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The first months of the new year for some of us are that tragic moment when we face reality and resolve to lose weight. Also due to the excesses of the holidays, we subject ourselves to dietary restrictions that are often difficult to follow, which we inevitably interrupt after a few days from the beginning.
Today we want to reveal a secret to lose weight without losing your mind by counting calories or buying substitute foods.
The secret is to practice intermittent fasting. It is indeed a very valuable tool to maintain a stable weight and promote the digestion process and waste management. Easy to integrate into everyday life, it adapts very well to our sleep/wake cycle. The most difficult limit to overcome is our fear, the doubt that we will starve to death within the day... absolutely false!
Intermittent fasting consists of limiting food intake to an 8-hour window each day, which is a very simple mechanism to regulate our meals, help our digestive system, and not exceed the amount of food. Think about it, 8 hours are only 1/3 of our day. This significantly reduces the risk of overeating!
It's true that it may be a bit difficult at the beginning, that the feeling of hunger can be annoying, that even the feeling of an empty stomach doesn't help us fall asleep or be in a good mood in the morning, but these are temporary inconveniences. Without even realizing it, we will already be accustomed to fasting and we will realize that we actually have more mental hunger than real hunger. In fact, once we get into the mechanism, we will start to feel much more rested in the morning, because our body will not have exerted itself to digest food during the night. The quality of our sleep will improve and we will wake up feeling much lighter, energetic, and cheerful.
In reality, the idea of intermittent fasting is not new: our ancestors, who had to get up in the morning to go look for food, probably spent hours walking before finding something to eat and when they found it, they did not consume anything else until the next day. This naturally led them to fast for many hours a day.
The mechanism consists of fasting between 14 and 16 hours between dinner and breakfast. In reality, it starts to be effective already after 12 hours but as a general rule we can go up to 16 hours (there are people who do more but it is not necessary). The ideal, especially to increase the process of autophagy, is to fast for 16 hours (the process of reusing metabolic waste to generate energy that the body performs when there is nothing else to eat), as this reduces food intake to only 8 hours.
So just adjust the time of dinner and breakfast to benefit from this wonder, having a light dinner and enriching breakfast (in this way we accompany the circadian cycles). To do a 16-hour fast, for example, you will have dinner at 7:00 pm and have breakfast at 11:00 am.
During these 14/16 hours just drink plenty of water, filtered broth, infusions, tea, coffee (without sugar, without milk or plant-based drinks). If you need to take medication or supplements, of course, you can do it.
Ideally, do it during the week to leave the weekend free.
The benefits of intermittent fasting are many, in fact not only supports the immune system, but also provides more energy and mental clarity, improves sleep quality, helps maintain stable insulin levels. During fasting, you will give your body the opportunity to reach its balance, help it manage toxins and waste, regenerate, burn accumulated fats, eliminate metabolic waste such as dead cells, bacteria, intestinal mucus or food debris, decrease chronic inflammation and therefore diseases, improve blood pressure, improve intestinal health.
Even though we cannot eat solid foods, we can give ample space to liquids, which help purify and drain. An excellent solution could be, for example, to prepare a detox vegetable broth based on galangal, ginger, and turmeric, spices that should never be missing in our diet, with purifying, anti-inflammatory, digestive, and warming properties.
Here is the recipe:
Bring the water to a boil with the washed and chopped vegetables and cook over low heat for half an hour. Strain and add the spices. Before drinking it, squeeze the juice of half a lemon into it. You can pour it into a thermos and take it with you throughout the day.
If you don't feel like cooking or simply want to diversify, you can prepare herbal teas to your liking, for the elimination of toxins. In the evening, to promote sleep, you can take a relaxing herbal tea, for example a passionflower tea, or St. John's wort or the well-known chamomile.
If you are a hopeless tea-nerd, we recommend Japanese teas like the roasted Houjicha tea which has zero caffeine, and has diuretic and hypoglycemic properties (helps alkalize the blood).
This type of fasting has no risks, but beyond its benefits, we should not become obsessed, because it is just one more tool to improve our diet (today we have access to food 24/7 and this undoubtedly generates bad habits). Also, before putting it into practice, it is advisable to follow a good diet, which is healthy, balanced, and rich in vegetables and real foods.
Keep in mind that it is not necessary to do it every day, for example, you can do it during the week and keep yourself free on weekends or do it three days a week to start. Anyway, stay comfortable and do not fall into obsession.
Naturally, a healthy diet plus nighttime fasting plus minimal physical activity are the magic formula to improve our lives.
