Intermittent fasting is not about starving yourself, you can eat healthy foods in moderation. (tuthelens / shutterstock)
editor’s note: Author Cynthia. Thoreau is a nurse and internationally renowned expert on women’s health. Although she looks decent now, in fact she experienced a period of unexplained weight gain after giving birth and when she was ill. At that time, she exercised was desperate and ate less, but I didn’t lose 1 kg. Later, after research and a large number of literature surveys, it was found that the reason for my inability to lose weight was “hormones”. He found that anyone can lose weight as long as they understand the hormonal mechanism and combine it with 168 fasting.
What is “intermittent fasting”?
Intermittent fasting simply “reduces the frequency of eating.” You will have a period of time when you do not eat anything (a fasting period) and only eat during certain “feeding periods”. At mealtimes, you can enjoy protein, healthy fats and non-starchy carbohydrates without having to count calories. You will set eating and fasting times carefully, and deliberately reduce the frequency of eating, which may be skipping meals or counting meals.
At the moment, there are three types of intermittent fasting methods most commonly used by the public, namely: fasting every other day, eating today and fasting every other day; 5:2 intermittent fasting (5:2 intermittent fasting), fasting 2 days a week and eating the other 5 days; and daily time-restricted feeding (daily time-restricted feeding), eating nothing for more than 12 to 16 hours a day (including bedtime at night) and eating only at specific times.
My 6-week intermittent fasting plan focuses on the “time-restricted eating method” and has been developed based on the “16:8” model (16 hours of fasting, 8 hours of eating). This is the easiest plan to implement, the most flexible, and the most suitable for women of all ages.
You can arrange eating and fasting periods according to your biological stage (fertile, perimenopause, menopause, or postmenopause) so that it matches your condition and helps maintain hormonal balance in your body. In addition, this type of fasting time is not really very long. After the body gradually adapts to fasting, you can extend the fasting time a little slowly.
Unlike many other types of eating plans, many studies have shown that time-restricted eating has a high adherence rate, meaning it can be implemented easily and last as long as you want!
My plan also allows you to eat a variety of nutrient dense foods during your mealtimes. Best of all, this 16:8 program offers many proven health benefits, especially when it comes to women’s health.
Intermittent fasting is a new concept to the public, a new way of eating that didn’t catch on until recently. That being said, people often forget that intermittent fasting has been around for a long time. In fact, it mirrors the eating patterns of our ancestors.
In prehistoric times or when materials were not so abundant, our ancestors did not eat three meals a day and often had snacks. They did not have easy access to countless food items as we do today. They probably did not eat for a long time, because at the time, food was not easy to find.
Depending on the season and climate, they may eat several meals a day on some days, and on other days they may have only one meal or none at all. That’s why I think humans are well suited for intermittent fasting eating, because that’s how we’ve evolved to eat that way.
Intermittent fasting is the most powerful choice you can make for your health, hormones, and well-being as a woman. In fact, it is also more powerful than any drug I have been able to prescribe. Shorter eating periods and longer fasting periods can bring you some amazing benefits. Here are the top 10 benefits of intermittent fasting:
burn fat
Many women in their 30s, 40s or 50s have dieted for years to lose weight, but their weight keeps going up and down. Not only that, this gain and loss tends to increase from year to year, from the original gain and loss of 4.5 kg per year, to 9 kg, 14 kg or more of huge shocks, so many women’s wardrobes are full of all kinds of. large, Clothing in small sizes.
This type of diet which causes weight fluctuations, known as yo-yo dieting, is very bad for your health.
A study by the American Heart Association found that women who ate yo-yo diets had a higher risk of heart disease than women whose weight remained stable over the years. Repeated dieting is definitely not a good eating habit, but now you have the ability to get rid of this habit, because intermittent fasting can help you.
One of the reasons intermittent fasting can help you is that it balances your hormonal status. Several important hormones in the human body can be activated by intermittent fasting, and most of these hormones can have many positive effects on weight management and health, such as: improving “lipolysis” (ie fat burning), improving flexibility metabolic (the ability). to use fuel appropriately, see below for details), avoid body fat accumulation, etc.
In the chapters that follow, I will describe these hormones in detail. In addition to balancing your hormonal status, fasting can speed up your metabolism, which can also help you maintain a healthy weight.
A retrospective study found that fasting can reduce belly fat by 4% to 7%. This proves that intermittent fasting is a great tool for us in losing weight. Another reason why intermittent fasting can help us has to do with the types of fat that humans have.
There are two types of adipose tissue in the human body: brown fat and white fat. Brown fat burns energy because it contains many mitochondria, the power plants of cells.
If you could choose, what type of fat would you like to have more of on your body? Brown fat, right? But things are not that simple. Adults don’t have much brown fat. In general, babies only have a large amount of brown fat, and their cute “baby fat” (baby fat) is usually made of brown fat. But the good news is that scientists have recently discovered that we can turn white fat into brown! Intermittent fasting is the driving force behind this transformation.
This great discovery was seen in experiments with mice. At that time, the researchers asked a group of mice to fast every other day; another group of mice let them eat as much as they wanted, and as much as they liked. Later, it was found in the fasting group of mice that intermittent fasting changed their gut microbiota, which also promoted the production of short chain fatty acids (SCFAs) in the gut.
This reaction can convert the white fat stored in fat into brown fat that burns fat, which can not only effectively reduce obesity, but also improve insulin resistance (a major problem that leads to diabetes ).
Of course, mice, not humans, are the experimental subjects of this study, which I have taken into account when citing the research. However, the metabolism of mice is similar to that of humans, so these findings are very noteworthy. The important message from this study is that intermittent fasting can be very helpful in burning fat.
(Special article on website)
Responsible Editor: Zeng Zhen
