Fasting Every Other Day Accelerates Weight Loss?
Fasting has often been a controversial method to achieve a variety of things. Some people fast to help cleanse their system, or detoxify, in fact that may be one of the more popular reasons people do it, or they may fast because they are on a special order from a medical doctor before surgery or some other procedure or test, and lastly, and what we are going to talk about fasting for today, is they do it to actually lose weight, or accelerate their weight loss. Critics say that fasting for weight loss only confuses the body, and can actually do more damage than good when it comes to how your metabolism reacts.
Some believe that fasting actually slows the metabolism down, and may do so permanently, because the body is fooled into thinking it is starving, and therefore it tries like crazy to hold onto the food that it is getting by slowing the metabolism down, or in other words, the rate at which they are processing or using the food up as fuel for the body. I personally have tried fasting before, and it just wasn’t for me. While I can see how some people may like it, I simply couldn’t function the same without the proper nutrition that I’m used to, even when I was on a fast that still provided some kind of nutrients, although only in liquid form, I just couldn’t take the deprivation.
On the other hand, some people think that fasting clears their mind and actually helps them to be productive. I can see how that would be too, because although I had a hard time while fasting, I must say that I didn’t waste any energy on thinking about preparing food, actually preparing it, or wasting time with it, so I did seem to be more productive, maybe to take my mind off of it.
Researchers have now found evidence that fasting every other day, then eating between a few select hours on the days between where the patient actually gets to eat food, actually accelerates the weight loss efforts of obese patients. They found that, at least in obese patients, when the did this fast regimen, they lost weight faster, and seemed to like it better than restricting caloric intake every day they eat, because they knew they could eat what they pleased in those few hours the next day.
Researchers presume that the reason it helps to accelerate the weight loss fairly significantly is that it actually shrinks the stomach faster, so on those off days when fasting isn’t practiced, they are eating less because they feel full faster. That’s definitely interesting, and you may want to look into it more if you happen to be overweight and are looking for other alternatives to traditional dieting that may help you to stay within your guidelines and reach your weight loss goals faster without as much perceived effort of feelings of deprivation.
