethat he prefers to obtain from carbohydrates. However, sugary foods have the disadvantage that they raise your blood sugar levels.
The brain is the only organ that cannot store energy and is therefore constantly dependent on the inflow of nutrients. This means that your nerve cells in the brain are dependent on the supply of energy. As soon as you stop eating carbohydrates, your brain loses glucose as an energy source. Your body can adjust to protect your brain and supply it with energy by producing its own energy source.
This is known as ketones or ketone bodies. For this your body takes in that State of ketosis the energy from fatty acids. Ketone bodies are one for your brain much faster energy supplier than sugar. But producing the ketone bodies to power your brain is an effort that the body stops immediately when you can eat a sufficient amount of carbohydrates.
What happens when you fast?
When you fast and also cut out the carbohydrates, you force yours with the method Metabolism even faster in the state of ketosis, Thereby you boost the burning of your fat reservesso that you can lose weight. If you have your Carbohydrate intake to 20 to 30 grams per day limit, you can Accelerate fat loss.
Anyone who wants to make sure that they are in ketosis can have the ketone levels measured in their blood. Devices can determine the ketone level through a small prick in the finger and thus give an indication of whether you are in ketosis or not. The condition also has one advantage: by reducing the intake of sugary foods and snacks for ketosis, your insulin level remains constant.
Food cravings are therefore rather rare when fasting. The constant release of insulin, which occurs with a regular intake of carbohydrates, stresses your pancreas and is considered to be the cause of diabetes. However, it takes a while for your body to get used to the state of ketosis, which is why you will probably suffer from hunger with the ketogenic diet method when fasting, especially in the initial phase.
What are the rules of intermittent fasting?
The hours between the fasting periods do not mean that you can now eat all the time, that you can stuff yourself into food without end and that you can eat your mom's biscuits in one afternoon. Otherwise it can happen that you put a lot more weight on the scales after fasting.
You should omit snacks, processed foods, fast food, ready-made products, sugar and sugary foods in the form of white flour both during fasting and after fasting. Eventually, these products bring your body no valuable nutrients. Although you don't have to do without anything, you should still make sure that you eat a healthy and balanced diet, as well as outside of intermittent fasting.
As soon as your day is limited to two or three meals, you can Your organism utilizes the nutrients it has absorbed much better. Since you no longer waste your energy processing hard-to-digest meals, you will feel healthy, fit and focused after intermittent fasting.
By the way: athletes who want to build muscle can support the anabolic processes by optimizing the supply of high-quality protein. Whey protein or vegetable protein in the form of hemp, lupine and rice protein are the perfect sources of protein. Protein strengthens the muscles and tightens the skin and connective tissue.
Side effects of intermittent fasting
Have you ever skipped food for several days? Then you know the feeling of intermittent fasting very well, if you skip eating several times a week: You feel limp, demotivated and listless. This is because your body detoxifies. Not only harmful metabolic products (purines), but also stored toxins are excreted.
In intermittent fasting, this process is not too extreme. Since the intake of food and the refusal to eat alternate with intermittent fasting, your body excretes the metabolic products, but you do not feel as weak as you do with therapeutic fasting for several days because you regularly feed your body. So-called fasting crises, as you have probably experienced when you abstain from eating for several days, do not occur with intermittent fasting. So - don't worry, you can do it!
Intermittent fasting and the feeling of hunger
When you start intermittent fasting, however, it may well be that you are often hungry at first. In reality, however, you are not hungry - You only have an appetite because your body has got used to the snacks and meals and craves them. You're driving that out of him now.
Feelings of hunger when fasting occur especially if you have in the past preferred to eat isolated sugary foods, which cause a drastic increase in your insulin and blood sugar levels:
- white rice
- White flour baked goods
- Chocolate and granola bars
As soon as the insulin levels drop again, your body needs replenishment.
What can I eat during intermittent fasting?
It is ideal if you have the Leaving out sugary foods and using whole, unsweetened foods instead. Then your Normalize blood sugar and your blood lipid levels.
Here are the main foods you can eat:
- Vegetables
- Legumes
- Fruits
- Meat
- Fish
- Nuts
- Oils (olive, linseed and coconut oil)
- eggs
Additionally are healthy fats, such as Omega fatty acids 3 a real benefit for your nerve cells and not only in the brain.
Intermittent Fasting: What are the Health Benefits?
That you can lose weight through the fasting days and your Purifies cells, is a major benefit of intermittent fasting. Especially if you also follow a ketogenic diet and do not consume any carbohydrates.
In addition, there are other health benefits of intermittent fasting:
- the blood sugar level regulates itself
- the blood pressure regulates itself
- the cholesterol level regulates itself
- the nervous system is protected
The blood sugar level regulates itself
Since many Due to the lower feeling of hunger than you eat, your pancreas also has to release less insulinso that your blood sugar remains almost constant. Low blood sugar not only prevents diabetes, but also inflammation, acne, depression and cancer.
The blood pressure regulates itself
High blood pressure and diabetes are closely related. The main cause is sugary foods, which stimulate both the pancreas and the metabolism. High blood sugar levels are, in turn, a cause of cardiovascular diseases, which is why you can minimize the risk of a heart attack or stroke if you fast regularly.
The cholesterol level regulates itself
fasting lowers the harmful LDL cholesterol while increasing the beneficial HDL cholesterol. The low-density lipoprotein (LDL) is considered to be the cause of vascular calcification, while the high-density lipoprotein (HDL) protects the blood vessels.
The nervous system is protected
Intermittent fasting stimulates the formation of proteins and enzymes that have an antioxidant effect on our nervous system. Antioxidants or antioxidant processes protect your nerve cells in the brain and body from oxidative stress. Athletes in particular stress both their muscles and nerve cells with complex movements, which is why many athletes swear by regular fasting.
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Summary
Living healthier, getting fitter and losing weight are popular goals. If you want to declare war on dreaded pounds and still don't want to miss out on delicious food, try intermittent fasting. This form is not only suitable for health-conscious people, but also for athletes who want to lose some body fat and build muscle.
This Diet not only boosts your metabolism and fat metabolism, but also has positive effects on your health, as intermittent fasting prevents diseases and can extend life.
¹Calcium contributes to the normal function of digestive enzymes. ²Zinc contributes to the normal function of the immune system.