Fasting has become quite popular the past few years. Initially it started as a dieting method or concept among the fitness and fat loss industry professionals, but has grown from there to mainstream for quite a number of reasons.
Fat Loss
Yes, fasting works to lose weight and fat, it works very well for that. Although a bunch of reasons why it causes fat loss have been touted and thrown around by proponents, clinically and academically, it has really only been proven to aid or cause fat loss for one main reason.
That reason is the same why almost all other diets that work, cause fat loss, and that is a energy deficit, caused by a calorie deficit. Simply put, your body uses more energy than you consume, so it burns energy stored as fat, and sometimes muscle too.
What makes fat loss through fasting easier for some than others, is because of the time frame during which the calories for the day is consumed. If you fast in the morning when you wake up all the way to around lunch time, before having your first meal, that follows a period of sleep, when you did not consume calories either.
So in total, if you had 7 hours of sleep, wake up at 07:00 am, and only eat your first meal at 13:00 pm, you have fasted since the dinner from the night before. Now let’s say you had dinner at 20:00 the previous night, that means you roughly stopped eating and consumed your last calories at 21:00 pm. That gives a total fast of 16 hours, leaving only 8 hours to consume your calories or meals for the day, usually just 2 meals, lunch and dinner again.
For people that are used to eating until physically feeling full, this is easier to diet in this method, as for those two meals that they eat, they generally eat until feeling full, and still consume a caloric deficit for the day.
Anti-Aging
Since the fasting craze for dieting started, there have been numerous other benefits discovered caused by fasting too, even some proven anti-aging benefits have been studied and shown.
Fasting has been shown to reduce prediabetes markers by reduced fat in the liver, this in turn reduces immune system aging and biological age markers.
This along with a host of other health and long-term brain health benefits from fasting, is enough reason to give fasting a try if you have struggled to maintain other diet methods.
