By Mary Gocke, RDN, CDN
The key to losing weight in 2016 might be found by going back in time and eating like our ancestors.
What if fasting was a part of your healthy lifestyle and offered the benefit of weight loss? Please, don’t get nervous and don’t go anywhere. Keep reading. This is the real deal.
We’re talking about intermittent fasting and it’s how our ancestors ate – think feast or famine. When there was food available, they ate; when they didn’t have food, they didn’t eat. They couldn’t run to a fast-food restaurant or pop a frozen-food entrée in the microwave.
Intermittent fasting does not mean you have to starve yourself. It does ask you to look at your lifestyle, notice how often you eat and especially observe late-night snacking – you know, when you’re stressed and watching late night television to take your mind off things and unconsciously eating the bag of potato chips or pint of ice cream.
What if you stopped eating after dinner and didn’t eat again until breakfast? There you go – intermittent fasting! 8pm to 8am – 12 hours of intermittent fasting. Maybe your schedule is 7pm to 7am; not a problem. There’s flexibility here. It’s not the time that matters; it’s the timing – setting yourself up for a period of 12-14 hours when you are not eating. And giving your body a chance to detoxify and rejuvenate itself.
The benefits of intermittent fasting are well-studied and vast, including:
- Improve metabolic efficiency and metabolic flexibility
- Reset your body to use fat as its primary fuel source
- Boost enzyme production to facilitate digestion and weight loss
- Generate production of human growth hormone
- Increase insulin sensitivity
- Reduce markers of chronic inflammation
Intermittent fasting is one aspect of the revolutionary weight loss program offered at Blum Center for Health this month. We want to help you lose weight and we want you to keep it off with a healthy lifestyle plan.
Learn more and join our Group Weight Loss Program.