What is Intermittent Fasting?3 min read

Unlike a conventional diet, which limits or specifies what you can eat, intermittent fasting is better described as an eating pattern, since it involves monitoring and controlling when you eat. Basically, people who fast intermittently cycle through periods of eating and fasting.

There are many popular strategies or fasting patterns to follow, but common ones include the 16/8 method (where you eat all your calories in an 8-hour window daily and fast for the other 16 hours), the eat-stop-eat method, (where you fast for two full 24-hour periods each week) and the 5:2 method (where you eat normally for 5 days a week, but only consume 600 calories or less on the other two days.) 

These practices restrict your calorie intake, which is the best-proven strategy for weight loss, but the benefits of these methods take us all the way back to the beginning of civilization – think about how hunters and gatherers must have eaten! Humans are biologically capable of surviving without food for much longer than modern humans typically do, but tapping into our prehistoric eating habits might just make us healthier today.