Intermittent Fasting: Is It Good For Your Health?

Intermittent Fasting had been the most talked-about of many people searching for weight reduction processes.

Dieticians and fitness enthusiasts suggest that fasting in an alternate-day routine is more efficient in losing weight on a normal low-calorie diet. Such a suggestion seemed fair since you should be losing weight by reducing your intake of calories. Further, weight loss and being proactive helps you reduce the risks of obesity-related health conditions. Some of these known conditions are sleep apnea, diabetes, and certain cancers.

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Image source: adobestock

However, despite the growing popularity of intermittent fasting, it’s common for people to asks if it is really good for their health?

Keep reading the health facts below to enlighten yourself about the effects of intermittent fasting on your health.

What’s Intermittent Fasting (IF)?

To a greater extent, intermittent fasting is the reduction of food intake by following a timetable. For example, you go on a 24-hour cycle of just consuming liquids and take no solid food throughout your fast. After 24-hours, you then start eating normally starting sequentially with easy to digest foods as not to upset your system.

The intermittent pattern suggests you keep going at a pre-determined time, alternating between both non-fasting and fasting stage. Sticking on to such an eating routine would provide a ton of benefits for your health, thereby conforming to the belief that intermittent fasting is indeed good for your health.

Below are some of the known health benefits of intermittent fasting:

1) Weight Loss

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Weight loss; image source: pexels.com

Of the many reasons why people try intermittent fasting, perhaps losing weight is the most prominent. And that argument appears to hold strong. Thus, it would be safe to say that if you’re looking at fasting to lose some weight, that’s a piece of welcome news.

With intermittent fasting, though, the weight loss isn’t more than you would anticipate, compared to other forms of diet. Relevant to the calories you ingest per day, weight loss is not that highly guaranteed. Intermittent fasting, after all, doesn’t limit high-calorie intakes.

Despite everything, intermittent fasting may become as impactful as standard calorie restriction diets when it’s strictly followed. Some people, particularly active people, who may not have time dedicated to preparing meals, may even consider intermittent fasting easier to adopt than other approaches to weight loss.

2. Helps In Regularizing Blood Pressure

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Measuring blood pressure; image source: pexels.com

It’s always essential to maintain your blood pressure levels to avoid detrimental health conditions related to it. Intermittent Fasting (IF) over time could help lower or regularized your blood pressure. Unhealthful conditions increase the risks of cardiovascular diseases, heart attack, and kidney problems.

But even so, given such impacts for maintaining healthy blood pressure, it would only last if regularly practiced. When the fasting stopped, and you returned to your regular eating habits, your blood pressure resumed to its original levels.

With that, it’s crucial that you stick on to your fasting routines and be mindful of your habits –from eating to your ways of life.

3. More Essential For Heart Health

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Image source: pexels.com

It’s known that different health indicators, or “risk factors,” are associated with significantly increased or lowered risk of heart-related diseases.

Different sorts of heart-related complications, such as cholesterol levels, inflammatory markers, blood pressure, triglycerides, and blood sugar levels were shown to be mitigated during intermittent fasting. Many of these, however, are based on animal experiments. There’s a need for studying its impact on people’s heart health before conclusions can be drawn.

4. Promotes A Good Night’s Sleep

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Sleeping; image source: pexels.com

You might not have noticed it, but eating affects your alertness and drowsiness in a day. That’s the reason why you feel like you’ll fell into a food coma after having a big meal. Many IF followers mention having better periods of sleep at night because of this style of diet.

An assumption is IF controls circadian rhythm, the one responsible for establishing wake and sleep patterns. A controlled circadian rhythm ensures a quick sleep at night and waking up feeling good.

Another theory’s focused mostly on the necessity of having your meal early in the night. It implies the time you’d hit your head on your pillow, you’ll already digest the food you’ve eaten. Digestion is best achieved if you’re sitting. So, going back to sleep with a full tummy can contribute to acid refluxes or heartburn during sleeping time.

5. Good For Your Mental Health

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Image source: pixabay.com

Frequently, what’s beneficial for the body is also of advantage for the brain. Intermittent Fasting boosts different metabolic elements that are essential for a healthier brain. It involves lessened oxidative stress, decreased inflammation, and decreased levels of blood sugar or resistance to insulin sensitivity.

It also improves brain hormone levels labeled brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF). Insufficiency of such factors may lead to symptoms of depression and many other brain-related issues.

6. Allow You To Live Longer

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Image source: pixabay.com

One of intermittent fasting’s many promising applications could be prolonged or enhanced lifespan. While it’s far from validated, intermittent fasting among anti-aging groups has become quite common.

Along with the existing metabolic benefits and all kinds of health indicators, it makes perfect sense that intermittent fasting would support you to live longer with healthier lives.

So, Is Intermittent Fasting Good For Your Health?

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Image source: adobestock

People’s idea of eating meals thrice a day, munching on snacks, feeding while watching TV, and getting so many different types of food in a day is very peculiar. People’s access to food has been very extensive throughout most of human existence. Yet, the truth is, even if people aren’t able to eat, they have adipose cells with energy reserves that can sustain their bodies for the whole week.

Various studies with humans and other animals have already shown that abstinence from food will suppress biomarkers (a detectable predictor of some type of biological condition) for issues, like hypertension, diabetes, heart disease, cancer, etc.

Essentially, intermittent fasting significantly reduces blood sugar and insulin growth factor (IGF1), a hormone linked to diabetes and cancer. With the decreased levels of such hormone, cells move out of the growth phase and open up to maintenance conditions. This shift within the cells may help in delaying aging and massively reduce risk factors of common diseases.

Wrapping It Up

Losing weight is sometimes challenging, but it may improve with intermittent fasting. This diet plan, which includes periods of eating and fasting, is getting much attention from health and fitness enthusiasts. It’s not only whether you chew or not that counts in the battle to lose some weight. The concept of intermittent fasting is fairly simple, yet its health benefits are extensive.

Along with the mentioned explanations above, it’s nice to go on intermittent fasting since it’s beneficial for one’s health.

 

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