Fast Diets For Dummies
Overview
Lose weight with the Fast Diets? Easy!
Over the last few decades, food fads have come and gone, but the standard medical advice on what constitutes a healthy lifestyle has stayed much the same: eat low-fat foods, exercise more, and never, ever skip meals. Yet, over that same period, levels of obesity worldwide have soared. So is there a different, evidence-based approach?
Yes! Fast Diets are the revolutionary part-time weight loss programs with lifelong health and anti-aging results. Fast Diets For Dummies is your hands-on, friendly guide to achieving weight loss, without having to endlessly deprive yourself. Inside, you’ll get the lowdown on
easily incorporating one or all of these unique dietary programs into your busy life. You will get the lowdown on tackling the most popular fasting diets such as: The Fast Diet (5-2 Diet), Intermittent Fasting, Micro-Fasting, and One Meal a Day (Warrior Diet). It offers you information and tips on how to incorporate these unique and popular dietary programs into your busy daily life.
- How and why the benefits of these fasting diets go well beyond weight loss
- Fast diets dos and don’ts
- How to get started and everything you need to know to help you along the way
- Over fifty 500- and 600- calorie meals that are quick and easy to make
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About The Author
Dr. Kellyann Petrucci is the coauthor of the health and lifestyle books Living Paleo For Dummies and Boosting Your Immunity For Dummies. She also created the successful kids' health and wellness program Superkids Wellness and the Paleo door-to-door home delivery food service Living Paleo Foods.
Melissa Joulwan is the author of the paleo recipe and lifestyle blog www.theclothesmakethegirl.com.
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fast diets for dummies
CHEAT SHEET
People have been fasting (in other words, not eating for a while) for centuries to prevent disease and strengthen the body. Fasting is also a safe way to lose weight.This Cheat Sheet gives you an overview of the basic principles of fasting, including what you should and shouldn't drink, so you can implement it into your routine and start your journey toward more vibrant health.
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You can take your fasting to the next level by following these ten sneaky, little tricks to boost the effects of fasting so that you burn more fat, increase productivity, and stave off hunger. They don’t take much effort, and they do produce large results. Implement the ones you want.
Exercise intermittently
To dramatically enhance the effectiveness of your fasts, without question, you should exercise.
General Diet & Nutrition
If you're new to fasting, you may feel that eating is one of the best ways to give yourself an energy boost. However, eating often makes people feel a lack of energy because your body releases an influx of insulin after you eat, which aids in digestion by helping your body utilize the glucose and amino acids that it received from the food you ate.
General Diet & Nutrition
Fasting has many, many benefits. But sometimes even knowing all the benefits of a healthy lifestyle doesn't mean that you'll be able to stay motivated all the time to adhere to that lifestyle. Following are some different techniques you can use to get and stay motivated.
You don't have to stick with just one of these motivational tactics.
Whatever information you've heard or been told that says fasting is bad for you is either wholly unsupported or very plainly wrong. Following are three myths broken down so you can fast with peace of mind and defend your actions against all those individuals who may question them.
Myth 1: Fasting slows your metabolism
Your metabolism is the energy cost to keep your cells alive; it's the summation of all the biological processes that sustain your life.
General Diet & Nutrition
You may think that 500 calories can be quite a lot of food, but it only is if you're eating only vegetables. By adding protein-rich foods, such as lean beef, trimmed of as much fat as possible, you're actually going to feel more satisfied for a longer time after eating.
Eating smaller portions of high-quality protein allows you to eat less food because lean protein is slower to digest in the body — so that by the time your body digests the beef, it's likely time to eat again.
General Diet & Nutrition
Pork and lamb in small portions can also provide protein to your diet. Eating protein-rich meats — making sure you trim off any excess fat — and adding a side of vegetables can fill you and make you feel satisfied.
These recipes offer pork for a dinner meal and a breakfast meal. Of course, if you feel like mixing up things, eat the frittata for dinner and the stir fry for your earlier meal.
General Diet & Nutrition
Like beef, the protein from skinless and boneless chicken breast meat and turkey breast meat is extremely lean. In animal products, protein is located in the muscle tissue. This lean protein digests slowly in the body, leading to feelings of fullness for longer.
White meat, boneless and skinless chicken breast meat, and turkey breast meat boast about 30 calories per ounce, which means you can eat quite a bit of poultry as part of this very low-calorie staple of your fast regime.
General Diet & Nutrition
Seafood, and fish in general, is an increasingly popular low-calorie food when compared to other protein-rich foods, such as meat and poultry. Many lean fish varieties contain similar calories per ounce as lean poultry, about 30 to 35 calories. Some of the fattier fishes, of which salmon is one, contain about double that number.
General Diet & Nutrition
Every once in a while it's good to go meatless. Not every meal must contain animal products. So many choices are available these days for delicious food options that you won't miss the animal proteins in the following recipes.
And if you're a vegetarian, you can find some creative and tasty options here. Every recipe contains a good source of protein, including nuts, and dark greens, such as kale and mushrooms.
General Diet & Nutrition
Men can eat 600 calories when fasting on the 5:2 Diet, which can be quite a lot of food, if you're only eating vegetables. But by adding protein-rich foods, such as lean beef, trimmed of as much fat as possible, you're actually going to feel more satisfied for a longer time after eating.
Smaller portions of high-quality protein allow you to eat less because lean protein is slower to digest in the body — so that by the time your body digests the beef, you're ready to eat again.
General Diet & Nutrition
The protein from skinless and boneless chicken breast meat and turkey breast meat is extremely lean. This lean protein digests slowly in the body, leading to feelings of fullness for longer. White meat, boneless and skinless chicken breast meat, and turkey breast meat boast about 30 calories per ounce, which means that you can eat quite a bit of poultry as part of this low-calorie staple of your fasting regime.
General Diet & Nutrition
Seafood and fish are increasingly popular, low-calorie food when you compare them to other protein-rich foods like meat and poultry. Many lean fish varieties contain similar calories per ounce as lean poultry, about 30 to 35 calories.
Just make sure that you purchase seafood and fish, preferably as fresh as possible, from a reputable source.
General Diet & Nutrition
You may want a lighter-feeling meal without meat. You can go meatless while on a fasting regimen. In fact, not every meal that you eat must contain animal products.
And if you're a vegetarian, going meatless is clearly your only option. Many delicious food options are available these days. These recipes have protein in the form of nuts, fruits, and dark greens, such as kale and mushrooms.
General Diet & Nutrition
Pork and lamb often get a bad rap for being fatty and caloric, when in fact, some cuts, such as lean (trimmed of visible fat) pork loin, has nearly the same calories as lean poultry or fish. With less than 40 calories per ounce, lean pork is as versatile as chicken, but with a meaty flavor and texture, as with beef.
General Diet & Nutrition
Hunger doesn't make fasting difficult. Your reaction to the hunger does. If at the first sign of hunger you seek out food, you need to ask yourself an important question: Do you control your hunger, or does your hunger control you?By controlling your hunger, you can strengthen your fasting practice. The most important aspect of controlling hunger is to accept it.
Here's an easy model to follow if you're seriously considering micro-fasting. Walk through a day of micro-fasting, starting with the morning fasting routine, working through an intense exercise regimen, and finishing up with an eating window.
For the sake of convenience, assume that you stopped eating the night before at approximately 8 p.
During your actual fasting (or non-eating time), you obviously won't be drinking any alcohol. When you're fasting, you're consuming limited calories, so using them on something like alcohol that is void of nutrients wouldn't be a smart choice to fulfill your needs.
During your eating window, consuming alcohol isn't the best choice either because you want your liver to process real toxins to keep you healthy and well, instead of processing the alcohol that you drink.
General Diet & Nutrition
The combination of fasting and exercise triggers an amazing rejuvenation and detoxification process, far beyond what exercise and fasting offer by themselves. In other words, fasting and exercise, when joined, enhance the benefits of one another.
You can assume that all the benefits to be had from exercising are increased when you exercise in a fasted state, such as an increase in the following:
Cellular stress response (to protect us against illness and aging)
Fat burning (lipolysis)
Insulin sensitivity (making it easier to build more lean muscle)
Muscle tissue repair
Neurogenesis (the birth of new brain cells)
The reverse is also true, meaning that the benefits to be had from fasting are increased when you add in exercise.
To maximize the benefits of fasting and exercise together, you should eat nothing before a workout. The best way to make this work, of course, is to exercise in the morning hours before your first meal. The best time to work out generally is before noon.
Doing so allows you to break your fast immediately after your workout, which is yet another ideal situation, because the food from that meal will go almost exclusively toward feeding and repairing hungry muscle tissue, rather than shuttling into fat cells.
Frankenfoods are processed soy and meat alternatives made to look like real foods, but they're nothing more than fake foods from head to toe. Think of Dr. Frankenstein making his monster. The same correlates to these food items. Scientists made these freakish foods.
They're and the worst of the worst of processed foods.
General Diet & Nutrition
Fasted exercise won't build you more muscle, but it will make it possible to add lean muscle mass more efficiently. In other words, through fasting (which improves insulin sensitivity), and by being leaner (which means you typically have improved insulin sensitivity than someone who is overweight and/or insulin resistant), you have the ability to utilize nutrients more efficiently, specifically protein.
When you take a break from eating, your body burns more fat. So yes, not eating — perhaps the most classically employed method of weight loss — in almost all cases, is still the safest and soundest option for weight loss.
In order to understand how fasting assists in the process of burning fat, you need to first understand how fat burning works.
General Diet & Nutrition
Fasting is at root all about creating a calorie deficit. And fasting makes it easy. Fasting takes large chunks out of your weekly calorie intake. And it does so fairly painlessly too.
For example, say right now you consume about 2,000 calories to maintain your current weight, which is 14,000 calories a week. If you implement one full 24-hour fast once a week, your weekly caloric intake is reduced to 12,000 calories.
One of the perks of the 5:2 Diet is that you aren't dieting most of the time, and the research has shown that this type of fasting style is as effective in weight loss as long-term calorie restriction.
Unlike fasting on occasion, daily calorie restriction over the long term typically leaves its followers feeling deprived.
General Diet & Nutrition
One of the simplest ways you can make a difference in your fasting outcome to lose weight and get healthier is to listen to your body — and choose to drink clean, pure water. You may not have access to pure stream or river water, but you can get close.
Your body needs pure, clean water without chorine, fluoride, and toxins.
Fasting triggers a nearly miraculous cleansing process throughout the entire body. It not only permits organs and glands a much-needed rest, particularly the digestive system, but it also allows for the body's natural home-cleaning mechanisms (including white blood cells, enzymes, and so on) to course through your body and take out the trash.
General Diet & Nutrition
To help mitigate the chances of you eating unhealthy foods when breaking your fast, don't set yourself up for failure. Prepare ahead for what you'll eat and have it readily on hand. Don't wait until the last 30 minutes of your fast to realize you have nothing in the house to eat. Have easy-to-eat but healthful foods available to you at the end of your fast.
General Diet & Nutrition
When you come off a fast, you should eat what you would have eaten if you hadn't fasted. Just make sure you focus on choosing nutritious food, meaning you stay clear of the double bacon cheeseburger with fries and a milkshake.
Focus on the effect that each macronutrient (such as carbohydrates, protein, and fat) will have on your post-fast body.
General Diet & Nutrition
Although you don't eat anything while fasting, make sure that you drink only noncaloric drinks during your intermittent fast, the most important being water. In fact, you should drink a minimum of eight glasses of water, which can help you feel fuller and can ensure you're staying hydrated throughout the day.
Other noncaloric drinks you can consume during your intermittent fast include the following:
Black coffee
Black tea
Green tea
Herbal teas, such as peppermint, chamomile, or rooibos
Sparkling water
Keep caffeine to a minimum, if you can because too much isn't good for you or your fast.
General Diet & Nutrition
The following include some calorie-controlled recipes if you’re following the 5:2 Diet, which limits the amount of calories you can consume in one day, or the Warrior Diet, which allows you to overeat healthful foods for your evening meal. The first two recipes are geared for a 600-calorie a day regime with the following three geared for a 500-calorie a day regime.
General Diet & Nutrition
Getting in the habit of training your body to sleep during its natural rhythm is key. You want to sleep during the darkness and awake when it's light. Staying up all night in artificial light confuses your system.
When you constantly trick your circadian rhythm (your body's natural sleep cycle during a 24-hour period) by staying up too long in artificial light, your body thinks it's a long summer day.
General Diet & Nutrition
Some people have misconceptions about what it really means to be strong. You don't need big muscles to be strong. That is, and always will be, a false claim. The ability to generate tension in your muscles isn't related to muscle size, but rather, the efficiency of your nervous system.
The central nervous system (which you can think of as your control center or operations manager) dictates how hard you can tense your muscles.
General Diet & Nutrition
When adhering to the Warrior Diet, the undereating phase lasts the vast majority of the day — about 20 hours — whereas the overeating phase that occurs in the evening lasts the remaining four hours.
Although you can think of the four hours as one large meal, aim to break up the various meal components (subtle-tasting greens, protein, veggies, and fruits/dessert) as you see fit across that time period.
General Diet & Nutrition
Your skin is your largest organ. Yes, your skin is actually an organ, and anything you put on the skin has a direct route into your bloodstream. When you put something on your skin, ask yourself, “Is this product pure enough that I could actually eat it?” If not, you probably shouldn't have it on your skin at all.
General Diet & Nutrition
Fasting has shown to increase cellular stress response, which is impaired with age. Aging is cellular degradation; it's quite simply a loss of function. Free radicals, which are toxic byproducts of metabolism, latch on to and destroy healthy cells and cause aging.
The moment that you're born, the second law of thermodynamics, also known as the universal forces of entropy, which degrades all living things, begins to attack you.
People have been fasting (in other words, not eating for a while) for centuries to prevent disease and strengthen the body. Fasting is also a safe way to lose weight.This Cheat Sheet gives you an overview of the basic principles of fasting, including what you should and shouldn't drink, so you can implement it into your routine and start your journey toward more vibrant health.
Fasting specifically acts to stimulate autophagy, which is the process through which the brain cleans itself. Your brain also needs cleansing because it hoards trash just like any other organ. In the brain, this trash is largely an accumulation of damaged cells and other assorted toxins.
More specifically, autophagy is when the cells purge waste material and repair themselves.
General Diet & Nutrition
Fasted exercise is the most potent fat burner on the planet. More potent than any diet pill, safer too, and much more economical. If you want to lose weight more effectively, then combining fasting with exercise will satisfy you.
To burn fat and ultimately lose weight, combine high-intensity exercise (such as heavy weightlifting and metabolic conditioning) with low-intensity exercise (such as walking and hiking), in that order while in a fasted state.
The Paleo Diet is the perfect complement to fasting. Together, fasting and the Paleo Diet are the evolutionary keys to unlocking true health, leanness, and vitality.
The Paleo Diet, which is also known as the Caveman Diet, aims to replicate the eating habits of your ancestors. In short, when you're on this diet, you eat the foods you're biologically designed to eat.
General Diet & Nutrition
If you want to look and feel your best, you have to keep the inflammation out of your body, whether you're fasting or not. Inflammation is the precursor to just about every modern-day disease known today, including heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and more. By using good old back-to-nature real foods, you can spare yourself from what is known as gut-inflammation or leaky gut.
General Diet & Nutrition
With a 500- to 600-calorie limit on your fasting days on the 5:2 Diet, you really do have to be judicious in what foods you're consuming. That's why the GI becomes especially important. Stick to foods and beverages that are high in protein and have low GI scores. You'll feel fuller longer and won't experience that dreaded sugar crash and empty-stomach feeling.
Sleep is always critically important — whether fasting or not, but even more so when you're fasting because your body needs to regenerate more than ever, and this regeneration happens while you sleep. Sleep also suppresses your appetite (making fasting easier).
Many people report that they're shocked at how much better they're sleeping when fasting.
General Diet & Nutrition
Finding pantry items in-line with your fasting lifestyle can get a little dicey because you have to enter the middle-aisle territory of your grocery store. (When searching for healthy proteins and produce, you can stick to the old nutritional tenet of “stay out of the center aisles and stick to the perimeter of the store.
General Diet & Nutrition
In order to succeed with your intermittent fast, you first need to be able to embrace those feelings of hunger. Be aware that feeling hungry or wanting to eat aren't true feelings of hunger or deprivation. Your mind is merely telling your stomach to feed because that's what your mind is used to doing.
Being able to develop the fortitude to forego food for a short amount of time is incredibly important because only when you stop eating can you go from a fed state to a fasted state and reap all the wonderful benefits of fasting.
General Diet & Nutrition
The good news: You can do metabolic conditioning training in many ways. Here are some of the most popular ways you can incorporate metabolic conditioning into your training plan:
Circuit training
Circuit training involves moving from various exercises and oftentimes equipment (body weight, barbells, kettlebells, and so on) with little to no rest in between.
General Diet & Nutrition
The 5:2 Diet allows 500 calories to women and 600 calories to men for the two modified fasting days each week. But what does 500 or 600 calories look like? Well, depending on your food choices, they may not look like much. That's where your understanding of the GI, as well as knowing how to make optimal food choices, is the key to your 5:2 Diet success.
Listening to your body when it comes to thirst is really important, especially when you're fasting. Getting enough water helps minimize the sensation of hunger and keeps the toxins moving out of the body. Recognize that what you may think is hunger during a fast may very well be thirst.
Here's how it works: Your brain recognizes low energy levels available for body functions, including hunger and thirst.
General Diet & Nutrition
Enhance your fast by removing as many toxins from the home as you can. Toxins in your home include any pollutants that are in your daily surroundings.
Here are some common toxins and what to do about them:
Cleaning solutions: Cleaning products can be hazardous because you inhale chemicals in the fumes that these products often give off.
General Diet & Nutrition
The research is clear: Fasting helps to ward off the odds of neurodegenerative diseases. In fact, even if you have no interest in losing weight or gaining muscle, the positive benefits of fasting on the brain alone merit your great consideration. In fact, fasting puts mild stresses on brain cells, similar to how exercise does on the muscles.
Fasting actually works to increase your energy in a similar way that exercise does. The body responds to stress via the release of adrenaline, a person's natural fight-or-flight hormone. Typically, the bigger the stress you experience, the bigger the adrenal response is.
For example, if a lion were chasing you or you were being held at gunpoint, you would experience a massive adrenaline surge, which is your natural response to danger.
General Diet & Nutrition
The easiest way to keep track of what you eat is to keep a food journal on the days you aren't fasting. Doing so allows you to see exactly what you're eating each and every day. The adage “what gets tracked, gets managed” is true.
Try it out for a week: Log everything you eat or drink for seven days. Even on your fast days, you can jot down the noncaloric beverages you drink, as well as what you eat to break your fast.
General Diet & Nutrition
Because you're focusing on fasting, which removes toxins from your body, the last thing you want to do is add more toxins with the water you drink. Tap water is easy to get and low in cost. But is it healthy to drink? Unless you know your tap water is safe, drink it only when you're desperate, and look for a cleaner source.
One of the sneakiest ways to kill body fat dead is through fasted cardio, which means low-intensity aerobic activity, such as walking and hiking. While fasting, your body increases lipolysis (the releasing of fatty acids into the bloodstream). Fasted cardio can accelerate the oxidation (or burning off) of those fatty acids.
General Diet & Nutrition
Sometimes life gets in the way. If for some reason you have to stop your fast, think through the decision before doing so. If you have no other course of action, when you do end a fast, keep these pointers in mind to help so you can get as much from your fast as possible:
If possible, end your fast hungry, but not ravenous.
Fasting along with exercise during your fasting state can also help your body put on muscle. The human body has a special protein called mammalian target of rapamycin (mTOR for short). Many experts now refer to it as the muscle-building gene, because recent research shows that it regulates the construction and rejuvenation of muscle tissue.
General Diet & Nutrition
Some ancient peoples, such as the Greeks and Romans, understood cyclical food consumption. They ate sparingly during the daytime hours and feasted together at night. They were also hardened warriors, lean, able-bodied, and mentally alert. They fought, they conquered, and they created great works of art, philosophy, and literature.
General Diet & Nutrition
Restocking your kitchen with all the best foods is where the real commitment begins. Your ultimate goal when restocking your kitchen is to make sure you're getting nutrients in the highest amounts. Your body can handle eating small amounts of food beautifully when it's still getting what it needs in terms of nutrients.
Your body needs salt. However, you want to make sure you're consuming the right type of salt. You want to do without processed salt — the run-of-the-mill table salt — that is a heavily refined food. Table salt is chemically cleaned with bleach and then mixed with toxic anti-caking agents to make sure the salt flows properly.
General Diet & Nutrition
In order to install a successful mindset before you begin any dietary or lifestyle change, you need to set realistic expectations for yourself to ensure both motivation and adherence. If you enter into fasting with unrealistic or downright delusional expectations, and you end up not meeting them, then you'll be discouraged and likely quit straightaway.
General Diet & Nutrition
Avoid any food or drink that will cause a spike in insulin because insulin is the hormone that regulates whether you store fat or release it. By maintaining low levels of insulin throughout your fast, you ensure that the body has a chance to release — and use — fat stores, rather than continuing to pack fat around the typical trouble areas of your tummy, hips, thighs, butt, and arms.
General Diet & Nutrition
Understanding healthy fats and the value they have during your eating window is one of the most important principles you can discover in nutrition. Eating healthy fats actually helps you lose stored body fat for overall weightloss, protects you against heart disease, melts away inflammation, and aides in conditions like skin disorders, arthritis, high cholesterol, high triglycerides, diabetes, and depression.
General Diet & Nutrition
Carbohydrates in the form of produce (fruits and vegetables) give you the fuel your body needs for bursts of energy. Whether you eat cookies or kale, your body transforms the carbohydrates into glucose.
Your brain and your cells use this glucose for fuel for your daily activities, which means the quality of your health and how lean you become depends a great deal on what carbohydrates you choose to use as fuel.
General Diet & Nutrition
Protein builds you up. Growth and repair are protein's major roles; your body uses the protein you take in from foods to build cells, synthesize new proteins, and keep your tissues healthy. Eating adequate protein between fasts supports your physique and keeps you full for a long time.
Food quality is particularly important when dealing with protein.
Strength training takes a heavy toll on the body, and your body needs time to recover because through the processes of recovery your body adapts and gets stronger. Although there are ways to practice strength every day and still recover from it, f three to four days a week of strength training is more reasonable.
General Diet & Nutrition
The dead lift is how you pick things up off the ground, or how you should pick things up off the ground. The dead lift is basically a hip hinge, meaning you initiate the movement by pushing back your butt and hinging at the hips.
The dead lift strengthens the entire posterior chain (in plain English your backside), which consists primarily of your hamstrings, your butt, and your lower back.
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The goblet squat, a movement invented by renowned strength coach Dan John, is perhaps the most simplistic, but effective squat variation in existence. What's great about the goblet squat is that it's almost impossible to do wrong, making it a perfect beginner squatting variation.
Just because it's easy and great for beginners, however, doesn't mean that it's of no use to veterans.
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The kettlebell swing is simply the dead lift performed quickly and consecutively. It's an explosive hinging movement, where you swing a weight — in this case a kettlebell — between your legs, and then powerfully drive your hips forward to accelerate the bell upward.
Here is how you can do the kettlebell swing:Stand a little bit behind a kettlebell (no more than a foot) with your feet shoulder width apart and your toes slightly out.
General Diet & Nutrition
The pull-up is also a classic upper-body strength builder and the perfect complement to the push-up, because when you push, you must also pull. Although a pull-up is more difficult, you can do one. Even if you can't right now, with some practice, you can do one.
Here's how to do a proper pull-up:Hang from a bar or a set of rings with a shoulder-width grip.
General Diet & Nutrition
The push-up is the classic gym class exercise that most people do incorrectly. The push-up is still really one of the best, if not the best, upper-body strength-building exercises you can do. It hits the chest, the shoulders, the triceps, the abs, and a few other things here and there.
Push-ups by themselves aren't all that difficult for some people.
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The Turkish get-up is one of the most comprehensive, compound movements in existence today, because it has you moving just about every joint in your body. The purpose of this exercise is to get up off the ground while supporting a weight overhead.
This movement simultaneously works elements of mobility (the ability to move through a range of motion) and stability (the ability to resist changes in joint position) in the shoulders, hips, and core.
Sugar is sugar is sugar. Some sugars, in moderation, have some slight value, but you should avoid some of them at all costs. The rules for sugar are steadfast throughout any fasting regimen or throughout any healthy diet or weight-loss plan.
Sugar is not only highly addictive (the more you eat the more you crave), but it's also an immunity suppressor.
General Diet & Nutrition
Another way to ensure your success is to find an accountabili-buddy, someone who is a friend, family member, or coworker who can hold you accountable. When you have an accountabili-buddy, exchange before photos and food journals. Sharing your food journal (which should include everything you eat and drink throughout the week) with your buddy at the end of every week will help to keep you motivated and on track.
General Diet & Nutrition
The idea of feast and famine is one that has been part of humanity since ancient times and one that has been hard-wired into your DNA to have some pretty spectacular benefits.
The advantages of the Warrior Diet
Some of the advantages of the Warrior Diet include the following:
You have the ability to eat (although lightly) throughout the day.
By definition, fasting is the abstinence from eating. As a practice, cultures in all parts of the world have observed some form of fasting. In fact, you can fast in differing ways, and here are four of those ways. Regardless of which method you choose, be sure and stay hydrated by drinking plenty of fresh filtered water.
Intermittent fasting is inherently flexible. Because you only need to fast one or two times a week, you can begin your fast at the time that is most convenient for you as long as you ultimately fast for 24 hours.
As a result, you can start your once or twice weekly fast at any time on any day of the week. That means intermittent fasting has no set schedules.
The best approach to eating is a low-glycemic diet, and one that is centered on wholesome, nutritious foods. A low-glycemic diet is any diet aimed at controlling blood sugar. Even though fasting may reduce the effects of poor eating habits, it's not a powerful enough mechanism to completely prevent or reverse the ailments brought about from an unhealthy diet.
General Diet & Nutrition
Most people who practice micro-fasting say that 16 hours of fasting feels just right — you get hungry, but not too hungry. The peskiest part about micro-fasting, however, is identifying the ideal times to eat, more specifically, where to place your eight-hour eating window.
Most of the time, your first meal when micro-fasting happens sometime between noon and 2 p.
General Diet & Nutrition
Understanding the blood sugar's effect on the body and the glycemic index of various foods will go a long way in ensuring the successful completion of a fast. The glycemic index (GI) is an indicator of how quickly your body's blood sugar will rise after eating a particular food.
Because carbohydrates affect blood sugar to a much greater effect than proteins or fats, the GI deals mostly with foods that are higher in carbs but don't have a sizable protein or fat content (of course, there are exceptions to this rule).
Fasting and exercise are forms of hardship, and the principle in physiology states that the body will adapt to certain hardships to maintain a state of equilibrium. The hardships of fasting and exercise, however, not only permit the body to adapt, but to thrive.
The adaptation benefits of these hardships are enormous — as long as those hardships are applied in a reasonable manner.
One of the amazing things about fasting is its ability to burn fat. For people who have had terrible weight-loss resistance, finally seeing the needle move on the scale is really liberating. Stress, however, interferes with some of the most stubborn fat — belly fat.
Belly fat is resistant fat, sometimes coined the middle-aged spread.
General Diet & Nutrition
Overeating on the Warrior Diet means just what you would expect. You eat more than you normally would, but only in the evening at your one meal. With overeating, you don't count calories, feel guilty eating high fat (but healthy) foods, or portion foods to ensure that you receive the appropriate fat, carbohydrates, and protein.
Fasting, like all dietary and lifestyle practices, has its pros and cons. What's unique about fasting, however, is that many of the cons turn to pros after you shift your perspective. For example, being hungry is only a con if you make it so. You can make being hungry a positive and productive experience just by a simple shift in your mindset.
Just like all the other fasting practices available to you, micro-fasting also has its pros and cons. The good news: Most people find micro-fasting the most user-friendly of all the fasting practices, even more so than the 5:2 Diet.
Here are the most prominent pros of micro-fasting:
Shorter fasting periods may make it easier.
General Diet & Nutrition
Intermittent fasting carries a unique set of pros and cons. Examine the upsides and downsides, so that you can make an informed decision as to whether or not fasting intermittently is the best approach for you.
Intermittent fasting provides many benefits and can help you realize your weight loss goals. However, remember that it's not magic.
General Diet & Nutrition
No doubt that at some time or another you've read, heard, and maybe even believed that eating at night makes you fat and that you mustn't eat anything past a certain hour if you want to finally free yourself from the stubborn fat that clings to your body.
The truth is that if you're eating healthy, wholesome, natural foods, and you fast or undereat for most of the day, eating at night won't make you fat and it won't keep extra weight on your body that refuses to come off.
Every night while you sleep you enter into a fast, but as soon as you wake up and eat breakfast, you turn off that fast, and, in turn, miss out on all the wonderful benefits to be had from fasting through the morning hours. The idea that breakfast is a necessity, or the most important meal of the day, is propaganda populated and perpetuated by food companies, specifically cereal companies.
General Diet & Nutrition
Undereating is the phase of the Warrior Diet that takes up most of the day. You simply don't eat as much as you normally would during the daytime hours. You're naturally most active during these daytime hours, whether that activity is physical or mental.
During this undereating phase, the time when you restrict how much food you eat, you allow your body to give less energy toward digestive processes and relegate more energy to processes that will allow it to detoxify and cleanse itself, as well as burn fat, stabilize insulin levels, and promote the release of growth hormones.
General Diet & Nutrition
The benefits of the 5:2 Diet are similar to other fasting methods, but some people may not find it as restrictive as, say, the full 24-hour, no-calorie intermittent fasting method.
The pros of the 5:2 Diet
The 5:2 Diet aims at promoting a healthy and, most importantly, sustainable lifestyle. In this fasting method, you need only to fast twice per week, but unlike other fasting methods, due to its modifications, you'll most likely never go more than 12 hours without eating — and much of your fasting time will occur during sleeping hours.
General Diet & Nutrition
Exercise is a critical factor for biological growth and rejuvenation. Engaging regularly in physical activity, especially bouts of short and intense exercise, is something everyone should do, no matter whether they're fasting or not. Specifically, integrating micro-fasting with your exercise plan can help you create the ultimate weapon to combat obesity, aging, and illness.
General Diet & Nutrition
You may feel like eating food is the best way to give yourself a shot of energy during the middle of the day. However, when you’re fasting, food isn’t an option. If you trouble keeping energy level high, try employing these methods, or any combination thereof. Mix and match, play around, and see which ones work best for you.
The glycemic index (GI) is an indicator of how quickly your body’s blood sugar will rise after eating a particular food. No matter what you eat, your blood sugar will temporarily increase as your pancreas secretes insulin into the bloodstream. However, how much your blood sugar increases (and you don’t want it too spike too much) depends on what kinds of foods you eat, particularly carbohydrates.
General Diet & Nutrition
Medium-chain triglycerides, unlike most other forms of fat, are quickly digested and utilized. Nutritionists often tout them as “the fat that helps you burn fat.” Medium-chain triglycerides provide numerous health benefits, including:
Increased weight loss: A number of small studies have confirmed that the consumption of medium-chain triglycerides do indeed support weight loss.
Fasting may not only help you live longer, but be healthier as well. It's very difficult to live long if you're relatively unhealthy, so fasting also makes sense to ward off illness. As a matter of fact, fasting is perhaps the world's oldest cure-all and the most potent natural remedy for whatever ails you. Everyone actually has a natural inclination to resist food when they're ill.
Intermittent fasting — or dieting sporadically — simply means you take a break from eating one to two times per week (meaning a full 24- to 32-hour fast), while the rest of the time you follow some basic eating guidelines that you probably already know but unfortunately seldom follow.
These guidelines include taking the time to enjoy the foods you eat, eating lots of fresh fruits and vegetables, utilizing herbs and spices instead of salt to flavor food, and eating less overall.
Metabolic conditioning is simply an elevated cardiovascular stress plus moderate to heavy strength efforts. That is, metabolic conditioning, or metcon, blends strength and cardiovascular efforts in a short, intense, and compact bout of exercise.
To get a bit more into the science of it, the term metabolic conditioning actually refers to the training of the various metabolic systems in the human body that store and deliver energy, of which the three are as follows:
The phosphagen energy system (high power/short duration): The phosphagen energy system fuels the most explosive and short-lived bouts of exercise, such as the first couple seconds of a sprint, a standing broad jump, or the swinging of a baseball bat.
General Diet & Nutrition
You want to select certain types of exercise that give you the best results when you're micro-fasting. Some are better than others. A combination of sprinting and heavy lifting (along with micro-fasting) can give you the results you want.
For example, aim for 10 to 15 minutes of sprints combined with 15 to 20 minutes of heavy lifting, with a focus on the big compound movements such as squats, dead lifts, and pull-ups followed by 20 to 30 minutes of brisk walking to get the most out of your fasting periods.
As a general rule, when fasting, you’re only able to indulge noncaloric beverages. To fast, after all, means to abstain. This means that, for the most part, food is something that needs to be set aside in the hours that you’re fasting. However, you can enjoy several drinks during your fast, including the following:
Black coffee
Black tea
Green tea
Herbal teas, such as peppermint, chamomile, or rooibos
Homemade light broths
Sparkling water
Unsweetened coconut water
Water
Don’t underestimate the power of water.
The food you consume during the eight hours, how you choose to consume it, and how much you choose to consume greatly affect the effectiveness of your fasts. Fasting for 16 hours doesn't grant you permission to binge for the remaining eight.
Fasting works primarily by creating a caloric deficit. If you fast for 16 hours and then overcompensate the remaining eight, you're negating one of the primary benefits of fasting.
The foods that you can eat during the undereating phase are different from those foods that you can consume during the nightly overeating phase, although the guidelines for both phases follow similar rules. Here are some general guidelines to follow on the Warrior Diet so you know what to eat in your evening meal.
General Diet & Nutrition
Anything with calories in it is off limits, because it will break your fast. This includes all soda and juices. The only exception to this rule is if you’re following a controlled fast, such as in the Warrior Diet or the 5:2 Diet, where fresh fruit and vegetable juices are permitted in moderation.
What you shouldn’t drink when fasting includes the following:
Alcohol: Alcohol is quite calorically dense, so stay away from it.
The Warrior Diet is a modified fasting regimen where you don’t completely restrict all calories — in liquid form or solid form — during your fast. The restriction focuses on consuming a small amount of food for most of the day and then eating as much as you want for several hours each evening.
The Warrior Diet is based on the premise that ancient people, who were fitter, healthier, and leaner than their modern counterparts, followed a daily regimen that included snacking only on healthful foods during the hours in which they completed most of their physical labor.
General Diet & Nutrition
Post-workout nutrition is essential. Your muscles are desperately hungry for nutrients in a specific time-frame after your exercise. As a general rule, you should wait 30 minutes after your intense workout sessions before you ingest anything.
This time gives your body a chance to discover how to handle the stresses of exercise on its own (rather than always relying on the use of dietary supplementation), as it naturally increases antioxidant production to combat and reverse oxidative damage sustained through intense exercise.
Although intermittent fasting has been proven to burn body fat, ward off illness, improve brain function, and increase your energy, sometimes intermittent fasting isn't appropriate. Make sure you use common sense and consult your physician with any questions that you may have about fasting.
If you find yourself in one of the following groups, you shouldn't do intermittent fasting:
If you're pregnant or trying to become pregnant: When you're pregnant or trying to get pregnant, focus on the pregnancy.
General Diet & Nutrition
Before you start the 5:2 Diet or any other fast, make sure you talk to your physician or health professional about fasting, its benefits and drawbacks, and the status of your health.
What days and times to fast
The 5:2 Diet prescribes two days of modified fasting and five days free from calorie counting. When deciding which days during the week to fast, understand that you may have to be flexible.
Fasting has been known to help alleviate and reverse many chronic health conditions, such as inflammation, Type-2 diabetes, and hypertension. However, fasting may not be right for everybody right away.
Before you start any fasting protocol, consult your doctor. If you have any health issues that you think may be aggravated by fasting, be sure to discuss them with your doctor as well.
Realizing what causes obesity — and what keeps people from reaching their weight goals — is simple. It's all about the complete and total overabundance of food. People have just too much food available and they eat too much of it. Intermittent fasting can cut back on your interaction with this overabundance by simply saying “No thanks” one or two times a week.
General Diet & Nutrition
Fasting is a critical time to get water in your body, but even when you're not fasting, water is essential. In fact, your body consists of about 60 percent water. Just as your body needs macronutrients (such as healthy protein, carbohydrates, and fats) to function, it also needs water.
Pure, clean water is the most essential of all nutrients.
Your body isn't designed to be under chronic stress. In fact, your body has a built-in system called the sympathetic nervous system, also referred to as the fight or flight response, which activates in times of stress. This mechanism helps your body when you're in moments of crisis (for example, a tiger chasing you).
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