Intermittent fasting is an eating pattern where people limit their food consumption to certain hours of the day. Some research suggests that it may have benefits beyond weight loss, like improved brain and overall health.
Fasting from time to time is more natural than always eating 3–4 (or more) meals per day. When you fast, several things happen in your body on the cellular and molecular level.For example, your body adjusts hormone levels to make stored body fat more accessible. Your cells also initiate important repair processes and change the expression of genes.
There are several different ways of doing intermittent fasting — all of which involve splitting the day or week into eating and fasting periods. During the fasting periods, you eat either very little or nothing at all.
These are the most popular methods:
- The 16/8 method: Also called the Leangains protocol, it involves skipping breakfast and restricting your daily eating period to 8 hours, such as 1–9 p.m. Then you fast for 16 hours in between.
- Eat-Stop-Eat: This involves fasting for 24 hours, once or twice a week, for example by not eating from dinner one day until dinner the next day.
- The 5:2 diet: With this method, you consume only 500–600 calories on two nonconsecutive days of the week but eat normally the other 5 days.
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