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When Should I Start My Fasting Timer

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Whats Happening With Your Body: Fat Burning Mode

Beginners Guide to Intermittent Fasting | Jason Fung

When you consume a typical diet of carbohydrate rich foods, your body breaks down sugars and starches into glucose. Glucose is the primary source of energy for the body. However, when you fast or go into ketosis glucose becomes limited, and your body must turn to fat stores for the energy it requires. Your body breaks fat down into glycerol and fatty acids. The liver synthesizes ketones using glycerol. The glycerol is broken down by the liver for additional glucose, and finally, those ketones are used by your brain as glucose becomes less available.

Fasting Benefits Over Time

As I mentioned already, the various fasting benefits will occur at different times during your fast. For the average person, heres what you can expect :

  • Maximum benefit for decreased insulin levels: 1 day
  • Maximum benefit for autophagy: 3 days
  • Maximum benefits for weight loss and ketone production: 5 days and beyond
  • Maximum benefits for immune reboot and musculoskeletal stem cells: 2 days
  • Maximum benefits for intestinal stem cells: 4 days

Whats Happening With Your Body: Healing Mode

During stage three, your body starts to enter into a healing mode. This healing process begins as your digestive system takes a rest from the common stressors and toxins it endures on a daily basis. As a result, your body has fewer free radicals entering the mix, and oxidative stress decreases.

On the flip side, fasting causes a stress that provides an added benefit. This is a kind of mild stress that is comparable to the stress caused by exercise, which ultimately makes you stronger and your immune system more resilient.

Also Check: Intermittent Fasting Carb Cycling Meal Plan

How To Fast: Plan Ahead And Be Flexible

Once youre used to fasting, you may find that you can incorporate a short fast on little notice. But when youre just starting out, make sure to plan your fast at least a few days in advance. Youll want to ensure that your fast isnt going to interfere with work, family, or training, all of which can counteract the positive effects of the test run.

Put some thought into where and how you will be fasting. Fast at home before trying it in the wilderness or on vacation. Have plenty of water on hand. Tell your friends and family youre fasting so they know whats going on if you start feeling irritable, and so you wont have to answer the same questions 25 times at the next group dinner.

Lastly, dont be too rigid. If you typically eat from 11 a.m. to 7 a.m., its perfectly fine to eat before a morning race or a big training day, breaking that fasting window. Consistency is good inflexibility is not.

Degrees Below The Horizon For Fajr And Either 17 Or 18 Degrees For Ish

How many calories you need to lose weight?

It is with this in mind that we may conclude that an individuals Mushhadah for prayer times must not negate the accepted criterion that was originated by global and widespread mushhadah established in different countries and throughout the centuries. That criterion is the basis for the decision of both Muslim jurists and astronomers that Fajr should be calculated when the sun is at 18 degrees below the horizon for Fajr, and either 17 or 18 degrees for Ish. It should be noted that the slight choice offered for Ish times is insignificant and thus there is no need to discuss it here.

Recommended Reading: How To Maximize Weight Loss With Intermittent Fasting

How To Fast: Choose Your Preferred Style

Fasting is distinct from the likes of a juice cleanse or a two-day restrictive diet. There are two categoriestraditional and intermittenteach of which appeals to different individuals depending on their goals and lifestyles.

While both can be beneficial to your brain health, intermittent fasting is better for weight loss and maintenance. Pick the one that works best for what you want to accomplish.

Concerns And Adjustments With Intermittent Fasting

Intermittent fasting is becoming popular, but it’s still not the normal thing to do. As a result, you may have some concerns about it or you may want to make some adjustments to your intermittent fasting schedule. Here are some common questions I’ve seen that should help point you in the right direction.

What if I ate my first meal at breakfast, skipped lunch, and then ate my second meal at dinner time?

This idea would work well for one reason, but not well for another reason. Let’s talk about both.

First, if your goal is to lose weight, then skipping lunch should help because it decreases the number of calories that you’re eating throughout the day. As I said in my article on lessons learned from 1 year of intermittent fasting, even if you try to eat two large meals instead of three regular meals, it’s hard to get the same number of calories. Even if you want to eat more, you often end up eating less.

So the end result of skipping lunch is that you would probably reduce your overall caloric intake and end up losing weight.

However, one of the primary benefits of intermittent fasting is that it puts you in a fat burning state. In other words, fasting makes it more likely that you’ll burn fat and not muscle.

In other words, you need to have at least 8 to 12 hours off from eating before your body enters the fasted, fatburning state. This is why you want to squish your meals into a smaller time frame rather than spreading them throughout the day.

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How Do You Get Rid Of Lower Belly Pooch

6 Simple Ways to Lose Belly Fat, Based on Science Avoid sugar and sugar-sweetened drinks. Foods with added sugars are bad for your health. Eat more protein. Protein may be the most important macronutrient for weight loss. Eat fewer carbohydrates. Eat fiber-rich foods. Exercise regularly. Track your food intake.

Questions About Exercise And Intermittent Fasting

the BEST Intermittent Fasting Schedule (& my personal fasting schedule)

A lot of people have questions about how to exercise and train while fasting. Here are some good questions that should push you in the right direction with your training.

I wanted to thank you both for writing such a fantastic, motivating blog and for introducing me to intermittent fasting. I am enjoying watching my weight go down by basically doing something that involves no effort skipping breakfast! I was hoping you could elaborate more on your exercise routine. I have waded through the Leangains site and the other links you mentioned in the beginner’s guide, and while very interesting, they are WAY too complex for me at this stage.Paul S.

Readers like Paul are what make our community great. He read about an idea that interested him and even though some of the details were overwhelming, he didn’t let that prevent him from taking action. In other words, he started before he felt ready.

I try to make my writing as easy as possible to use, but it’s always up to you to experiment and see if it makes sense for your circumstances. Keep up the good work, Paul!

Back to the question

Intermittent fasting works great with most strength training programs.

I believe in strength training and compound movements. I think 99% of the population could get in the best shape of their life with only eight exercises: snatch, clean and jerk, squat, bench press, deadlift, pushups, pullups, and sprints. If you did those exercises and did them well, then that’s all you would ever need.

Also Check: What To Eat In 16 8 Intermittent Fasting

Examples Of Different Intermittent Fasting Schedules

If youre considering giving fasting a shot, there are a few different options for working it into your lifestyle.

Daily Intermittent Fasting

Most of the time, I follow the Leangains model of intermittent fasting, which uses a 16hour fast followed by an 8hour eating period. This model of daily intermittent fasting was popularized by Martin Berkhan of Leangains.com, which is where the name originated.

It doesn’t matter when you start your 8hour eating period. You can start at 8am and stop at 4pm. Or you start at 2pm and stop at 10pm. Do whatever works for you. I tend to find that eating around 1pm and 8pm works well because those times allow me to eat lunch and dinner with friends and family. Breakfast is typically a meal that I eat on my own, so skipping it isn’t a big deal.

Because daily intermittent fasting is done every day it becomes very easy to get into the habit of eating on this schedule. Right now, you’re probably eating around the same time every day without thinking about it. Well, with daily intermittent fasting it’s the same thing, you just learn to not eat at certain times, which is remarkably easy.

Weekly Intermittent Fasting

One of the best ways to get started with intermittent fasting is to do it once per week or once per month. The occasional fast has been shown to lead to many of the benefits of fasting we’ve already talked about, so even if you don’t use it to cut down on calories consistently there are still many other health benefits of fasting.

Fast For 12 Hours A Day

The rules for this diet are simple. A person needs to decide on and adhere to a 12-hour fasting window every day.

According to some researchers, fasting for 1016 hours can cause the body to turn its fat stores into energy, which releases ketones into the bloodstream. This should encourage weight loss.

This type of intermittent fasting plan may be a good option for beginners. This is because the fasting window is relatively small, much of the fasting occurs during sleep, and the person can consume the same number of calories each day.

The easiest way to do the 12-hour fast is to include the period of sleep in the fasting window.

For example, a person could choose to fast between 7 p.m. and 7 a.m. They would need to finish their dinner before 7 p.m. and wait until 7 a.m. to eat breakfast but would be asleep for much of the time in between.

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Schedule #: Alternate Day Fasting

With alternate day fasting you eat every other day.

What it involves

You eat normally one day. The next day, you dont eat. Repeat.

People who benefit

This is an advanced fasting schedule that works best for people who have already mastered fasting one or two days a week.

As with schedule #6, its ideal for people whose lifestyles reinforce the fasting schedule. Think of hospital medical professionals who work 12-24 hour shifts. For them, it might be easier and even preferable to not eat during their shift.

If you try it:

  • Practice fasting for shorter periods, first. Again, this is an advanced practice. Before trying alternate day fasting, experiment with fasting once or twice a week.
  • Plan for when you will break your fast. Make sure youve got food at the ready.
  • Be flexible. If you break the fast early, you didnt screw up. Try to learn from it and move on. Also, try not to compensate for mistakes by fasting even harder. For example, if you eat dinner on a fasting day, dont skip a meal on your eating day in order to make up for it.
  • Take time off from fasting when your life gets busy. ADF doesnt pair well with hard training, excessive life stress, or even someones monthly menstrual cycle.

Schedule #: 1: : 4 Omad And Other Types Of Time Restricted Feeding

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Popularized and researched by Satchidananda Panda, PhD, time-restricted feeding combines a fasting window with a feeding window. During the fasting window, people either dont eat at all or eat much less than usual. During the feeding window, people may either eat normally or more than normal.

In theory, this protocol takes advantage of our natural circadian rhythm to optimize metabolic health.

What it involves

Three of the more popular types of time-restricted eating include:

  • 16:8, which calls for a 16-hour fast followed by an 8-hour eating window.
  • 20:4, which entails fasting for the first 20 hours of each day, and then eating only during a 4-hour overfeeding window. Generally, most people put their 4-hour overfeeding window at the end of the day, as its more convenient for family dinners and after-work training sessions.
  • OMAD, or one meal a day, which involves consuming all of your calories within 1 hour and nothing for the other 23 hours.

In each approach, some people focus on including highly-satiating foods such as colorful veggies and lean protein. These foods can help to dampen hunger during the fasting window.

For someone following 16:8, it might look like this:

Monday, 8pm: Finish your last meal of the day.

Tuesday, 11am: Work out.

Tuesday, 12pm: Eat your first meal, ideally the biggest one of the day.

Tuesday, 12-8pm: Feeding window during which you eat your daily energy intake.

Tuesday, 8pm: Last meal of the day ends, and the fasting period starts.

Also Check: Is Fasting In The Morning Good For Weight Loss

When Should I Begin My Fast

2. Early fasting state. Around 34 hours after eating, your body transitions into the early fasting state, which lasts until around 18 hours after eating. During this phase, your blood sugar and insulin levels start to decline, causing your body to start converting glycogen into glucose to use as energy .

What Are The Negative Effects Of Intermittent Fasting

In my own experimentation with Intermittent Fasting since 2014, I have found very few negative side effects with Intermittent Fasting.

The biggest concern most people have is that Intermittent Fasting will lead to lower energy, focus, and the holy crap I am hungry feeling during the fasting period and ruin them.

People are concerned that they will spend all morning being miserable because they havent consumed any food, and thus will be miserable at work and ineffective at whatever task it is they are working on.

The following are my thoughts and experiences, and your results may vary:

Yes, the initial transition from EATING ALL THE TIME, to intermittent fasting MIGHT be a bit of a jolt to your system it was for me.

However, once I got through the transition after a few days, my body quickly adapted and learned to function just as well only eating a few times a day.

Although I fast for 16 hours per day with no issues, the following might help assuage your fears that skipping breakfast will cause your body to eat itself and your brain to implode:

After 48-hours of fasting in a recent study , cognitive performance, activity, sleep, and mood are not adversely affected in healthy humans by two days of calorie-deprivation. Youll be fasting for far less time than that.

So why do I feel grouchy and lethargic when I skip breakfast?

If you eat breakfast every morning, your body expects to wake up and eat food.

Read Also: What Can You Drink When Fasting

What Is Dry Water Fasting

If youve tried a few water fasts successfully, you might be interested in the next fasting challenge, which would be dry water fasting. Under this type of fast, you consume no food as well as no water. Since your body needs both for long-term survival, dry water fasting is done in even briefer intervals than standard water fasting if fasting consecutively, such as 24 hours straight.

There are two types of dry water fasts: hard and soft. With a soft dry water fast, while youre still not drinking any water, you are allowed to use it. You can wash your hands with soap and water, bathe in water, and brush your teeth with water.

If youre undergoing a hard dry water fast, then the rules are even tighter. You cannot have contact with any water at all until your fast is over. That means brushing your teeth dry and refraining from showering for the duration of the fast.

New intermittent fasters will want to begin with a standard water fast before moving on to soft dry water fasts. It takes the most discipline and experience to get through a hard dry water fast, so dont jump immediately to that one.

Is Intermittent Fasting Right For You

How Often Should You Do Intermittent Fasting?

Fasting, like eating a low carb-high fat diet, is another tool for weight loss and improving your health. But the effectiveness of these tools rely on whether you can do them consistently over the long run.

Here are some pros and cons to help you decide:

  • Its simple and easier to stick to because you simply skip a meal when youre not hungry or too busy to eat.
  • You can fit it into your lifestyle, i.e. schedule around special occasions, Holidays.
  • However, theres the hunger . You need to develop the skill to ride the ebb and flow of hunger by being more mindful about why you eat. But because its a skill, you can learn it.

What if you achieved the health benefits you want from intermittent fasting?

How will that change you?

“You don’t have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step.”

– Martin Luther King Jr.

If you’re looking for a simple, doable way to practice fasting, I get it. It shouldn’t have to be hard. Get my FREE email course below that shows you the easier way.

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Quick Answer: What Time Should I Start Fasting

The easiest way to do the 12-hour fast is to include the period of sleep in the fasting window. For example, a person could choose to fast between 7 p.m. and 7 a.m. They would need to finish their dinner before 7 p.m. and wait until 7 a.m. to eat breakfast but would be asleep for much of the time in between.

How Do You Curb Hunger When Fasting

The simplest, easiest, and healthiest method to stave off hunger while fasting is to consume adequate amounts of fluid, especially water. Much of the time, hunger is actually thirst so you should reach for some water. In fact, filling up on good, clean water will be your number one weapon to combat hunger.

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