Short-term Fasting: How to Supercharge Your Weight Loss

Let’s firstly remove one of the biggest misconceptions when it comes to fasting; this isn’t a short term solution. We’re by no means suggesting that you completely avoid food for the next three days, just so you get to your target weight. This is a recipe for disaster.

Instead, this chapter will concentrate on a long-term form of fasting; one that’s completely healthy and can help you immensely as you bid to achieve your fitness goals.

Strictly speaking, it goes by the name of intermittent fasting. Instead of completely avoiding food altogether, your aim is to just eat during specific sections of the day. It means that there will be hours where you don’t eat anything and for the purposes of this chapter, this is referred to as fasting.

Following on from the brief introduction to intermittent fasting, let’s now delve into the subject in further detail and highlight the benefits, and what you have to do to incorporate it into your lifestyle.

An initial caveat: this might not work for women

It sounds rather sexist, but give us time. Unfortunately, this is one approach which might not work for some female readers out there.

The reason is completely physiological and related to the make-up of our bodies, but some women won’t experience success with intermittent fasting and we just have to put it out there.

Scientific studies have shown that females don’t receive the insulin sensitivity boosts that men have (and as we’ll find out, this is one of the main benefits of the whole process).

At the same time, some other studies have shown that obesity levels have dropped amongst women after intermittent fasting – so there really is mixed feedback on this.

However, considering the fact that the evidence for intermittent fasting is so strong for men, we just had to highlight that there are some minor doubts about the situation for females.

Nevertheless, the general advice is to at least try intermittent fasting. As the studies have shown, the responses can be different, and if you find that it doesn’t work for you it’s easy to adopt one of the other numerous strategies that we have outlined through the eBook.

Why is intermittent fasting such a worthwhile solution for weight loss?

Intermittent fasting attacks fat loss in several ways.

The first is in relation to your insulin levels. As soon as you start your fasted state, your insulin levels will fall. The upshot of this is that your body doesn’t have any glucose to use as a fuel source, and will as such start to turn to fat. Naturally, this is the exact solution that we are all looking for.

Next, we’re going to talk about catecholamines. This scientific term refers to chemicals that are able to tell the body to use more fatty acids. When you start to fast, you will release more catecholamines into your body.

The result is that fatty acids will find their way into your bloodstream, and they will be burnt as fuel during your normal day-to-day processes.

There are also studies that have shown that growth hormone is released when your body is fasted. As we all know, this is vital for muscle growth, meaning that your muscles are more likely to develop whilst fasted as well.

In short, intermittent fasting will result in your body being forced to tap into your fat stores as energy.

What about the starvation effect?

If you’ve read about dieting in the past you may have stumbled across the starvation effect. Before you start to become concerned that the approach in this chapter is going to result in starvation, it’s time to think again.

The starvation effect only occurs for prolonged fasting periods and as you’ll only be going several hours without eating, it’s nothing that you need to be worried about. Your metabolism won’t slow down – you won’t suffer with the starvation effect.

What about those immense hunger sensations?

Most people think that they will be utterly starving during this process, but this doesn’t tend to happen. Sure, it might feel a little different at the start, but like a lot of things your body slowly gets used to the fasted sensation and over time you won’t feel hungry at all.

How can you add intermittent fasting to your lifestyle?

Now we have outlined the benefits of fasting, it’s time to outline exactly how you can implement it into your normal lifestyle.

In truth, this is really down to you and your own preferences. Some people will split their day into windows, whether these are in six or four hours. They will decide to only eat in those periods although in truth, the longer the window the better the results.

A common way is to just eat during a long window though. This might involve completely skipping breakfast, and then only eating between 12pm and 8pm.

By doing this, you are fasting for sixteen hours – and many people find this quite easy to implement as the main portion of the fasting period is when they are asleep anyway.

It’s worth mentioning that even though you might be skipping a meal through one of these approaches, this isn’t performed with the aim of cutting your calories. In other words, feel free to eat the same amount of calories (but condensed into fewer meals) as the fasting state will take care of the rest (as we have talked about).

This approach might appear to go against the “little and often” approach which is vindicated by so many dietary experts. However, while the smaller meals philosophy can work very well with some people, let’s not forget that it can also take an incredible amount of work to implement.

Attempting to prepare six meals through the course of the day is certainly tricky, and through our approach you’ll spend much less time preparing your meals but for potentially better results.