Intermittent fasting is not about starving you, you can eat healthy foods in moderation. (tuthelens/shutterstock)
editor’s note: Author Cynthia. Thoreau is a nurse and an internationally renowned expert on women’s health. Although she looks decent now, she actually experienced a period of inexplicable weight gain after giving birth and when she was sick. At that time, she exercised desperately and ate less, but I didn’t lose 1 kg. Later, after research and a large number of literature surveys, it was found that the reason for my inability to lose weight was “hormones”. She found that anyone can lose weight as long as they understand the hormonal mechanism and combine it with 168 fasting.
What is “intermittent fasting”?
Simply put, intermittent fasting is “reducing the frequency of eating.” You will have a period of time when you don’t eat anything (a fasting period) and only eat during specific “feeding periods”. During meal times, you can enjoy protein, healthy fats and non-starchy carbohydrates without having to count the calories. You will carefully set the times for eating and fasting, and deliberately reduce the frequency of eating, which may be skipping meals or counting meals.
At present, there are three types of intermittent fasting methods that are most widely used by the public, namely: alternate-day fasting, eating today and fasting every other day; 5:2 intermittent fasting (5:2 intermittent fasting) , fasting 2 days a week and eating the other 5 days; and daily time-restricted feeding (daily time-restricted feeding), eating nothing for more than 12 to 16 hours a day (including bedtime at night) and eating only at specific times .
My 6-week intermittent fasting plan is centered on the “time-restricted eating method” and developed based on the “16:8” model (16 hours of fasting, 8 hours of eating). This is a plan that is the easiest to implement, the most flexible, and the most suitable for women of all ages.
You can schedule eating and fasting periods according to your biological stage (fertile, perimenopause, menopause, or post-menopause) so that it matches your state and helps maintain hormonal balance in your body. In addition, this kind of fasting time is actually not very long. After the body gradually adapts to fasting, you can slowly lengthen the fasting time a little bit.
Unlike many other types of eating plans, many studies have shown that time-restricted eating has a high adherence rate, which means that it can be implemented easily and last as long as you want!
My plan also allows you to eat a variety of nutrient-dense foods during your mealtimes. Best of all, this 16:8 program offers many proven health benefits, especially when it comes to women’s health.
Intermittent fasting is a new concept to the general public, a novel way of eating that didn’t catch on until recently. Having said that, people often forget that intermittent fasting has been around for a long time. In fact, it mirrors the eating patterns of our ancestors.
In prehistoric times or when materials were not so abundant, our ancestors did not eat three meals a day and often snacks. They did not have easy access to countless food items like we do today. They probably didn’t eat for a long time, because at that time, it was not easy to find food.
Depending on the season and climate, some days they may eat several meals a day, while other days they may have just one meal or nothing at all. That’s why I think humans are well-suited to eating intermittent fasting, because that’s how we’ve evolved to eat that way.
Intermittent fasting is the most powerful choice you can make for your health, your hormones, and your well-being as a woman. In fact, it’s also more powerful than any drug I’ve been able to prescribe. Shorter eating periods and longer fasting periods can bring you some amazing benefits. Here are the top 10 benefits of intermittent fasting:
fat burning
Many women in their 30s, 40s or 50s have dieted for years to lose weight, but their weight keeps going up and down. Not only that, this ups and downs have a tendency to increase year by year, from the original ups and downs of 4.5 kg a year, to 9 kg, 14 kg or more huge shocks, so many women’s wardrobes are full of all kinds of large, Clothes in small sizes.
This type of diet that causes weight fluctuations, known as yo-yo dieting, is very bad for your health.
A study by the American Heart Association found that women who ate a yo-yo diet had a higher risk of heart disease than women whose weight remained stable over the years. Repeated dieting is definitely not a good eating habit, but now you have the ability to get rid of this habit, because intermittent fasting can help you.
One of the reasons intermittent fasting can help you is because it balances your hormonal status. Several important hormones in the human body can be activated by intermittent fasting, and most of these hormones can bring about many positive effects on weight control and health, such as: enhancing “lipolysis” (i.e. burning fat) , improving metabolic flexibility (the ability to use fuel appropriately, see below for details), avoiding body fat accumulation, etc.
In the chapters that follow, I will describe these hormones in detail. In addition to balancing your hormonal status, fasting can speed up your metabolism, which can also help you maintain a healthy weight.
A retrospective study found that fasting can reduce belly fat by 4% to 7%. This proves that intermittent fasting is a great weapon for us when losing weight. Another reason why intermittent fasting can help us has to do with the types of fat in humans.
There are two types of adipose tissue in the human body: brown fat and white fat. Brown fat burns energy because it contains a lot of mitochondria, the power plants of cells.
If you could choose, which type of fat would you like to have more on your body? Brown fat, right? But things are not that simple. Adults don’t have much brown fat. Generally speaking, brown fat only exists in large amounts in babies. Their cute “baby fat” (baby fat) is usually made of brown fat. But the good news is that scientists recently discovered that we can turn white fat into brown! Intermittent fasting is the driving force behind this transformation.
This wonderful discovery was observed in experiments with mice. At that time, the researchers asked a group of mice to fast every other day; another group of mice let them eat as much as they wanted, and as much as they liked. Later, they found in the fasting group of mice that intermittent fasting changed their gut microbiota, which also promoted the production of short-chain fatty acids (SCFAs) in the gut.
This reaction can convert the fat-stored white fat into fat-burning brown fat, which can not only effectively reduce obesity, but also improve insulin resistance (a major problem leading to diabetes).
Of course, the experimental subjects of this study are mice, not humans, which I have taken into account when citing the research. However, the metabolism of mice is similar to that of humans, so these findings are very noteworthy. The important message from this study is that intermittent fasting can be very helpful in burning fat.
(Website special article)
<本文摘自《The 6-week 168 Intermittent Fasting Book for Women: A professional nutritionist teaches you to make good use of the 532 principle and adjust hormones with food. It is suitable for postpartum, menopause, and menopause, and you can lose weight even after 40!“, provided by United Publishing. >
Responsible Editor: Zeng Zhen
