You may have heard about intermittent fasting. After all, its popularity has skyrocketed in recent years. Unlike many other fads, however, there is a good reason why fasting is suddenly being highly advised.

What is intermittent fasting? It’s a method of consuming food that centres around consuming all your calories within a set period, and then fasting till your next eating window. For this reason, Intermittent fasting can also be referred to as ‘time-restricted eating’. The most common form is the 16-8 arrangement. This consists of an 8-hour feeding period (e.g. 10 am – 6 pm) following a 16-hour fasting window (6 pm – 10 am).

Benefits of Intermittent Fasting

For many, eating this way is unusual since society has conditioned us to believe that breakfast is the ‘most important meal of the day’. The reality is that this is far from the truth. Eating within a time-restricted window is actually far healthier for our bodies than eating all day long.

This follows the eating pattern of our hunter-gatherer ancestors where food was rarely available to eat as soon as they woke up – instead, they would hunt first, and only then were able to feast. Our bodies have adapted to eat this way over hundreds of millennia. Therefore it seems reasonable to assume that continuing this feeding pattern would be beneficial for our biology.

Fasting Improves Mental Clarity And Focus

Ever feel tired and sluggish after having a large meal? That’s the effect digestion can have on the body. In order to digest food, the body has to divert large amounts of energy and resources from other systems and towards the digestive system. One of these systems is the brain.

This leads to the assumption that during digestion, you will experience reduced brain function – and this assumption is supported by science.

Most people are consuming food throughout the whole day, and therefore digesting food through the whole day. This means a large amount of people probably aren’t even aware of their own mental capabilities.

Choosing to perform important tasks before consuming your first calories of the day can make it easier to slip into a state of deep work. Structuring your day in this way might give you the edge you need to outperform the competition in your business or career.

Increased HGH Production through intermittent fasting

HGH stands for Human Growth Hormone, and as the name suggests, is responsible for the growth of human tissues. It’s the main hormone responsible for regulating height before the growth plates fuse and perform other important functions such as supporting metabolism, muscle growth and strength.

Studies have repeatedly shown that intermittent fasting results in significant increases in HGH. I’m talking about 1000% increases. That much more HGH is going to have positive effects on all the things listed above. Maybe intermittent fasting might even lead to increases in height if your growth plates are still open…

Weight Loss and Fat Loss

Fasting intermittently when you are trying to lose weight (specifically fat) is one of the best routes to take. The first benefit is that the shorter eating window helps limit your caloric intake. Having less time to eat means that it is harder to get in the same amount of calories as it would be if you were eating for the whole day.

Even if you did consume the same calories as before your fast, you are likely to feel much more satisfied. You are able to condense the calories into less frequent, but larger meals, rather than frequent but smaller meals.

Fasting should also make it easier to lose weight whilst maintaining muscle mass. This indicates that a larger percentage of the weight loss comes from fat. The immense increases in HGH mentioned previously are responsible for this since growth hormones play a large part in the maintenance of lean mass during a fast.

Fasting Increases Longevity

While the mechanisms behind it are still unclear, animal studies indicate that fasting can significantly increase mice’s lifespan. While mice are not biologically the same as humans, they can still be good indicators of human biology.

Apart from this, fasting also supports other biological processes that should contribute to a longer, healthier life:

It upregulates autophagy which is a natural process where your body replaces older cellular components with newer ones so they can function more optimally. Autophagy is an important procedure that maintains your body’s metabolic health and immune function. Anti-ageing processes within the body have also been linked with autophagy.

Fasting also activates anti-inflammatory pathways that are switched off when in the fed state. The consequence is a reduction in chronic inflammation. Chronic inflammation can impair longevity since it damages healthy cells, tissues and organs. It also damages DNA which can lead to cancer.

Conclusion

Intermittent fasting has shown us the importance of not just what we eat, but when we eat it also. It’s behavioural tools like this that provide us with so many benefits, that it’s hard not to be excited about embracing. This is yet another example where our ancestors from millennia ago were doing it better than us, and we would be wise to study their behaviours for further insight into our own biology.