Ashley Rowen
In other words, I eat between the hours of 12pm and 8pm and fast outside of that range.
Since I started intermittent fasting, I’ve discovered why it’s raved about by many leading health gurus.
Firstly, when doing the Keto diet, intermittent fasting is effortless.
This is because your body can quite easily use stored fat as energy, meaning you’re less likely to get hungry and fall off track.
(Hunger is a sign that your body needs energy/food. If your body can easily use your love handles for energy, then why would it need more food?)
I also love how flexible intermittent fasting is.
For example, I do 16:8 Intermittent Fasting meaning I fast for 16 hours per day and eat for 8 hours per day, whereas you can change this ratio to fill your needs.
If you want to fast for 23 hours and then feast in a 1-hour period? Great, go ahead.
If family commitments mean you can only fast for 12 hours today? Not to worry, you can just fast for longer tomorrow.
And let’s not forget the long list of health benefits that intermittent fasting has to offer.
Whilst I may cover the many benefits in a future article, this post looks exclusively at using intermittent fasting as a tool for weight loss.
Ready? Let’s go.
5 Reasons Why Intermittent Fasting is Great For Weight Loss
1. Intermittent Fasting lowers Insulin
Insulin is a storage hormone.
When we eat, insulin levels rise which stores the excess energy from food as fat.
From an evolutionary perspective, this was a crucial feature for survival as humans would often go through long periods without food, and hence storing excess energy as fat was beneficial.
But nowadays, the availability of food is like we’ve never seen before.
And since we no longer have to go through periods without food, we’re always in a “storage” state.
The outcome? Obesity.
You may think that’s a bit extreme, but it’s predicted that 40% of American adults are Obese.
(And this number keeps on rising…)
So how do we get out of this “storage” state so that we can use stored body fat for energy?
We lower insulin levels.
Many studies have shown that intermittent fasting lowers insulin levels, which releases fat to be used for energy.
The outcome? Weight loss.
