subject: Weight Loss and Fasting [print this page] Weight Loss and Fasting
Dieticians and personal trainers have taken it as gospel that you should eat many small meals throughout the day in order to keep your metabolism going. The idea is that splitting your daily food consumption into many small meals throughout the day will keep your blood sugar level and will help combat hunger by keeping you full all day, preventing you from binge eating and ruining your diet.
However, many people find it inconvenient to eat five or six times a day. Between all the demands of daily life, it can be hard to find time to prepare and cook food. This can sometimes lead to people who are pressed for time making unhealthy choices with their food by eating fast food or processed food which typically aren't healthy. However, there has been a recent trend with athletes towards fasting-based diets that only have you eating once or twice a day and then fasting for up to twenty hours between meals. The initial impetus for this style of dieting is to return to the diets of ancient hunter-gatherer humans. They would have experienced long periods of intermittent fasting in which they would be looking for food, and then would eat as much as they possibly could when they did find food. Recent research in this area may have findings that can help busy people lose weight.
Scientists and doctors are beginning to discover that the number of times you eat per day isn't the greatest determining factor in keeping your metabolism level high or keeping hunger from creeping up on you. Instead, the most important factor is to have a regular eating schedule. If you vary your eating schedule or eat when you feel hungry, your body begins to produce the hunger-inducing hormone ghrelin in greater quantities, leading you to feel hungry more often. In addition, your body cannot both burn fat and store fat at the same time; therefore, it's best to maximize the amount of time you go each day without any food in your digestive system. This forces your body to begin burning fat stores to produce glycogen which it uses as energy.
It may seem counter-intuitive, but your body can adjust to going without food for long period of time without you ever feeling hungry. Many people who fast for religious reasons report that the feelings of hunger subside after three days. The general idea for people who are considering going on a diet plan like this is to choose a convenient four or five hour window in your day where you try to eat all the food you will need to fulfill your daily nutritional requirements, and then to consume no calories outside of that window - even liquid calories such as soda.
Beware of lapsing on your diet plan if you are going to have a diet that includes intermittent fasting; cheating on your diet will result in your feelings of hunger coming back. After an adjustment period of training your body to eat within a four or five hour window each day, you will no longer feel hungry outside of your eating window - but cheating on your fasting diet can quickly ruin that. If you cheat too often and don't adhere to the diet, you may also find your body going into starvation mode, where it will want to store as much energy as it can in the form of fat, resulting in you gaining weight instead of losing it.
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