These days there are always new diet options being offered up by the health and wellness industry. This has its good and bad points, of course.
On the good side, we’re all built differently and our own unique systems function better with certain ways of eating than others. Variety is the spice of life! What works for one person may not work for another. For example, maybe a mostly-fruit diet is your thing. Or, perhaps you’re all about the high protein/low carbs. Whatever the spice is of your life, you can bet there’s a diet for you to try.
The not-so-good side is that often we find diets that swing to extremes in what you can eat, often causing extremes in health ramifications too. Fad diets are really not where it’s at, and if you don’t use an abundance of caution when embarking on a new way of eating, you could do a lot more harm than good.
Fasting – Not A Fad
When we think of fasting, we may think of the guru perched peacefully on their meditation cushion, or perhaps even a hunger strike. But in recent years, fasting has become more mainstream. A lot of attention has come around intermittent fasting, in particular – not exactly as a “diet” per se, but as a way of eating. In other words, it’s not an exception you would adopt in the way you eat, just to drop 10 quick pounds. Instead, it’s the rule by which you’ve chosen to fuel your body every day.
The premise with intermittent fasting is that you simply restrict your eating to a certain set of hours each day, 11am-7pm, for example. You don’t do much monitoring of what is consumed during that time unless, of course, you want to. The only real requirement is that you consume no calories outside of the allotted hours. Why? Essentially, you’re attempting to get your body to run as efficiently as possible on whatever it is that you give it.
Autophagy And Fasting
Studies have shown that intermittent fasting is a great way to jumpstart a process known as autophagy, which in very simple terms is essentially when healthy cells eat non-healthy cells, thereby causing your body to run more efficiently on the strongest cells. (1)
Scientists and dietitians seem to generally agree that this particular method of eating can be beneficial. This is a bit of a rarity, so you know it must be good!