Trying Intermittent Fasting for Weight Loss? Here's Everything You Need to Know
Burn fat, lose weight, and improve your health by approaching intermittent fasting safely.
You’re ready to lose weight, and everyone’s buzzing about intermittent fasting. You want to jump on the trend, but you’re wondering:
Is intermittent fasting safe?
Is it too good to be true?
Is it right for me?
When done safely, intermittent fasting is an effective way to lose weight and even improve your health. It’s known to help your body burn fat faster and promote healing processes.
But for your weight loss to be sustainable, you need to supplement fasting with healthy lifestyle practices. Use this guide to learn the benefits of intermittent fasting, healthy practices to pair with it, and how to get started.
Intermittent Fasting Benefits
Do you know what it’s like to exercise and not reach your healthy weight goal? You put so much effort into biking, lifting, or running – but nothing seems to change. It feels discouraging for your hard work not to be matched by results.
Let's start by acknowledging that the number on the scale doesn’t define your health. Instead of setting a weight goal as your target, we recommend you navigate your weight loss journey with the goal of feeling your best. Approaching weight loss with the goal of feeling healthy is more motivating, sustainable, and healthy.
If you're committed to losing weight by getting healthy and strong, we're here to help. Excess weight from fat is usually a sign of a deeper problem, which we help you identify and address. Intermittent fasting not only helps you reach a healthy weight, but has added health benefits.
How Fasting Affects Weight Loss
Though exercise impacts weight loss, the food you eat – and when you eat it – has more of an impact on how you feel.
Intermittent fasting is a method of alternating cycles of fasting and eating. This approach defines your eating window, but it doesn’t say anything about the types of food you’re eating during that time.
Fasting for a certain amount of hours helps your body burn fat faster, contributing to weight loss. Aside from losing weight, intermittent fasting is linked to other benefits, like… (1)(5)
Improving metabolic health
Protecting against disease
Promoting cellular repair
Reducing insulin resistance
Preventing obesity
Decreasing inflammation
Intermittent fasting is a way to restrict calories and burn fat. The fasting window gives your body time to process the food in your system and reset. This method is an effective way to lose weight, but more importantly improve health, when paired with healthy eating and exercise habits.
There are a few different types of intermittent fasting windows – but not all of them are as safe as others.
Intermittent Fasting Schedule
Intermittent fasting is as simple as it sounds. You only eat food during your eating window and fast for the other hours of the day.
The thought of not having your morning coffee is probably already scaring you out of trying fasting. But don't worry – you can still drink water, coffee, tea, and other beverages that don’t include calories.
These are three common types of fasting schedules: (2)
16/8 Daily Method
In the most popular form of intermittent fasting, you fast for 16 hours a day and restrict your eating window to an 8-hour period. Users of this method usually wait to have their first meal of the day around 11 or 12 and finish dinner before 7 or 8. This means the majority of the fasting window is while you're asleep, which helps tame hunger.
5:2 Weekly Method
Instead of restricting your eating window daily, this method limits the number of days of the week that you eat. You eat as you usually would for 5 days a week, but then restrict your calories to 500-600 for 2 days per week.
24-Hour Fast
Some people find success in doing two 24-hour fasts per week. Make sure you’re being cognizant of the activities that you’re doing on those days. If you’re planning to do a hard workout, don’t plan to fast that day. You need to properly replenish your body with nutrients and energy.
We recommend the 16/8 daily method for the healthiest results. This ensures that your body is adequately fed daily with the nutrients it needs to keep you energized. But it's still a long enough fasting window to give your body time to burn fat and see results.
How to Start Intermittent Fasting
Before you jump into a fasting schedule, we recommend you start slowly and try 1-2 days per week.
Ease into the method by starting with a 12-hour fasting window. If this feels daunting, remember that you're spending around 8 hours a night sleeping. Unless you're eating right up until you go to sleep, the sleep and after-dinner window covers about 11 hours already.
Taking a gradual approach to intermittent fasting sets you up for success. Even just two days of intermittent fasting each week leads to health benefits.
Lastly, try not to eat between your meals. Grazing and snacking between meals can be harmful to your system. When you give your system a true break until the next meal, it leads to more success.
If you're a big snacker, try to stop snacking before you start intermittent fasting. Suddenly removing the snacks you love and starting fasting can be too much at the same time. Taking a gradual approach to each step will make it more sustainable and effective.
Remember that having a healthy, balanced diet is still vital to feeling healthy and promoting sustainable weight loss.
Downsides of Intermittent Fasting
We always want you to have all the necessary information to make an informed decision about your health. So let's take a look at some of the possible downsides and risk factors of intermittent fasting. Most of these arise when you fast too drastically, which is why we recommend a gradual approach.
Stronger Cravings. When you're really hungry are you more tempted to indulge in cravings and overeating? Your mouth waters, your stomach grumbles – suddenly, all you can think about is a burger and a shake.
When you're deprived of food, the hunger center in your brain can get worked up. You may end up eating more than you would've in a typical meal. That's why they say you shouldn't go food shopping when you are hungry. (3)
Headaches. Common side effects of intermittent fasting are "fasting headaches." When your blood sugar drops, it can trigger hormones that lead to headaches.
Low blood sugar also leads to lightheadedness and possibly feeling weak. If you’re experiencing this, we recommend eating and replenishing your nutrients. (4)Irritability and mood changes. Have you ever heard the term “hanger”? It’s when you haven't eaten in a while, so you're more grouchy.
If you're prone to hanger, keep this in mind when choosing your fasting windows. You don't want to start biting your family's head off when you're just hungry!
The downsides of intermittent fasting usually occur when you're too deprived of food. This is why we strongly recommend easing into it, as opposed to jumping into long periods of fasting.
We recommend the 16/8 method because it greatly reduces the potential of these side effects. With this method, you give your body the proper nutrition and energy it needs to get through the day. Listen to your body's signals and make sure you eat when you need to.
Weight Loss Practices to Make Fasting More Effective
Intermittent fasting is an effective addition to your weight loss plan. But losing weight and keeping it off requires a healthy diet, exercise, and lifestyle.
For intermittent fasting to be effective, pair it with these healthy habits.
Resistance Training. Building muscle (lean tissue) burns more calories at rest, i.e. your increasing your basal metabolic rate.
Cardio. Getting your blood pumping keeps your heart healthy and leads to longevity, but don’t do it excessively. Excess cardio can backfire on you and actually lead to weight gain ( a topic for another blog). But make sure that you’re eating enough food on the days that you work out. If you're fasting in the morning, try going for a walk not a 10 mile hike.
The 16/8 method ensures you're replenishing the energy you burned while working out.
Nutrition. Shortening your eating window can lead to weight loss. But eating unhealthy food during your eating window doesn't benefit your health.
One tip is to increase your intake of healthy fats. These keep you full longer and help to prevent weight gain but still keep you well-fed.
Acupuncture. Weight gain is sometimes caused by an imbalance in your body. Acupuncture works to restore your neuroendocrine system, which in turn helps you lose weight.
Specifically, acupuncture regulates blood sugar and appetite, which can tame food cravings.
Injection Therapy. Certain injections speed up your body's process of breaking down fats. Lipotropic injections combine amino acids, vitamins, and minerals that help metabolize fat.
Be sure that the lipotropic injections don't include ephedrine. This speeds up the metabolism by increasing your heart rate,which is not healthy.
Supporting your intermittent fasting journey with positive habits like these is vital to success. Healthy habits and methods fuel your body and sustain long-term weight loss.
Healthy Weight Loss Plan
It's possible there are underlying factors that are preventing you from losing weight. We'll help you get to the root cause and create a personalized plan for you.
If you're ready to lose weight and feel your best, request a free 15-minute consultation at Denver Sports and Holistic Medicine. We'll make sure that intermittent fasting is a healthy option for you before you give it a try.
Lose weight in a healthy and sustainable way.
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