Intermittent fasting has lately emerged as a boon for people aiming to shed some weight. Health experts have discovered its range of benefits from improving metabolic health to even possibly extending the life span of the individual. But before you choose intermittent fasting or any other kind of eating pattern, you must fully understand its effectiveness and the right way to do it so that you reap all its benefits while also keeping the side-effects at bay.
As the name suggests, in intermittent fasting, a person follows an alternate cycle of eating and fasting. Unlike other dieting plans, intermittent fasting emphasizes more on the timing of meals rather than its nature or content. People usually fix a time window in which they have their food while fasting for the rest of the day.
Now that you have grasped the functioning of intermittent fasting, let’s look at some tips to follow it effectively.
Timing is the key
There are plenty of ways to do intermittent fasting and time plays an important role in each one of them. One way to do is by consuming just raw vegetables and fruits during the day and devouring a heavy meal at night. It is advised to have the night meal within a window of four hour.
16/8 method
This method usually requires the person to confine their eating to approximately eight hours a day and fast for the rest of the day. This pattern is followed everyday where you can fit several meals in the eating window of eight hours.
Take it easy
Following a strict intermittent fasting plan is not necessary if you are looking to lose weight. Especially, if you are a beginner, it is advised to simply skip meals whenever it is convenient. This way you will lose weight without burdening your body too much.
Skip a day
In this method, you basically fast for a full day or 24 hours once or twice every week. Sleeping is also a form of fasting and extending that period even after waking up can do the trick for you. In other words, just have you dinner today and don’t eat until the next dinner.
Side effects
With a drastic change in eating habits, the body takes its time to get in sync with it. Beginners following this fasting method have experienced minor issues like bloating, headaches and lightheadedness which usually fades away with time.
