Janet Bond Brill - Intermittent Fasting For Dummies

Choose an approach to eating (don’t call it a diet — it’s a lifestyle) that best fits your personality. Part 3discusses the different fasting plans you may want to consider. Whichever one you choose, ensure that your meals leave you satisfied, not hungry and definitely not deprived.

One of the main reason diets fail is because people deprive themselves of the foods they love. When life happens, they go off the diet and gorge on those foods they restricted during the diet. Face it, if you love carbs, there’s no way that you’ll ever be able to not eat pasta for the next 50 years! The long-term solution and the gold standard of dietary balance and moderation is what nutritionists call the 80:20 rule.

The 80:20 rule , more formally called the Pareto principle, states that, for many events, roughly 80 percent of the effects come from 20 percent of the causes. If you apply this philosophy to your eating regime, you can use it as an approach to healthy eating. The 80:20 rule shows you the way to balance, moderation, and indulging without any feelings of guilt. Don’t let perfection be the enemy of the good.

The basic idea of the 80/20 rule as it applies to your intermittent fast is very simple. In order to be healthy and balanced, you don’t always have to make 100 percent healthy food choices. Eighty percent will do the trick. You can choose less healthy food and indulge yourself without guilt with the remaining 20 percent. Think of your 20 percent time as the freedom to eat the foods you love that may not be the healthiest. The 80/20 rule is a fantastic way to enjoy your treats and stay on the intermittent fasting train.

Your indulgences need to be a reasonable portion rather than a free-for-all eat fest. Just because your 20 percent is for treats doesn’t mean you can go rogue with the entire pint of ice cream.

Revisit Kiki again: She loves her red wine (she drinks one 8-ounce glass a night) and munches on her nighttime snacks. Kiki has zero intention of giving them up. She is following the 5:2 intermittent fast. On her five non-fasting days, she eats three healthy plant-based meals totaling approximately 1,400 calories. That leaves her with 450 treat calories for nighttime. If she makes her dog walking a daily routine, she gets to add an additional 100 calories to her treats stash or 550 calories per night during her five non-fasting days. Five hundred and fifty calories translate into 8 ounces of red wine (approximately 200 calories) plus an additional 350-calorie high volume, slow-eating snack such as a huge bowl of popcorn. No deprivation here!

Red wine in moderation is a heart-healthy habit. However, doctors advise against beginning to drink if you don’t already do so. Exercise caution with any alcohol consumption because alcohol carries with it the risk of overindulgence, with many negative health effects. According to the American Heart Association, moderate consumption is one to two drinks per day for men and one drink per day (5 fluid ounces) for women. If you have any doubts about whether it’s safe for you to consume wine or any type of alcohol, ask your personal physician.

Several intermittent fasting approaches can succeed in helping you attain your goals. Intermittent fasting has many healthful effects on your body such as flipping your metabolic switch and changing your hormonal balance, which contribute to weight loss. But make no mistake about it, intermittent fasting doesn’t work through magic, and these plans don’t work through some secret bio-hack. Intermittent fasting lifestyles cause weight and body fat loss primarily by creating a sustained calorie deficit.

If you’ve tried intermittent fasting for a few weeks and haven’t lost any weight (or maybe you’ve even gained a little) despite doing everything by the book, you can easily get discouraged and give up. One of the major mistakes people make when first trying this lifestyle is giving up too soon. This lifestyle takes time to adjust to and for you to see results. If the plan isn’t working for you after say six weeks, switch to a different intermittent fasting schedule or better yet, come back to this chapter and do the calorie math. The calculations enable you to pinpoint where the problem areas are in your calorie intake (food consumption) and/or calorie output (exercise). Just remember to keep at it.

Chapter 4

IN THIS CHAPTER

Facing the facts about excess fat

Fighting back against heredity

Getting healthier with a more active you

If you’re overweight and have been trying to lose weight, you are far from alone. The latest national stats on dieting have found that nearly half of American adults are trying to trim their widening waistlines. This is a smart move — being overweight is harmful to your health.

According to the experts, obesity rates continue to escalate — approximately 72 percent of U.S. adults are now overweight. Add to this statistic the fact that their physical activity rates are abysmally low, and you have the perfect recipe for creating the epidemic of type 2 diabetes that plagues the United States.

Scientists differentiate between the terms overweight and obese, using the body mass index (BMI) calculation. Overweight is defined as having a BMI between 25 and 29.9. Obesity is defined as having a BMI of 30 or more. Both terms are used to identify people who are at risk for health problems from having too much body fat. However, obese generally means a much higher amount of body fat than overweight. Everyone who falls in the obese range is overweight, but not the other way around. Refer to Chapter 2where I discuss the BMI in greater detail.

Clearly, many Americans need to lose weight. In fact, even a modest weight loss of just 10 percent of your body weight can treat and often reverse the un-healthy conditions associated with being overweight.

Everyone needs some body fat for good health. When people eat more calories than they use, their bodies store the extra calories as fat. A couple of pounds of extra body fat is no big deal for most people. The problem arises when people continue this pattern of eating more calories than they burn (creating a calorie surplus ) over an extended period of time.

More and more fat builds up in the body, and eventually the amount of body fat is so great that it can harm a person’s health. Many doctors use the terms overweight or obese to tell if someone has a greater chance of developing serious weight-related health problems from excess body fat. The good news is, when you lose weight and the closer you can get to a normal weight (a BMI under 25), the greater the health benefits.