By now you've probably heard of intermittent fasting, arguably the hottest health trend of the last couple years. It involves fasting (or refraining from eating) during parts of your day, restricting the amount of time during where you consume calories.
It's been heralded as not only a foolproof weight-loss method, but also a potential cure for things like high cholesterol, high blood pressure, poor sleep, insulin resistance, even cancer and Alzheimer's disease. A new study in The New England Journal of Medicine links fasting to "increased stress resistance, increased longevity and a decreased incidence of diseases, including cancer and obesity."
Want to learn more? And maybe try it yourself? Here's everything you need to know about intermittent fasting (which I'll also refer to as "IF"), including some of my own experiences with it.
Editors' note: You should always consult with a doctor before making changes to your diet or eating behaviors.
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The utter simplicity of intermittent fasting
Most of us eat throughout the day, starting with breakfast when we wake up and perhaps ending with a dessert or snack after dinner. If you have breakfast at 7 a.m. and a final snack at 8 p.m., you're consuming food for 13 hours; that's your current "eating window." The idea behind IF is simply to shorten that window -- not necessarily to eat less (though of course that's part of it), but to eat less often.
For example, most experts agree that you can start to experience IF benefits with an 8-hour eating window, meaning a 16-hour fast. So you could have lunch at noon and still have your 8 p.m. snack (well, ideally 7:45 p.m, so you're actually done at 8). That's it. If you can stick to that, it may be enough to produce results.
But, wait: Isn't that just skipping breakfast? And haven't we heard for years that skipping breakfast actually leads to weight gain? Yes and yes. However, IF requires a "clean" fast to be effective (more on that below), and once you get accustomed to it, your appetite should correct so that you no longer overeat once your window opens.
Here's what I love about this: It costs nothing. It requires nothing: You don't have to buy books or gear or supplements or meals. You just adapt yourself to a slightly different way of eating (or "WOE") and that's it. The simplicity -- and affordability -- of IF is what drew me to it.
The best part about intermittent fasting
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