What’s the Best Way to Start Intermittent Fasting?
With many of us still working from home with easy access to food, weight gain has anecdotally been a common side effect of lockdown. If you’re wanting to shift a few kilos and regain control over food intake, intermittent fasting, or the regime that has gained significant attention off the back of the work of Dr Michael Mosley, may offer a number of benefits.
Specifically it is the simplicity of fasting regimes that explains their popularity and why fasting may be a long-term dietary solution.
Fasting regimes operate on the premise that significantly restricting daily calorie intake, either via time-restricted feeding – in which calories are consumed within a small number of hours each day as proposed by the 16:8 program – or low calorie days in which one or two small meals are consumed as per the 5:2, switches the body into fat-burning mode. As a result of the fast, the body is basically forced to work harder to burn calories, which gives the metabolism, immune system and the energy centre of the body’s cells a reset. In a world in which individuals rarely go for more than an hour or two without eating, this break from eating altogether has been shown to be very good for us.
Excerpted from The Sydney Morning Herald
