Member-only story
How to Succeed at Intermittent Fasting and Make it A Habit
From Atkins to paleo to Keto and beyond, there has been much chatter over the last few decades about the best way to lose weight and actually keep it off. In the late 2010s intermittent fasting (IF) caught fire, thanks to blockbuster books like “The Obesity Code (aff)” and “The Fast Diet. (aff)”
Intermittent fasting simply means not eating (or drinking anything with calories or artificial sweeteners) for a specific period of time. There are a number of intermittent fasting timetables out there, but the most popular is probably the 16:8 timetable, during which a person fasts for 16 hours (the “fasting window) and then uses the eight-hour window to eat (“the feeding window”).
How Does Intermittent Fasting Work?
Why would anyone voluntarily shun food for such a long stretch, when they could just eat reasonably all the livelong day? It all boils down to biology. The carbohydrates we eat are broken down into sugar, which are important because the cells need them for energy. The problem is that any excess sugar is stored in fat cells. These sugars can only be released from the fat cells (to be used as energy) if people allow their insulin levels to dip low enough. Every time we eat or snack, we experience an insulin spike, effectively blocking the sugar from getting burned off…
