The Benefits Of Fasting

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Intermittent fasting recommends abstaining from food during certain times of the day or week. This means changing your eating schedule, and adding/substituting a few things to the kind of food you consume. As all effective diets go, you need to remove those that contribute to unwanted weight gain too.

The main principle of intermittent fasting is: giving your body enough time to eat and digest your meals during the day, usually within a 6 to 8 hour period. Then the rest of the hours are devoted to fat-burning. Your body does this naturally when you don’t consume anything with calories after 8 to 12 hours of your last food or drink intake.

For this eating regimen to yield quick results, your daily fasting should at least be 8 hours a day. …show more content…

The prospect of not eating or drinking anything for 8 to 16 hours may seem daunting at first, but you can always schedule your fasting state after dinner, when you are ready to tuck in for the night, and/or in the morning when you are not quite ready for breakfast yet.

For example: you can have your last meal of the day at 5 o'clock in the afternoon. Next day, you can eat breakfast at 9 in the morning. That’s an easy 16 hours of fasting.

Although you should avoid consuming calories within the fasting state, you can still have all the water(plain, unflavored, tap or mineral water) you want. If you have to munch on something, crushed ice or ice cubes make great zero-calorie “snacks.”

To understand this eating regimen further, let’s see what happens when you consume food and what happens when you abstain from eating. The Feeding State versus the Fasting State

Feeding …show more content…

Everything that cannot be broken down further goes into the large intestines and will eventually be eliminated out of the system.

Digested food with high nutrient value is processed by the small intestine. Nutrients are absorbed by the intestinal wall, which are picked up by the bloodstream. It is also during this time when the insulin level of the blood spikes.

Insulin is essential in processing the simple carbohydrates in the blood, and turning these into expendable energy. Without the right amount of insulin, simple carbs (especially sugar) remain in the bloodstream, which increases blood sugar level – one of the main symptoms of diabetes.

The blood then passes through the liver which removes impurities and toxic substances. The “cleansed” blood with its valuable cargo of vitamins and minerals, flows to the different organs of the body.

It takes 10 calories (usually carbohydrate-based, and from the basal metabolism)to burn off 100 calories of food and drinks. The more calories you consume, the more calories you need to burn

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