I am no fan of diets. Most diets can work, for a while, but most people tend to “yoyo” up and down with dieting. They apply themselves for a while but soon they fall back into old habits. It can be difficult to alter the types of food you eat for long term and so many diets are hard to sustain. How are you going to make the change to a high protein low carbohydrate “keto” diet when you love spaghetti and fettuccine? Well maybe intermittent fasting may be your answer because it doesn’t tell you what to eat but rather when to eat.
Intermittent fasting (IF) actually has lots of good research to support it, unlike some other diets. If you think about it, we humans lived a fasting lifestyle in our early history. We were hunter-gatherers so food wasn’t readily available to us like it is now. While popular press has made intermittent fasting more well known over the last 5 years, the research into it goes back decades. Sure, most of this research involves rats and mice but the results are very good.
The study results in humans for weight-loss with intermittent fasting are good but really no better than any other diet. Whether you’re doing the Atkins diet or Weight Watchers or South Beach or intermittent fasting (IF) everyone loses weight. The cool thing with IF is that it has benefits to your health that go beyond just weight loss. To understand some of these benefits we need an understanding of what IF does at the cellular level to our bodies.
