Keeping yourself healthy is what most people strive to achieve every day. Daily exercises, minimizing food intake, hydrating most often.
These are some of the many things individuals do to lose weight and accomplish their desired body. Most notably to athletes, they need to regulate their workouts and eating patterns for their certain events to compete.
While keeping oneself to losing weight, there are a variety of dieting patterns and exercises existing in today’s time. You can choose from these choices depending upon your daily needs and capacity. Thus, one of them is intermittent fasting.
What is Intermittent Fasting?
Intermittent fasting or calorie restriction is one method of healthy dieting. You are restricting food intake for a specified period. On the other hand, it enables your body to use its energy effectively. This pattern is a usual religious practice since prehistoric times. It has now become a well-favored fitness and health trend today.
Moreover, the technique can help athletes focus on the quality of food that they are eating. It is also essential to consider those that are unprocessed, fresh, and foods enriched with vitamins and minerals.
It is believed by many that intermittent fasting is causing weight loss while improving one’s metabolic health. It is also known for promoting a positive lifestyle that can extend your life longer.
Health Benefits
Performing all those techniques are all worthy in the end. Essentially, it is giving the individual positive effects on achieving healthy wellbeing.
- It is keeping a healthy heart. Intermittent fasting can reduce bad cholesterol in the body, that is the low-density lipoprotein. It also efficiently metabolize the sugar and providing you the energy you need.
People can manage their calorie intake, and they will have the self-control to choose better food choices. Thus, it will reduce the risk of having heart complications.
- Can regulate blood sugar. Helping you secure from acquiring type 2 diabetes is one of its benefits. Your cells will respond actively to insulin. Thus, reducing blood sugar level to 3-6% and 20-31% for fasting insulin levels.
- Developing a healthy brain. Intermittent fasting has the same thought of exercising. It influences the increase of protein that is present in our minds.
Thereby, the technique promotes the development of neurons. Also, it is strengthening its connection and the synapses that pass signals to our system.
In specific, intermittent fasting can improve our memory as well as our way of learning. The diet may help increase brain resistance to ailments like Dementia and Dystonia.
Lifestyle Benefits
Intermittent fasting not only gives health benefits but also provides ease in lifestyle.
- Weight loss– Research shows that one of the many health benefits of intermittent fasting is experiencing weight loss.
While you are at the verge of the fast, you are reducing your calorie intake. It includes stubborn fats, that is not a good indicator of a healthy body. More often, it will also help clean up your metabolism to improve efficiency.
One study review implies that intermittent fasting decreases the body’s weight by 3-8% for 3-24 weeks. Moreover, as you continue to lose weight, you are also enhancing your well being with healthy hormones
- Enhance mindfulness– Engaging self in intermittent fasting increase the mindfulness of the individual. You are more aware of what you are eating, whether it is beneficial to the body or not.
Moreover, you tend to become more mindful of when real hunger strikes, not just because of boredom.
- It helps you to live longer– Many scientists imply that avoiding calories is a way of extending your life. Thinking logically, a person finds alternatives and ways to live longer when they’re starving. Thus, while achieving a lot of health benefits, intermittent fasting will indeed extend your life.
As much as you are increasing your patience in doing these methods, exerting efforts in daily workouts is also essential.
You can provide your playground equipment that helps with the workout; buying barbells, balance ball, jump rope, kettlebell, and such. These things can become your investment while catering your needs. Thus, also helping athletes with their upcoming events.
Daily exercise is also a way to keep your wellbeing healthy. Sweating has a lot of benefits to the body. That includes detoxifying the body and flushes out cholesterol, salt, as well as substances of alcohol.
Perspiring also boost your endorphins. This hormone is the reason behind an individual’s good feeling. Thus, it also reduces the feeling of stress that a person is experiencing.
How to do it?
There are different possible methods on how you do intermittent fasting. Enumerated below are some of the various ways.
- The 5:2 diet– This method means a person will eat with his or her regular food intake for five days a week. The remaining two days are about restricting 500 to 600 calories. To sum, this technique requires you to fast for two days a week.
- Eat-Stop-Eat method– 24 hours fasting is what this method is all about. You are required to fast for an entire day once or twice a week. Remaining days means you can go back to your regular calorie intake.
- Fasting for 16 hours– This is also known as the 16/8 diet. It is as simple as eating lunch and dinner but skipping breakfast the next day. You are expected to do fasting for 14 hours for women and 16 hours for men. Your calorie intake must fall during the remaining 8 to 10 hours only.
- Alternate day fasting– This diet pattern is quite intense. It includes fasting for the entire 24 hours and going back to regularly eating the next day. Binge eating is a significant tendency while doing this technique. Mostly, you have to eat until you feel contented during your eating days.
Given these points, intermittent fasting is a great pattern to reduce the calories you intake every day. This technique to weight loss may be useful to some people, but it does not mean it will work efficiently to everyone.
As an athlete, if you are practicing for your sport during the fasting period, it is recommended to take a small number of calories. Thus, supplementing the body with branched-chain amino acids (BCAA).
