How To Institute Intermittent Fasting On The Keto Diet
If youre looking for a successful intermediate diet for the keto diet, youve come to the right place. In order to make Keto Intermittent Fasting work well, you need to understand what it is and how it works. Once you understand what intermittent fasting is for, its important to put in the hard work. First, you need to break down each food group into its own list of ingredients. Next, its time to get your body in shape. You can do this by going through photo albums and reading about different fitness programs. After youve completed some research, its time to start putting food into your diet.
The Benefits Of Intermittent Fasting
There are a lot of benefits to intermittent fasting. The most obvious is that youre able to lose weight without counting calories. Many people who dont have time for a full-fledged diet and workout routine are able to control their weight and stay fit with intermittent fasting.
You can also make your body stronger, which is important for any endurance athlete. These benefits arent just theoretical either intermittent fasting has been shown to improve muscle growth, decrease fat storage, decrease the risk of heart disease and diabetes, boost the immune system, regulate blood sugar levels and even increase brain function.
Choose The Right Fasting Method For Your Body And Goals
When youre deciding how to begin fasting, your unique psychology, metabolism, and physiology each play a role:
- If youre the type of person who prefers to jump in with both feet, you may find the challenge of extended or more difficult fasting patterns rewarding.
- If youre feeling a bit uncertain about fasting, or arent sure how your body will respond to fasting, ease in instead.
- People who struggle with hunger or get hangry should start with a minimal fasting approach .
- Anecdotally, men may have an easier time with prolonged fasts, while women may need to adjust their fasting strategy at different times of their cycles.
Before you choose a fasting strategy, be sure to think about the ways your mindset and your body may affect your fasting experience.
Most people should probably start with 16/8 or another less-challenging approach like non-daily fasting, but theres no one-size-fits-all recommendation for fasting.
Broadly speaking, heres how your goal choice may affect your intermittent fasting approach and duration:
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Simplifying The Mechanisms Behind The Benefits: Autophagy Ketones And Fat Loss
Intermittent fasting is so powerful because you can use it to restrict calories, induce ketosis, and activate the processes of autophagy that are brought about by protein restriction and starvation.
If this scientific jargon is throwing you off, think about what it takes for you to clean your room. You may clean it in your spare time or have a set time on the weekend to do it, but what happens when the weekend comes?
Tasks or chores come up and you prioritize something else. After a week without cleaning, your room is just a bit dirtier than usual, but after a month of being too busy to clean, your room is filthy.
This is what happens to our cells when we eat three or more meals a day that completely fulfills our calorie needs every day. Even by eating the healthiest of foods, your cells still can get backed up with non-essential proteins and toxic compounds so what can you do?
To make sure that you clean your actual bedroom, you fast not from food but from being consumed by other obligations. To make sure that your cells can clean themselves, you must fast from food.
This fasting process will not only activate this clean process for your cells, but it will increase your ketone production and promote fat burning as well. Simply put, by adding intermittent fasting to your keto lifestyle, you can experience the benefits of keto more quickly along with the effects of autophagy.
No Diet Is Right For Everyone
As with any diet, certain individuals are not good candidates for the keto-intermittent fasting diet. If you are pregnant or nursing, have a sleep disorder, a history of bulimia or anorexia, or if you suffer from type I diabetes, you should avoid this type of diet program.
However, Type II diabetics can successfully follow this diet, but should only do so under the supervision of a licensed, health care practitioner. Additionally, if you experience irregular menstrual cycles, hormone imbalances, anxiety, sleeplessness, constant headaches or other disruptive side effects, you should discontinue the diet.
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Fasting To Induce Ketosis
I already listed the three ways your body may end up in ketosis . The point of the article is to explain how intermittent fasting and ketosis work together to help you achieve your health goals, so I am going to explain how to use fasting to induce ketosis. Before we get to that, I need to explain the stages of intermittent fasting because how fast you move through all the stages will impact how you will be able to use intermittent fasting and ketosis.
How To Do Intermittent Fasting: 4 Fasting Schedules To Try
Whether youre new to keto or have been doing it for a while, you may be wondering how to do intermittent fasting. At one point, the health and wellness industry advised eating 5-6 small meals per day for optimal metabolism. The claim was that smaller meals lead to weight loss, while a fasted state puts the body into starvation mode, causing it to hold on to calories.
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Intermittent Fasting Schedules To Follow
There are many ways to practice intermittent fasting for weight loss. The following are some of the most popular schedules:
Time-restricted eating: This involves consuming all of your meals within a period of 4-12 hours in a day. For example, you could choose to have your meals and calories between 8 am and 6 pm. Limiting your calorie intake to daylight hours is called eating with the sun. Time-restricted eating is particularly beneficial if you eat your meals before sunset. Not only does this help you eliminate bad habits like late-night snacking, but it improves your sleep and blood sugar control. Over time, time-restricted eating can lower your blood sugar levels, make you more sensitive to insulin, and reduce your blood pressure.
One-meal-a-day : This involves packing all of your days calories in a single meal that you consume within 1-2 hours. A small study conducted by Dr. Jason Fungs research group showed that fasting for 24 hours 3 times a week and eating only dinner on fasting days, eliminated the need for insulin in type-2 diabetic patients. This fasting approach also resulted in improved HbA1C, lower body mass index, and reduced waist circumference.
What intermittent fasting schedule is right for you? Find out here.
First What Exactly Is Keto
Keto is a high fat, low-carb diet often mistaken for a high protein diet because so many of its popular recipes include bacon and other types of animal products, but the focus really is on fat.
The goal of the keto diet is to eat meals that are 60 to 75 percent fat, 15 to 30 percent protein, and 5 to 10 percent carbohydrates. Doing so puts you into a state of ketosis, where you can burn ketones from fat instead of glucose from carbs, speeding up your metabolism and increasing the potential for weight loss . Between burning fat during ketosis, and losing water weight that you’d normally hold onto to store carbs for energy, you may drop quite a few pounds on keto.
Normal staples of a keto diet include healthy fats , meat, and dairy products. Foods that are off limits are any kind of pasta or bread, starchy veggies like potatoes, beans, and anything that contains sugar, including many cocktails.
There are some variations on the standard keto diet, and some of them include sneaking some carbs in. The cyclic keto diet involves eating keto five or six days out of the week, and then eating a small amount of carbs on the other day or two to replenish energy stores . There’s also the targeted keto diet, common in athletes as well, in which you basically carb load less than an hour before strenuous exercise for a burst of energythe object is that you’ll burn off the carbs before they’re stored as fat in the body.
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Benefits Of Intermittent Fasting
There are several advantages to intermittent fastingboth physiological and psychological.
The first benefit may be for those looking to lose weight. While the research isnt definitive on this, many people report that they find it much easier to stick to than traditional diets where youre forced to consume much fewer calories than you need.
Some might find it easier to simply not eat than to chronically maintain calorie intake well below their means. This could be more of a psychological effect than something physical. In addition, IF may make it easier to meal plan . If its one of your fasting days, you dont have to worry about preparing a meal, making time to eat, or worrying about WHAT youre going to eat. When done in the proper context, this could free up some time to be productive in work or hobbies.
Intermittent fasting is in its infancy as far as research goes, and most studies have been conducted in mice.
How To Know You Are In Ketosis
At this point, you may be wondering whats the best way to measure your ketone levels? How do you know that you are in ketosis? For beginners, it can be useful and motivating to use a ketone monitor. As you gain more experience, you will know you are in ketosis just by the way you feel. You will start recognizing some signs in hour body, like feeling satisfied even if hungry , feeling energetic and focused.
If you would like to purchase a ketone monitor, I recommend you look up the Keto Mojo. My affiliate link will give you a 15 percent discount.
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The Crescendo Method With Keto
The crescendo method of intermittent fasting is like a 16/8-light version. Choose two or three days a week and fast for 12-16 hours.
This means that youll eat a normal keto diet for 4 or 5 days a week. On the remaining days, youll eat keto but during a reduced period of time .
Sample Crescendo Method Intermittent Fasting Keto Schedule
How To Do Intermittent Fasting On A Keto Diet
Updated on / by Addison
Both the ketogeniclow carbohydrate dietand intermittent fasting have been shown to balance glucose levels in the bloodstream, improve insulin sensitivity, quell food cravings and make workouts more effective. All of these are essential if your goal is to achieve sustainable weight loss and an overall healthier lifestyle.
Because both diets have similar benefits, combining them is a new approach that has increased in popularity over the past few years. Below are some essential facts about using this diet combination as an effective weight loss tool:
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Intermittent Fasting For Superior Mental Performance
At least in some promising animal studies, intermittent fasting improves cognitive function and helps boost brain power.
As mentioned earlier, IF induces autophagy. This includes neuronal autophagy in your brain and central nervous system, which allows your brain cells to recycle and repair themselves for optimal function.
Studies suggest that disruption of neuronal autophagy can lead to neurodegeneration, causing your brain to function insufficiently and prevent you from performing at your full potential.
In contrast, the absence of food during fast periods promotes neuronal autophagy, leading to better cognitive outcomes.
Intermittent fasting also increases a protein in the brain called brain-derived neurotrophic factor .
This protein interacts with the parts of your brain that control learning, memory and cognitive function. Animal studies suggest BDNF helps protect brain cells and even stimulates the growth of new ones
IF also triggers ketogenesis or ketosis, where your body turns to fat for energy, metabolizing fat into ketones. Ketones easily cross the blood-brain-barrier, feeding your brain and resulting in better mental acuity, energy, and productivity.
Combined with a well-formulated whole-foods diet, IF avoids the blood sugar spikes caused by a high carb diet, which leads to brain fog and low mood issues like depression.
What Can I Consume On A Keto Diet Plan Day
Get fresh, whole-food recipes that are best for the keto diet regimen!
To start your keto diet regimen, you need to make sure you obtain lots of protein and also great fats in your diet plan. Yet if you intend to drop weight or maintain your weight on the keto diet plan, you must also focus on dish planning and also section control.
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The Science Of Intermittent Fasting
Intermittent fasting is an eating schedule that alternates between fasting and feeding. You set a time window for eating, eat only within that window, and fast the rest of the time.
For example, you might eat only between the hours of 10:00 AM and 6:00 PM .
IF is not a diet in the conventional sense, but rather, an ancient pattern of eating.
Historically, during hunter-gatherer days and even earlier, our ancestors were often in a natural fasting state while seeking food.
Modern industrial agriculture may have eliminated hunger for most people, but the widespread availability of packaged, processed food has also led to many new diseases stemming from obesity and high blood sugar.
Essentially, it turns out that having food available all the time is unnatural, and modern approaches to fasting work by reintroducing periods of scarcity for health purposes.
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- Growth hormone release
- Lipolysis
In a nutshell, avoiding food intake while fasting enables your body to naturally cleanse, repair and regenerate cells and tissues for optimal function.
Fasting also works incredibly well for fat loss because it allows you to eat fewer overall calories and burn more fat with less hunger.
Added bonus benefits include better cognition, brighter mood, and greater energy levels.
Not coincidentally, many of the benefits of fasting overlap with those of ketosis, which well cover more later in this article.
What Is A Keto Diet
The ketogenic or keto diet is a high-fat, very low-carb way of eating.
Fat comprises about 80 percent of your daily calories, and with moderate amounts of protein you aim to consume between 20 and 50 grams of net carbs each day depending on your personal needs.
This absence of carbohydrates from your diet forces your body to rely on fats instead of glucose for its main energy source.
In the metabolic process known as ketosis, your body breaks down fats to form substances called ketones that serve as an alternate fuel source.
Doing keto or Intermittent fasting can help with weight loss in the short term, though each diet is very restrictive, so they certainly arent for everyone.
But how about combining them? Could two be better than one?
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Things I Learned About Intermittent Fasting And Ketosis:
Heres what I learned throughout the year:
- After fasting overnight, there was ketones in my blood but not enough to be in ketosis.
- After fasting for about 16 hours, I was in ketosis, but usually not at the optimal level for weight loss .
- Fasting for 18 hours was enough the reach the optimal level. I would then, keep fasting for about 2 hours to enjoy the benefits.
- The 20:4 method was the most effective and sustainable intermittent fasting method for me. Even after reaching my goal weight, I enjoy doing it 2-3 times a week just for health reasons.
Moreover, I learned that weight loss for women over 40 takes time and perseverance. It requires looking for a lifestyle that you enjoy because you will need to keep it up for the rest of your life to not gain the weight back.
I love intermittent fasting because I feel free. I dont feel hungry all the time, and when I do feel hungry, thanks for the magic of ketosis, I feel amazing!
I am so excited about what I have learned, I created a 30-Day Program to help other women achieve the same results. The program takes you through the whole step-by-step process of doing a modified fast, practicing intermittent fasting, eating healthfully, and exercising efficiently. You can learn more about it here: 30-Day Intermittent Fasting Transformation.
Summary Of What We’ve Learned
Peter VanNewhyzen
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Can You Lose Weight Intermittent Fasting Without Keto
I get asked this question quite often from individuals who found keto and IF but want to move to a diet with more moderate carbohydrates.
Can you lose weight intermittent fasting without keto?
And the answer is of course, you can.
You can lose weight without keto AND without intermittent fasting. You may have had trouble losing weight previously, and keto and/or IF seemed like the holy grail, but it was just another means to an end.
As the saying goes, there’s more than one way to skin a cat.
You can look at both keto and intermittent fasting as tools you can implement when the time is right, but don’t confuse that with them being THEE only tools you can use for weight loss, weight maintenance, or even weight gain if that’s what you’re after.
