How To: Intermittent Fasting

With the start of Fall often comes a fresh start. This is true of many seasons, but as the new school season comes around we often want to hit the ground running with a bang. For lots of us girls that can mean anything from a new haircut to a new workout schedule to a new diet. In my case I started with the latter. Juggling school, working out, extracurriculars, a social life and a balanced diet can be more than we are prepared to handle, so we want to make it easy to knock one part of this balancing out starting with diet.

What is it?

Intermittent fasting is not necessarily about what you eat, but more about when. The premise behind it is that it does not restrict the foods you eat, which can cause many of us to binge eat, but the hours a day that you are eating versus not eating.

How do I do it?

There are a few ways of doing intermittent fasting or patterns of eating, this should all work with what your body is telling you and what works for your weekly schedule. Many people eat from noon until 8:00 p.m. and fast from then onwards. This is known as 16/8 since you are fasting for 16 hours and eating for eight. I recently tried this for a week and found that what worked best for me was eating during the hours of 11 a.m. until 6:30 p.m every day. If you’re just getting started and find that waiting until noon to eat is difficult, start eating at 10:00 a.m one day, the next day break your fast at 10:30 a.m., then so on and so forth increasing by 30 minute increments until you can reach noon. Beyond the eating drinks that are allowed during the fasting period are coffee, tea and water.

By restricting yourself to a specific eating window of six to nine hour eating windows you are allowing your body to reach a state of fat burning which is hard to reach when you are eating food all day long. During the period when you are eating the insulin levels in your body are spiking, which prevents your body from burning fat. So if you limit the amount of time or hours you’re eating during the day you will naturally burn more without changing your diet or the amount you work out. Long story short, the less hours a day you eat, the more fat your body will burn.

Takeaways

Intermittent fasting is less a diet and more a way of eating. The period of fasting allows you to be in complete control of when you allow yourself to eat and in my opinion significantly reduces snacking habits which I know a lot of people are susceptible to.

This may seem like a complicated means to an end, but once you start it is a lot less difficult than it seems! With such a busy schedule I was feeling guilty about not always being able to get to the gym, but with intermittent fasting I have been able to be more in control of my intake and know that I am still doing good things for my body inside and outside of the gym.