Intermittent Fasting For Health And Weight Loss

For those who are unfamiliar with IF (Intermittent Fasting), it consists on cycling periods of eating with periods of fasting.
You basically eat your normal amount of food in a certain time frame. It’s not a diet, but just a pattern of eating.

There are many popular ways of intermittent fasting.

One of them consists on fasting for a full 24 hours during two non-consecutive days per week,
Another way is to skip one or two meals per day,
And finally, having an "eating window" of "X" number of hours a day.

That last method is the one that I feel is more natural and works wonders.

I tend to follow the "16/8 fast", which is having an ~8 hours eating window, followed by ~16 hours of fasting.
It may sound complex, but it's actually pretty simple.

What I like to do is to have my dinner very early (around 4 pm) and fast until 7-8 am of the next day. That's about 15-16 hours of fasting.
Most days, I finish my fast with some form of exercise (generally, a run). I get up early in the morning, go for a fasted run, and then have my breakfast.

Intermittent Fasting has many benefits on the human body, to name a few:

-Increased fatty acid oxidation
-Increased insulin sensitivity
-Faster healing and recovery
-Improved mental clarity
-Improved hormone regulation and increase in HGH production

I think IF is a good practice to give our digestive system a rest. If we are eating all the time, our body has to spend energy constantly to digest food, when it could spend it for cell regeneration and healing in general.

To get the benefits we don't HAVE TO follow that eating pattern every single day of the week for months on end, but the more we do it, the better the results will be.

I must say also that not every single person gets the same results (and, in general, men tend to do better with it than women), but it is certainly worth to give it a try!