A continuous daily supply of food requires significant effort from your digestive system to process, digest and absorb the nutritional components from the food you eat. The appetite-regulating brain centers in certain people are not good at permanently monitoring daily food intake effectively. Our body has several protective mechanisms to prevent starvation and nutritional deficiencies, and hunger is one of them. Although it was a great tool for ancient hunters and gatherers, it is less useful in our days when food is readily available. This is why obesity and its health consequences are increasingly frequent in the modern population. Choosing intermittent fasting as your weight loss diet regimen may be a natural way to adjust your eating habits to effectively monitor your weight and protect yourself from heart disease and high cholesterol. Intermittent fasting works through several mechanisms to help maintain a normal body weight and stay healthy:
Appetite Control
Intermittent fasting stimulates your body to use the nutritional components more effectively and prevents buildup of excessive fat. When we eat more calories than we consume through mental and physical work, our body will store the excessive energy as fat deposits.
As a protective mechanism against hunger and malnutrition, which was developed when our ancestors were struggling to obtain food, our appetite is not a great tool to regulate our food intake, because it will always cause us to eat more than we actually need. Our appetite, which resides in the lower brain centers that are not controlled by superior brain regions responsible for logic and reasoning, has no way of telling how much mental and muscular work we are going to perform after food intake. Intermittent fasting allows our body to adapt to a temporary lack of food and use the food more effectively without storing fat deposits.
Enhanced Metabolism
During short-term food deprivation, the energy expenditure is increased by higher blood adrenaline (also known as epinephrine) levels, as shown by a 2000 medical research study conducted by the University of Vienna, Austria, and published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. It is an adaptive mechanism that causes the mobilization of fat from deposits and accelerated burning of carbohydrates and fatty acids. The results is an enhanced metabolism that will lead to a gradual weight loss, provided you do not eat unhealthy food on your non-fasting days.
Intermittent fasting works in a similar manner with moderate exercise, which also results in an increase of blood adrenaline levels and enhanced weight loss. However, it does not mean that you should not exercise when using intermittent fasting as a diet to manage your weight.
Calorie Reduction
Intermittent fasting is associated with a reduction in total caloric intake. If you will not eat high amounts of food on your non-fasting days, the diet will decrease your caloric count. However, unlike daily caloric restriction, intermittent fasting allows you to eat some of your favorite foods during your non-fasting days. Besides reducing the caloric intake, intermittent fasting provides other significant health, benefits such as the speed-up of toxic substance removal from the digestive system, enhanced metabolism, better blood circulation and even increased longevity.