Can Intermittent Fasting Helps Weight Loss?

Hi Guys!

As a continuation of my previous post on ways to lose weight without exercise, I’ve introduced you guys to the concept of intermittent fasting by skipping breakfast. In this post, I’m going to share about how intermittent fasting has helped me lose weight in the past.

By the way, do check out The 2 Week Diet Plan as I learned this and other nifty tricks on weight loss from it. You can read my full review of the diet book in my post here and how it had helped me drop pounds in just 2 weeks.

Just like the name suggest, it means we need to fast or skip meals intermittently i.e not in a continuous day. While drinks are allowed, you can only drink plain water or unsweetened drinks and not the usual sugary drinks.

There’s a lot of intermittent fasting types with my favorite being the 16-hour fast where you eat your last meal during dinner and then don’t eat any food until lunchtime the next day. To be precise, you can also skip other meals (not just breakfast) but I like to skip breakfast as it’s the easiest meals to be skipped.

I know some people can’t live without breakfast, but I can assure you it’s do-able. Sure, it’s very hard in the first 3-4 days or so but it will get easier later on. The trick that I’ve used is to just drink lots of water whenever you fell hungry.

Another tip is to ignore the growling from your stomach as it’s just a sign that there’s no food in your stomach – which is a very very good sign for us that want to lose weight (more on that later on).

The way our body works is it’s either in fed or fasted state. Fed state is when you eat and 4-5 hours after that and during this state, the body will get all the energy it needs from the foods.

What that means?

That means during fed state, there is nowhere you can lose weight!

Losing weight can only happen when the body uses the excess/surplus energy storage from our fat cells, and this is only possible during the fasted state.

When we fast, the body is deprived of readily available energy from foods and has to depend on the surplus storage from inside our body. And you’ve guessed it correctly – this process will help us to lose weight!

Remember when I said about stomach growling and it’s a very good sign? That just means the body have already digested all the foods we ate and can’t no longer find any foods and has to switch to fat burning process.

I’ve always liked it when my stomach is growling in the mornings – that just means that I’m doing the right thing and letting my body to burn my fat =)

My best advice is to drink lots of plain water or any unsweetened drinks to help quench your hunger pangs. By the way, don’t underestimate the effects of plain ol’ water in a fasted state.

While in the past I’ve used lots of plain coffee or tea to help me got through the fast, lately I’ve experienced an equal or better effect from just plain water.

By the way, I’d refrain from sleeping during fasting as it defeats the whole purpose. It’s tempting to just sleep during your fast but do remember the body uses way lesser energy when we sleep so it reduces the effectiveness of the fast.

The other rule with intermittent fasting is to keep your other meals to have the same type of food and quantity as when you’re not fasting.

This is very important to ensure you don’t overeat just to compensate or get you ready for the fast. As I’ve mentioned previously, total caloric consumption should always be lower than total caloric expenditure to lose weight.

By doing intermittent fasting and skipping 1 or 2 meals, we will be effectively reducing our caloric consumption by 25%-50% and this will helps A LOT with our weight loss goals.

I hope you guys have learnt a bit on intermittent fasting and its great effects on weight loss. You can check out this excellent article to know more about it. Till next time then!