The Fast Diet Guide

By Mahmoud Yacoub

No matter if you're someone who keeps up with the latest health and fitness trends or someone who is just getting started in your search for ways to live a longer and healthier life, you've almost certainly heard of intermittent fasting (IF). It became one of the most popular trends for a reason.
Not only will you lose weight if you follow an intermittent fasting program, but you will also improve your health and live for an extra few years as a result. Not to mention how much IF will simplify your life—gone are the days of slaving away in the kitchen slaving away at three, four, or even more meals a day!
Even though fasting has been practiced for thousands of years, scientists have only recently discovered the remarkable effects that intermittent fasting (IF) has on your brain and body. It can reduce oxidative damage and inflammation, as well as protect cells more broadly. Because intermittent fasting is so effective, it can reverse type 2 diabetes. Considering that 10.5 percent of the population in the United States has been diagnosed with type 2 diabetes and that an additional 21.4 percent of people with the disease have not yet been identified, this is very encouraging news. When it comes to prediabetes, 88 million people over 18 are affected by the condition.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Feb 22, 2022
• ISBN: 9781458391858

Book preview

Chapter 1: The Fundamentals Of Intermittent Fasting

Congratulations! You've made the decision to embark on a weight-loss journey that will help you feel more confident and look your best, and you've chosen intermittent fasting as your method of choice. It is one of the most popular health and fitness diets in the world. It is effective for weight loss, improving overall health, and simplifying one's way of living for a good reason.

You've taken the first step toward making positive changes in your life, and if your future self could speak to you, they'd express their gratitude for what you've done. Even though you may have seen and heard a lot about intermittent fasting on the internet likely, you aren't entirely sure what it is or how it can benefit your health. And that is exactly where this book comes in.

This chapter is all about the ins and outs of intermittent fasting, including its benefits and drawbacks. We'll go over precisely what it is and how it works to keep you healthy while also assisting you in reaching your weight loss goals in this article. Along the way, we'll show you some suitable recipes for use with the various intermittent fasting methods.

Let's get down to the nitty-gritty of things right away.

What Is Intermittent Fasting?

Intermittent fasting is more accurately described as a pattern of eating instead of a specific diet. It is a method of planning your meals to ensure that you get the maximum amount of nutrients and satisfaction. The beauty of intermittent fasting is that it does not require you to alter your eating habits; instead, it requires you to alter when you eat.

You might be thinking, What difference does it make if I change my eating schedule if I'm still eating the same foods? You might be wondering. Plenty! One of the primary benefits of intermittent fasting is that it allows you to achieve your desired level of leanness without resorting to a fanciful miracle diet' or drastically reducing your daily caloric intake to the point of malnutrition.

Almost all of the time, you'll be exerting effort to maintain your caloric intake at or near the level that you were at when you started the diet. Generally speaking, people prefer to eat larger meals in a shorter period, but we'll get to that later. It's also a great way to keep your muscle mass while also losing weight by utilizing intermittent fasting.

The most significant benefit of intermittent fasting is its extreme simplicity: it is one of the most straightforward diet plans available for losing weight while maintaining muscle mass, as it requires slight modification in daily routine. This means that it falls neatly into the category of simple enough to be doable yet significant enough to be worthwhile to do' initiatives.

Fasting has been practiced by humans throughout all stages of their evolutionary development. At the time of their existence, prehistoric hunters and gatherers could not walk to their local supermarkets, nor did they have refrigerators, let alone enough food to store away. They were sometimes unable to find anything to eat during their stay.

To adapt, humans have evolved to survive for extended periods without food while still functioning normally. Nowadays, fasting is more of religious practice, but as you'll see, it also has some beneficial health effects, as you'll see in a moment. Fasting for 24 hours twice a week or fasting for 16 hours a day are two of the most common intermittent fasting methods currently in use. The latter is more common than the former.

How Does It Work?

It is essential to understand the difference between the fasting state and the feeding state to understand how intermittent fasting promotes weight loss. When your body is digesting food and absorbing its nutrients, it is fed. This state usually begins when you start eating and persists for about four or five hours throughout the process of your body digesting the food and absorbing its nutrients. It is quite challenging for your body to burn fat while it’s in the fed state because your insulin levels will be high.

Once the fed state has been completed, your body will shift into a state known as the postabsorptive state - essentially the state your body is in when it is not processing a meal. This state lasts for about nine to twelve hours after a meal, which is also about when you enter the fasted state. Insulin levels are low in this state, making it much easier for your body to burn fat.

The fasted state also allows your body to burn fat that it otherwise could not while it was in the fed state. Since it takes about twelve hours for the body to enter the fasted state, it’s quite rare that we bum fat during this time. This is one of the main reasons why you’ll notice yourself start to lose weight while intermittent fasting, without really changing the things you eat, how often you exercise, or how much you eat. When you fast, you put your body in a fat-burning state that does not normally enter when you eat on a regular schedule.

Unique Advantages Of Intermittent Fasting

Sure, losing weight is pretty great, but that’s not the only benefit of intermittent fasting. Here are a few more:

You'll Live Longer

As you are most likely already aware, losing a few pounds will almost always improve your overall health, which will, in turn, increase your life expectancy as a result. The fact that lowering your daily caloric intake is one of the many ways to extend your life has been well known by scientists for decades. You can rationally reason that your body will find ways to keep you alive if you're hungry, which makes sense.

But who would want to starve themselves to death just to extend their life by a few years? For the most part, people want to make the most of their limited time on this planet, and starving does not sound particularly pleasurable, at least not to us. One of the most beneficial aspects of intermittent fasting is that it activates many of the same mechanisms in our bodies that are activated when we consume fewer calories.

The bottom line is that you get to live longer, and you don't have to starve yourself to do so. Scientists discovered in 1945 that intermittent fasting could be used to extend a mouse's lifespan. Another study, which was conducted more recently, concluded that alternate-day intermittent fasting was associated with increased life expectancy and decreased mortality.

You'll Enjoy a Simpler Day

Many people are interested in changing their behaviors, reducing stress, and simplifying their daily lives. Intermittent fasting can provide these simplicities that many people crave enjoyably. When you use intermittent fasting, you won't have to worry about making breakfast in the mornings, which is stressful in and of itself.

If you don’t have a problem with cooking and enjoy eating, then the whole ‘three meals a day’ routine probably isn’t a problem for you. But, intermittent fasting will allow you to eat one less meal each day, which means there’s one less meal to plan a day, one less meal to cook, and one less meal to stress about. Life becomes more superficial, and thus, less stressful.

Intermittent Fasting Is Far Easier Hand Any Diet

One of the most important reasons that all of the other diets you've tried have failed is not that you started eating the wrong foods, but rather that you didn't stick with the diet for a long enough period. Much less does it have to do with nutrition and much more about how you conduct yourself?

Intermittent fasting can help with this situation. Once you get rid of the notion that you have to eat regularly, it is straightforward to implement. Researchers from the National Library of Medicine discovered that intermittent fasting was an effective method for losing weight in obese adults and that subjects could adapt to an intermittent fasting routine in as little as two weeks.

The thought of beginning a diet is much easier than the actual act of beginning one. It is the polar opposite of this: it can be difficult to comprehend at first, but it is relatively simple to maintain once you get the hang of it.

If you're reading this, you've likely considered going on a diet in the past. The first time you come across a diet that appears to offer everything you're looking for, it's natural to believe that getting started will be a piece of cake, no pun intended. However, once you begin to get into it, things become difficult, and you begin to miss the foods that you used to enjoy the most - fried chicken, tacos, and spaghetti - that you used to eat.

Your food expenditures will also decrease significantly, and you will find that you are no longer hungry as frequently. Even though it may take some time to get used to the idea of not being able to eat, once you've started intermittent fasting, you'll never go back to your old eating habits.

Reduced Cancer Risk

To be fair, this one is debatable since there has not been much research regarding the relationship between fasting and cancer, but early findings tend toward being more positive. A study done by the National Library of Medicine involving ten cancer patients suggested that fasting before a chemotherapy session