There are a few main reasons & key benefits to intermittent fasting. They can be grouped into 3 main categories:
Intermittent Fasting Benefits #1: Helps You Lose Weight
First, fasting makes it a LOT easier to eat fewer calories, which makes it easier to lose weight. If you’re overweight, losing weight is quite possibly the single best thing you can do to improve your health AND your appearance. So that’s a biggie.
Intermittent Fasting Benefits #2: Saves You Time
Second, fasting saves you a lot of time and energy. When you don’t have to worry about buying, cooking, eating, and cleaning up food, you can spend a lot more time focusing on other things. Work. Family. Life. Whatever.
Intermittent Fasting Benefits #3: Improves Your Health
And third, fasting engages a healthy cellular detoxification process called autophagy. Autophagy is known to be a healthy process, but it only kicks in after about 16 hours without food.
I like to think of autophagy as an evolutionary strategy that our bodies used to take advantage of periods of famine. So whenever food was scarce, our bodies would take advantage of it by going through this self-cleaning process to strong and healthy for whenever food DID become available again.
Does Fasting Slow Your Metabolism?
Finally, I want to address a really common question people have, which is:
“Won’t fasting cause my metabolism to slow down?”
This is a super common question, because the food and weight loss industries has told us, in the past, that in order to lose weight you had to eat many small meals a day to keep your metabolism running at a higher rate so you burn more fat.
As it turns out, this is really total BS. It’s simply not true.
Eating 6 small meals a day DOES create 6 small increases in metabolism…but if you eat 3 bigger meals a day, you’ll get 3 bigger increases in metabolism. The net change in metabolism is the same, as long as you eat the same number of calories.
So there’s no need to try and eat every few hours. And in fact you can go longer than you think without suffering any metabolic slowdown.
A study published in the British Journal of Nutrition, for example, reveals that you can go 72 hours without food before your metabolism starts to slow down at all.
So yes, there is such a thing as a “starvation mode,” but it only kicks in after about 3 days without food.
The take-home message is this:
Intermittent fasting will NOT slow down your metabolism, and it has some really great benefits for your weight loss, lifestyle, and health.