6 Things That Happened When I Tried Intermittent Fasting For A Week

Let me start by saying I'm not a girl who forgets to eat. Never will you hear me utter Did I eat lunch? Food has always been a driving force in my life: If I'm not eating it, I'm plotting to eat, and never do I diet. But lately, I've been giving my love handles a little too much love, and so I decided to reign in my eating. 

Enter: Intermittent fasting. As in, eating 500 calories 1 to 2 days a week, or going 12 to 18 hours a day without food. More a dieting pattern than a diet, science says it can help you lose weight (a smaller eating window means less calories consumed), but even better, research has linked it to improved blood sugar levels, decreased risk of heart disease and cancer, and, according to neuroscientist Mark Mattson's research, it might just help your brain ward off neurogenerative diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's while improving mood and memory.


Related: Intermittent Fasting - 6 Benefits To Aware Of.

Sounds too good to be true, right? Totally, which is exactly why I wanted to try for myself. Here's what I learned.

Time Restricted Eating (TRE)? What Is It And Can It Help You Lose Weight.

·         Time-restricted eating (TRE) is a form of intermittent fasting

·         Research is limited as to whether it will help you lose weight

·         Nutritionists say if it curbs unhealthy nighttime snacking, it could be a good thing

If the idea of counting calories to lose weight sounds like the absolute worst, a buzzy concept called time-restricted eating (TRE) might be more up your alley.

Time-restricted eating is basically a form of intermittent fasting, which has gained traction thanks to diet books such as The 5:2 Diet and The 8-Hour Diet. Based on the theory that most of us spend way too many of our waking hours munching away, this diet method is as simple as shortening the number of hours during the day that you eat. 

That could mean eating only between noon and 7 p.m. or 8 a.m. and 2 p.m. (it's up to you to decide how many hours you want to eat or fast per day). But the greatest benefits of time-restricted eating seem to occur when you stop eating earlier in the day.


Related: Intermittent Fasting. Does It Help Your Weight Loss?

For example, in one new study from the University of Alabama at Birmingham, when 11 overweight men and women spent four days eating only between 8 a.m. and 2 p.m. (a "restricted" schedule), and then four more days eating between 8 a.m. and 8 p.m., researchers found that time-restricted eating ramped up how much fat they burned at night. And, ironically, it led to fewer cravings throughout the day. 

Granted, this was a small study, and the researchers note that more research will be needed to determine if time-restricted eating could lead to long-term weight loss. Still, previous animal studies suggest that TRE may effectively help lower body fat and cholesterol levels, and even improve insulin sensitivity. Plus, a 2017 review from the University of California, San Diego, shows that, in some cases, TRE can indeed lead to weight loss in both men and women.

Essentially, this style of eating revs your metabolism, says Eliza Whetzel-Savage, R.D., a registered dietitian with Middleburg Nutrition in New York City. “When you cut the eating window down, you are creating a fasting period in which the body will have to use its own stored glycogen from carbohydrates and fat as fuel,” she says. “When the glucose and glycogen stores are used, the body switches over to a ketogenic state and burns fat for fuel.” 

Still, the diet has its challenges. 

Intermittent Fasting - 6 Benefits To Be Aware Of.

If you're not familiar with intermittent fasting, it's not a diet but rather a pattern of eating. You choose a part of the day to refrain from eating, called your fasting window, and the other part of the day to eat, which is your eating window. The most common type of IF is known as the 16:8 plan, where you fast for 16 hours and you eat from noon until 8 p.m.

Intermittent fasting (IF) is gaining popularity, most notably because it can help people lose weight. That's not the only positive effect, though! Here are six common health benefits you'll experience from intermittent fasting.

Related: 5 Types of Intermittent Fasting

Weight Loss

Many people who've failed at other diets or workout programs find success with intermittent fasting. Stephanie Ferrari, a registered dietitian with Fresh Communications, said, "The formula for weight loss is actually very simple. When the number of calories you eat is less than the number of calories you burn, you will lose weight." Since you're not eating for long periods of time, there are fewer opportunities to consume calories, which is why IF helps people eat fewer calories effortlessly. Stephanie also shared a meta-analysis from 2014, which "shows that when using an IF eating pattern, people reduced bodyweight by three to eight percent over three to 24 weeks."

Both Stephanie and Dr. Luiza Petre, a weight-loss specialist and board-certified cardiologist, also note that intermittent fasting raises growth hormone levels and lowers insulin levels, both of which help burn more fat. Stephanie added, "Insulin decreases when you fast, and lower levels of insulin results in burning more fat."

"The most important benefit of fasting is increasing insulin sensitivity," Dr. Petre said. "That means that cells are able to metabolise the carbohydrates better and the doors to the fat deposits are open vs. being locked as in insulin resistance syndrome." She added that your metabolic rate increases by four to 14 percent. "Intermittent fasting will reset your body from burning sugar as fuel to burning fat."

Crescendo Fasting? What Is It And Should It Be The Fasting Method For Women?

If you’ve ever looked into intermittent fasting, a diet that requires followers to fast for 12 to 20 hours daily, you might’ve come across some dire warnings about the diet being really, truly, dangerously bad for women.

Women’s bodies are more sensitive to the signals of starvation, so going too long without eating could throw their hormones out of whack, some experts say. As a result, intermittent fasting can make you so ravenous that you end up devouring everything in sight. Or worse, it can cause your body to break down lean muscle for fuel.

A quick Google search of “intermittent fasting for women” will tell you that the best way to avoid this supposed fate is with crescendo fasting—a special type of fasting that works with our delicate lady hormones instead of against them.

Instead of fasting 12 to 20 hours daily, crescendo fasters fast for 12 to 16 hours at a time on two to three non-consecutive days per week. (So, they might stop eating at 7 PM and fast until 9 AM the next morning and then do the same thing again a few days later.) The origins of the diet are murky, but it seems to have a cult following among Paleo-leaning health blogs.

5 Types Of Intermittent Fasting.

You've tried eating healthy, tracking your macros, monitoring your portions, and exercising like crazy, but your body isn't where you want it to be. Enter: intermittent fasting.

Although there are a variety of methods of intermittent fasting, most involve eating for a certain period of time and then not eating for a certain period of time. Certified dietitian Leslie Langevin, MS, RD, CD, of Whole Health Nutrition says that aside from a number of health benefits including lowering diabetes and other disease risks, improving blood sugar levels, extending life spans, and improving memory, intermittent fasting could be another tool in your belt to help with weight loss or to break through a weight-loss plateau.

She says, "It gets your body out of 'storage mode' and mobilises fat stores for energy." This means that without having the constant source of food (fuel) you'd get from eating all day, your body will dip into the fat it already has stored. That's why people find so much success losing weight with intermittent fasting. There are a few different methods described below so see which one might be right for you.

16/8 or Leangains

Things To Know Before You Try Intermittent Fasting.

A mere five years ago, skipping meals was a top diet taboo. Now it's the core of an increasingly popular (and increasingly research-backed) weight-loss approach.

 Intermittent fasting—periodically eating very little—is not only not bad for you, it may lower blood glucose levels and insulin resistance and reduce inflammation and cardiovascular risk. Why? How? Theories abound, but some experts believe fasting puts your cells under mild stress, just as exercise taxes your muscles and heart, ultimately strengthening them and making them more resistant to disease.

And that's not all, says Courtney Peterson, Ph.D., an assistant professor in the department of nutrition sciences at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. "Studies suggest you keep more muscle and lose more fat than on other diets, even if you lose the same number of pounds." That's because after about 12 hours of fasting, you run out of stored energy from carbs and start burning stored fat.

But a troubling flaw has popped up in this system. (You knew there was a "but" coming, right?) In a recent study, people on an alternate-day fasting plan for six months lost about 6 percent of their body weight—the same as those on a conventional low-cal diet—but 38 percent of fasters dropped out, nearly 10 percent more than in the other diet group. A similar problem has surfaced in other trials.

6 Mistakes People Make When Intermittent Fasting For Weight Loss.

After dabbling in intermittent fasting (IF) for over six months, I've experienced some tremendous benefits including weight loss, improved digestion, increased mental clarity, better sleep, and getting a handle on my sugar cravings. But it wasn't without making a few errors along the way. If you're thinking about trying intermittent fasting, avoid these mistakes. 

Choosing the Wrong Plan

There are so many different forms of intermittent fasting, so be sure to choose the one that works with your schedule, needs, and lifestyle. One type called 5:2 involves eating 500 calories a day (600 calories for men) twice a week. If you have a demanding full-time job, an active family, and an intense workout routine you want to stick to, eating that few calories will feel impossible on those days. So the 16:8 plan, where you fast for 16 hours every day, will probably be easier to maintain; it allows you to just skip breakfast and have a feeding window from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Do your research and choose an IF plan that makes the most sense for you so you're able to stick with it. 

Intermittent Fasting. Does It Help Your Weight Loss?

Want to drop some pounds? Chances are, you’ve considered intermittent fasting, a weight-loss technique that’s been surging in popularity. It involves set times when your eating is restricted and others when you eat as normal—or even more than you would typically.

But is there really any benefit to this kind of eating? A new study adds some clarity to the complicated topic: Intermittent fasting is no more effective for weight loss than daily calorie restriction, researchers from the University of Illinois at Chicago report.

Researchers split 100 inactive, overweight men and women with no history of heart disease or diabetes into three groups: A calorie-restricted group, an alternate-day fasting group, and a control group.