30/07/2020
Whether it’s time restricting eating, low calorie eating for a week, the fasting mimicking diet, fasting for a day a week, or ketogenic diet, they all do the same thing.
Food has an amazing ability to heal, but the timing of when we eat or abstain from eating can also have really amazing impacts on our health.
Autoimmunity, gut issues, Alzheimer’s, and aging have all been found to benefit from the right kind of fasting. Short-term fasting specifically goes after visceral fat—the belly fat leading to inflammation and chronic diseases—providing a huge metabolic boost on a cellular level.
There are no hard and fast rules except that during your fasting hours, you consume zero (or close to zero) calories. You’ll find numerous types of intermittent fasting online, including alternate-day fasting and fasting one day a week.
For many patients, I find a 16-hour window becomes that “magic” number. It isn’t as unpleasant as it might sound, since you’ll be sleeping about eight of those hours.
Fasting is not for everyone. If you are dealing with hormonal imbalance or trying to get pregnant, it’s not a great idea. Some people tend to lose too much weight too fast.
However, there is a type of fast that mostly everyone can do every day, and that's the 12 hour window. That means that there is a 12 hour window between your last meal of the day and your first meal of the next day. Let's say you eat your last meal at 7pm, your first meal of the next day would be 7am or after.