Is Intermittent Fasting the Answer to a Slimmer Future?

Touted as Silicon’s Valley latest fad diet, intermittent fasting may prove to be more than just a fad.

Intermittent or alternate-day fasting requires routinely alternating between eating little or no food and then feasting in your daily diet. It has become a growing weight loss trend in the US, the UK and other regions around the world.

A study published in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine suggests these types of fasting works roughly as well for weight loss as traditional dieting does.

As anyone who’s ever dieted knows, restricting what you eat every day can be monotonous, gruelling work. Enter intermittent fasting, a plan that essentially involves carefully monitoring what you consume on certain days and eating whatever you want on others.

While it might sound intimidating (the name itself doesn’t exactly scream “user-friendly”), intermittent fasting can be adapted for a variety of eating preferences, from regularly abstaining from food for 12-16 hours at a time to not eating once or twice a week.

Plus, a growing body of research on fasting suggests that in addition to helping with weight loss, the method could have other beneficial health outcomes, such as potentially reducing the risk for certain cancers and even possibly prolonging life.

Those potential benefits haven’t gone unnoticed amongst engineers and CEOs in Silicon Valley, many of whom are sworn devotees of the diet. These folks include a Bay Area group of biohacking enthusiasts called WeFast, which meets weekly to collectively break their fasts with a hearty morning meal, and Facebook executive Dan Zigmond, who confines his eating to the narrow time slot of 9 a.m. to 5:30 p.m.

Still, fasting isn’t fool-proof.

Like other diets, it might be tough to stick to. Roughly a third of the people assigned to both dieting groups dropped out before their year was up, compared with about a quarter of the people in the control or non-dieting group. Also, many of the people in the fasting group gradually appeared to slide into old dieting habits, meaning that by the end of the trial they were effectively doing regular calorie-restriction rather than alternate-day fasting.

Extra Help.

According to Dr Julinda Lee, the key to healthier (and slimmer) you is to cut down on your intake of sugar. It seems that sugar substitutes come out no safer (even many forms of honey are adulterated these days) so your only salvation is to curb your sweet tooth and de-program your body to need less sugar in the long run.

Besides focusing on numbers on the weighing scale, it is also important to realise that when it comes to weight, this is one instance whereby numbers do lie. Muscles are denser than fat; when you start replacing body fat with lean muscle, you will look more toned despite not dropping pounds. Targeting less-than-ideal body parts with proven fat-busting, cellulite-smoothening therapies may be key to achieving your dream physique safely. Dr Low Chai Ling from SW1 Clinic says her patients find Supermodel Bodyfit Program which combines cryolipolysis Coolshape and radiofrequency-based Exilis Body Magic helpful to tone and firm up troubling body areas.