Can Skipping Meals Benefit Your Body and Mind?
The concept of intermittent fasting may seem scary at first. Going many hours without food? Not even a snack to tide you over? Whether you refer to it as time-restricted eating or IF, the practice of going for a block of time without sustenance — and doing that on a consistent basis for at least a few weeks — has inspired numerous researchers to investigate one big question: Does it really improve your health?
According to a number of studies, the answer seems to be yes. Although more research is needed to pin down all the physiological mechanisms that make this strategy beneficial, we’ve got a sampling of what researchers have discovered so far. Keep reading to discover the five potential benefits of intermittent fasting.
- It May Help You Live Longer: Restrict your eating, lengthen your life? The evidence for the fountain-of-youth effect is promising. Researcher Mark Mattson, PhD, an adjunct professor of neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, looked at numerous intermittent fasting plans and concluded that two in particular are especially effective: restricting your eating time to a six- to eight-hour window every day (so, only eating between 11 a.m. and 7 p.m., for example), or a technique called 5:2 fasting, that involves eating normally five days a week and then eating only one moderate-size meal two days a week.
Excerpted from Woman’s World
