Intermittent Fasting is one of the most popular trends to emerge in the diet and health industry. It has powerful effects on your mind and body and can even help you live longer.
This article discusses a detailed step-by-step guide to starting intermittent fasting. But before that, let’s discuss the types of intermittent fasting you can adopt.
Benefits of intermittent fasting
According to science, here are the benefits of intermittent fasting:
- It makes your day simpler. You don’t have to keep planning meals and can relax while having bigger portions as you’ll be fasting later anyway.
- It helps you live longer.
- It can reduce the risk of cancer.
- It’s easier than dieting or restricting calories with each meal.
Ways to do intermittent fasting
1. The 16/8 method
This is the simplest way for beginners to include intermittent fasting into their lifestyle. The rules are simple: eat all your daily calorie requirements in 8 hours, while keeping the 16-hour window completely for fasting.
2. The 5:2 diet
Eat normally for 5 days of the week, but for the remaining 2 days, restrict your calorie intake to 500 daily calories for women and 600 daily calories for men.
3. Eat Stop Eat
This is another popular method to incorporate intermittent fasting into your lifestyle by eating normally for 5 days a week while fasting for the other 2 days. The two 24-hour fasts each week help regulate your hormones and cleanse your body of impurities.
4. Alternate-day fasting
As the name suggests, this method consists of eating normally on one day and fasting on the next. On your fasting day, you can either eat nothing or restrict your intake to a few hundred calories.
5. The Warrior Diet
This form of intermittent fasting involves eating on raw fruits during the rest of the day and having one big meal in the evenings. Basically, you fast all day and complete all your calorie requirements in a four-hour window.
6. Spontaneous meal skipping
This form of intermittent fasting doesn’t require any planning. When you feel full, skip meals. Your body will adjust to this rhythm after a while and this habit will also help you get rid of your tendency to overeat when not hungry.
Getting started with intermittent fasting
As mentioned earlier, the easiest way to adopt intermittent fasting in your life is by starting the 16/8 intermittent fasting method. Here are a few ideas how you can go about it:
- Start by skipping breakfast or dinner.
- Avoid midnight snacking. In fact, avoid eating anything after dinner.
- Maintain your daily eating habits in a habit tracker and keep track of your progress.
- Hire an accountability coach to help you stick to your goals and make sure you don’t miss a day even when you’re tempted.
- Learn from the experts at Better Humans. They write the most detailed tutorials on self-improvement.