Intermittent Fasting (IF) is a form of dieting where as you fast for a chosen amount of hours, and you then have an open window where you eat, this is one of my favourite diets at the moment and one which I see many benefits in.
There are three main methods to this madness, the 24 hour fast once or twice a week (Eat stop eat), the 16 hour fast (leangains), and the 20ish hour partial fast (the warrior diet)
Eat stop eat, you go 24 hours without food while drinking as many non-calorie beverages as you want, once your off the diet do not eat like you have been fasting just eat like you usually would so once you break the fast just have a regular meal and go on with your day. only do this fast once or twice a week at most!
Leangains is one of my favourite out of the three because you can use it if your loosing fat, gaining muscle, or just staying at a healthy weight, for men you fast 16 hours and for women you fast for 14. so if the last time you ate was at 6pm, the next thing you would eat would be at 10am (male) or 8am (female).
The warrior diet, this is an everyday diet where you consume a little bit of each of the following, fruit, veggies, protein shakes, nuts, eggs and juices, but keep this at very very small amounts and you eat one main meal at night, this diet would probably be the most beneficial for fat loss.
The department of cell and developmental biology in japan has even got some evidence tested on rats that these kinds of diets have improved their life span from up to 50%.
Researchers at the national institute of ageing in Baltimore, USA also have evidence that fasting could possibly protect the brain from diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. ”Reducing your calorie intake could help your brain, but doing so by cutting your intake of food is not likely to be the best method of triggering this protection. It is likely to be better to go on intermittent bouts of fasting, in which you eat hardly anything at all, and then have periods when you eat as much as you want,” said Professor Mark Mattson, head of the institute’s laboratory of neurosciences. (http://goo.gl/Ppn3G)
