Should you eat whatever you want just in small portions to lose weight if you’re overweight?

Yes and no. Obvious cutting higly caloric food to small portions is a way to eat less calories. But the solution is simplistic anyhow.

In first place, how small a portion do you want to eat? Suppose that you burn 2000 calories per day (it’s the average for women and, as usual, it’s a nice, well-rounded number that allows us to make easy calculations), but you are currently eating 2500 calories per day, so you have a surplus of 500 calories each day. In order to lose weight you have to eat around 1800 calories per day, that’s 700 calories less than you do each day.

This is actually more like 30 grams, but you get the idea

Now, suppose you like pasta (and I love pasta). A large bowl of spaghetti with tomato sauce can have some 6–700 calories, which is a lot. The easy solution would be to cut your portion to 50 grams, which is the diet portion sugested by many diets. That would be some 200 calories: about one third of your previous one. The problem is that such a dish can also get digested pretty fast, assimilated, and leaving you feeling starving.

To prevent you from feeling starving, you would need to bolster up your meal by both adding something that helps it become more filling. A good example of this something is vegetables, which are light in calories. If instead of using a tomato sauce you use a lot of vegetables (such as artichokes, broccoli, zucchini, asparagus, etc.) sautéed in just a small amount of oil with garlic, chili, and some of the pasta cooking water you get a much larger plate of food without adding a lot of ingredients. Even more interesting, the fibers in the vegetables make absorbing the calories in this dish slower, so that you can feel fuller for longer.

Pasta with artichokes

Besides, there’s the nutritional issue. Even if you eat a lot of “unhealthy” food, the very fact that you eat lots of food that is poor in vitamins and minerals provides you with most of what you need in terms of micronutrients. But if you reduce your portions, you also reduce the amount of vitamins and minerals you eat, so you must introduce extra vegetables and fruit or you can following the Eat The Fat Off eBook.

A small portion of a pasta with vegetables, followed by a small portion of meat, fish, or one egg (or also a lean diary), a salad, and a portion of fruit are a great diet meal that will keep you from starving. It sill includes that food you liked above all (in our hypothesis), but also proteins, a lot of fibers, a little natural sugar from the fruit. not just smaller portions of what you like, but a general change in how you compose your meals.

And you likely will need a couple free meals (I don’t like the concept of cheat meals: free meals are necessary in a diet) when you eat anything you want with no regards for the diet. These are necessary to prevent you from getting bored in your diet, to keep you in a good spirit, to allow you to take part to family events and meet your friends, to keep your metabolism highier.

How have you successfully lost a large amount of weight?

I have! On the 21st August 2016 I weighed and measured myself, measuring my arm, thigh, hip, waist, chest circumference with the aim of doing the same every month thereafter. I've dieted a few times over the years (I'm 38, have 2 children - 4 and 8) and had decided this is it. I was starting to feel old, my feet hurt, my hips and knees hurt and I wasn't happy (mentally) especially as I really didn't have much to be miserable about.

My daughter was starting school and that was my focal point. I discussed with my husband if he would mind me shelving everything I should be about to be taking on for 9 months more (like going from part-time to full time working hours!) for sorting out my health. I did 3 key things - I read the book “8 week blood sugar diet” by Dr Michael Moseley, I watched the TV documentary “"fixing dad” which is based on the same principles. Reduce my sugar intake, stop such huge spikes in my blood sugar and therefore find it easier to maintain a healthy diet without needing to keep feeding my sugar addiction. I also downloaded the free Nike+ personal training app - I've done exercise in the past and it always ends with injuries so I wanted to make sure I'd have variety in my routine to stop that happening. The biggest change to my diet - no more bread, no more breakfast cereal!

The blood sugar changes were instant, it took 3 days of feeling tetchy, headaches then I just suddenly felt ok. The diet itself has been bizarrely easy….feels odd saying that. I have my moments (once a month!) where all I want is carbs but then I just carry on. I take multi vitamins daily as I understand that such a restictive diet might need propping up.

Ok so the results…. I'm not where I want to be (I still want to lose 10% body fat) but I guess I'm unrecognisable now. I was just over 18 stone on the 21st August. I am currently (8th May) 11 stone 12lbs (that's a uk dress size 20/22 down to a 12). I have NO joint pain at all, my skin is great, mentally - I can't remember ever feeling this good, I love the gym and have now started running 5k a week (I have never been able to run). I also have recently joined a boxing club which is brilliant - they have no idea about my weight loss and just judge me on my current fitness, which they deem to be good (hearing that made me so unbelievably happy).

My tips:

1. Drop the bread, don't try to replace it or substitute it with a ‘healthier’ version just start eating different things.
2. Stop eating cereal, cutting out the sugar at breakfast has been key for me.
3. Don’t eat ‘diet’ food - just cook from scratch, eat healthily. If you are going to fall off the wagon make sure whatever it is it’s damn good and worth it!
4. The part in your evening meal that would be carbs just replace with green vegetables (kale, spinach etc..)
5. Cauliflower instead of rice is actually very good, there's plenty of recipes online EXCEPT replacing pizza dough - that's a crime and just makes you miss pizza more.
6. Don’t think of yourself as on ‘a diet’ - you are changing how you eat forever! So, if you wanna have ‘tea and cake’ (I am English!) then do it, because the rest of the day/ week you will be back to living and eating healthily.
7. When starting to exercise stay away from heavy impact (no running!) - if you are big, you'll wreck your joints and be in a lot of pain. It took me 7.5 months of body weight exercises (squats, press ups etc..) and strength training on my legs (twice a week) to get to a point of being strong enough (and light enough) to run. You will get there just go for consistency and sticking at it.
8. Get the Nike+ app, it's free and will give you all the exercises you need. My aim was to build lean muscle.

**Edit**

Thursday 8th June 2017 I officially hit my goal weight (6 stone 10lbs gone) which brings me into the green ‘healthy’ weight section of the NHS bmi chart for the first time since I was a child. I'm over the moon!! Now to adjust my diet to maintaining weight rather than loosing (eek! might be harder than I think)

Thursday 10th January 2018

The weight is still off!! I have the odd unhealthy day(s) but now I know how to get back to healthy again so easily. I couldn’t be happier. For anyone interested I try to keep a log of what I’m eating daily and my workouts on Instagram.

***

2013

July 2007

Jan 2016

Nov’17 vs 2010 (?)

Jan’2016 vs Dec’17

July’2007 vs March 2018

Jan’2016 vs Nov’17

Dec’2012 vs. Mar’2019

How can I lose a lot of weight fast with diets?

BUCKLE UP, BECAUSE WHAT FOLLOWS CAN AND WILL CHANGE YOUR LIFE, IF YOU ARE SERIOUS ABOUT WEIGHT LOSS!

Take it from someone who has done them all.

• I have tried intermittent fasting.
• I tried the ketogenic approach.
• I tried low-carb.
• I tried simply restricting my calories.
• I tried water-fasts.
• I tried going vegan.
• I tried Atkins.
• I tried the Warrior-Diet.
• I tried the OMAD-Diet.
• I tried EVERY diet in the book.

Now, which would I recommend?

No one. And all of them. Kinda. Piqued your interest?

Okay, I’ll turn this into a valuable life lesson for you.

95% (!!!) of diets fail within a year.

If you read, apply and understand all of this, I promise you will fall in the lucky 5% that lose weight and keep it off for good.

You can get a wonderful physique, if you follow this.

I’ll be blunt: I came to understand WHY and HOW this works, only recently myself. I am very thick-headed, you see, and it took me YEARS to finally understand the simple principle behind how weight loss works.

Let us start easy: I mentioned earlier that 95% of diets fail.
Now, why is that? Why can’t you keep the weight off, after months of dieting, loosing 50, maybe 100 pounds, just to put them back on?

The reason is so simple, it is baffling.

First of all, you have to understand the basic principle of weight loss.

Losing weight is simply burning more calories than you consume.

Calories are given by the three macronutrients: Fat (8), Protein (4) and Carbohydrates (4).

The numbers in the brackets are the amount of calories one gram of macronutrient equal to.

So, I’ll assume now 2000 kcal as your daily energetic output.
(For women that is less, for men more, depending on weight and muscle-mass. Also, activity plays an important role. On my marathon-day I had an output of 5100 kcals, on days without sports obviously much less.)

We go with 2000 though for simplicity.
This most likely won’t apply to you, just search online for a BMR (basal metabolic rate) calculator and find out your approximative value. (Approximative, because two people of the same age, weight and build can still have different BMR.)

Now. To burn 2 pounds of WEIGHT (or 1kg), you will have to (roughly) burn 7000kcals.

The time frame in which you plan on doing so is up to you.

Now you’re thinking: “Marco, that is great! So if I eat only 1000kcals a day for a month, I burn 30.000kcals, which are approxiately 4,5 kgs of fat?”

See, I pulled a little sneaky on ya there. Observe how I said that you burn WEIGHT, I didn’t specify if that weight is muscle or fat.

The truth is, if you restrict your daily intake by more than 500kcals, your body won’t only burn fat - it is going to eat your precious muscle.

This is for a couple of reasons undesirable.

• First, your body will likely (hopefully) put all that muscle-weight back, once you quit “dieting”.
• Second, you essentially lowered your BMR. Muscle burns more energy than fat, so the more you have of the first, the higher your BMR is.

So, let us clarify why most diets fail within the year.

Take Bob. Bob is a 120kg, 47 year old man with an office-job.

Bob eats rather unhealthy, one can already judge by his weight. He puts in a solid 4000 kcals everyday, and got fatter and fatter.

One day Bob looks in the mirror and realises how hideous he has become. He decides then and there: “That’s it, I’m going on a diet.”

And on a diet he went. Any of the upper mentioned examples have one in common: They won’t work without restricting your calories.

So Bob eats, keto, let’s assume. He swiftly goes from consuming 4000 kcals a day to 1500, starves himself, but for a good cause, he thinks, since he loses over 2kgs a week!

After 6 weeks, Bob is down 15 kgs! Everyone compliments him, he looks amazing.

He might even go for another 3–4 weeks, because motivation was so high.

Now it is christmas time. With all the delicious treats, Bob thinks to himself: “I put in all that effort, I can enjoy myself a little now.”

And Bob starts binging on cookies, cake and desserts like he never did before.

Obviously, this binging is temporary. After 2 weeks he goes back to his old eating habits.

But do you think that after binging for a while he goes back to keto? Yeah naw.

Bob goes back to the same diet he had BEFORE he had lost all his weight. Eating again 4000 kcals a day, and slowly building all the fat back up.

And that is how, after 1 year, Bob is back to his 120–130 kgs. Fatigue is high, motivation is low.
Bob gives up, because he “tried everything” and “it just doesn’t work” for him.

So. You hopefully understand what Bob did wrong.

That is why I had the initial claim that no diet ever works.
Because we all define a diet as something timely limited.
We diet for a month, two, or even three. But this won’t keep your weight off, if you go back to your old habits.

I also said though that all diets work. Now, how’s that?
They all work because, as we have all different food-preferences, you have to pick the one diet that makes it easy for you to stay under your BMR. If that is keto, go keto.
If it is intermittent fasting, do that one. There is not ONE PERFECT DIET, only the one that works for YOU.

And you can switch it up. You can do keto, IF, OMAD, whatever, when you get bored, just do something else.

You might even ditch “diets” completely and realize you are good off just by skipping dinner, or lunch, or whatever.

Doesn’t matter which diet you choose, here are some (personal) tips that makes it easier (for me) to stay lean:

• Don’t drink your calories. Avoid all juices, avoid alcohol. You can have them, but IN MODERATION.
  Many want a six-pack, but drink beer 4–5 times a week. Some people can get away with that, but that’s not you, otherwise you wouldn’t be reading this right now.
• Pick some kind of exercise. It is important you enjoy it!
  I started with going to the gym with a friend twice a week.
  Now I workout at the gym 4 times a week, box twice a week, have a race every month and finished my first marathon only 3 weeks ago!
  Also, the best trick in my book: ALWAYS work out with someone.
  I have found myself 3 friends, who I go with to the gym and boxing together.
  Suddenly, being unmotivated because the weather is bad, or you’re just not feeling it, or whatever, isn’t a reason anymore, because someone else holds you accountable. 6 of my current 7 workouts are with friends, and the one run a week I have to do alone, because I am proud to say that I’m on a level with my running that I don’t have a lot of friends who can keep up.
• Avoid refined sugar. I quit it for three months, and the tiredness and my cravings disappeared! The first 3 weeks are horrible, but afterwards, you feel like someone lifted literal weight of your shoulders.
• PPPPPP: Prior planning prevents piss poor performance.
  If you prepare your meals ahead, you’re much less likely to make the wrong choices.
  If you don’t buy chocolate, you won’t be able to eat any at midnight, when the hunger strikes. But hey, you still got bananas and some nuts! :D

In conclusion:

You are what you eat. If you enjoy eating donuts and cakes so much, trust me, you will look like it.
There is no “secret formula”, or pill, or tonic, or whatever, eat the fat off.

You will only ever get out what you put in. Stop searching for a “magic weapon” or whatever, and clean up your diet.

If you eat like sh*t, you will look like sh*t.

Oh, and one more very important thing:

It is a simple, yet cunning change in mindset. Don’t forbid yourself to eat or drink anything, but consciously make the better choice.

You don’t avoid sugar because “you’re not allowed sugar in keto” (for example), you avoid sugar because you decide that it isn’t worth it for you, and, VERY important, because you PREFER something different.

Also, you can still have everything in moderation. Today, I am traveling.
I am sitting at the airport for two hours now, will have to wait another 4, and then won’t be able (due to university, which I go to directly from the airport) to prepare anything, so I prepared my food in advance.
I had a big bowl of oatmeal this morning, have two bananas with me, and tonight, in celebration of returning home, I’ll go to an all-you-can-eat-Sushi.
So what.
I KNOW though that first thing after uni tomorrow, and every following day of the week, I have PREPPED my food in advance to a total of 2300 kcals, and I burn around 2500–3000 every day, trough my level of activity.

I'm overweight, I want lose weight first and then exercise

What would you prefer in order to achieve your weight loss goals?

I want to fill you in on a little secret about weight loss. The most important thing you need to do is improve your insulin sensitivity. Let me get a little deeper on this subject.

When you are insulin resistant, the body is much more likely to store the food that you eat as fat. It also promotes a lot of inflammation markers within the body, causing health issues and less quality of life. Here are some of the effects of poor insulin sensitivity

• Causes chronic insomnia and therefore, makes you even more tired
• Can lead to the development of diabetes
• Leads to poorer effort when training, as well as in your overall physical fitness
• Can increase the risk of heart disease

What you must be aware of is that when you eat a meal, your blood sugar level rises after the digestion process. Insulin therefore goes into action mode, binding with cells in order to store the glucose in muscle as glycogen (to power up your muscles) or as fat (excess storage, as you already know). Healthy bodies shuttle glycogen to muscles for energy, then only store excess glucose as fat if those glycogen stores are topped off.

Insulin resistance means that the cells aren’t readily binding to insulin. The body pumps out more insulin to get the blood glucose that’s whirling around the blood, and back to where it needs to be. This is the problem with those suffering from obesity. The good news is that we can re-train the body to shuttle glucose back where it belongs, and eliminate it from fat storage mode. Here is how.

5 ways to get your body back into a fat burning, muscle building machine

1. Opt for foods that improve insulin sensitivity. Place these important staples in your diet immediately: - nuts - vinegar - spices - Green tea - Red Tea Detox - turmeric - cinnamon. Dress your salad with herbs, olive oil and vinegar.
2. When eating higher carb foods, add these sensitisers to it. Apple cider - lemon - lime - sauerkraut - cinnamon - ginger
   - When eating oats add cinnamon to it.
   Drink a cup of green tea before this meal.
   - When you are having sweet potato, add sauerkraut and some lemon juice, with a drizzle of olive oil
3. Avoid soft drinks and any fruit juices. We all should know the dangers of soft drink and fruit juices. Both contain a multitude of added sugar and increase your insulin resistance, promote accumulation of fat on the belly, and can cause metabolic problems. Your best bet is to just drink filtered water, about 3 litres a day. This will help you lose body fat, hydrate you and eliminate waste products. Also, keep in mind that water has a thermal effect too.
4. Good fats are necessary for overall health and balancing blood sugar levels. Opt for olive, coconut, macadamia, almond oils, as well as avocados, nuts and salmon. Stay away from the following oils;
   - Vegetable, soy and cottonseed oil. They are filled with omega 6 fat. All are processed and partially hydrogenated. Often these are used in restaurants, store bought foods and in anything processed
5. Pick lower glycemic index foods in order to elevate your blood sugar at a slower pace. When you eat whole foods at all times, whilst diminishing refined and processed alternatives, you will teach your body to elevate blood sugar slowly, allowing the release of insulin more effectively, rather than pumping it out in a manic response to a spike in blood sugar. Just think as well what this will do to your overall health.
   - Choose fibre rich foods such as broccoli, kale, spinach and lettuce
   - Berries are a great source of polyphenols, and provide a great add on to your oats or as a snack during the day.

When you first alternate your food choices, improve your insulin sensitivity, and perform physical exercise, you will be more inclined to experience results faster, than if you split them. The choice is yours, and you can lose a relative amount of weight with food alone, following the options above to get your body back into the fat burning mode, instead of storing and holding onto fat.

12 step to step to lose weight?

I’ve spent over a decade trying to figure out the answer to this question and biggest lessons I learned are what not to do:

1. Don’t fast for long periods of time. I once fasted for 40 days! It slows down your metabolism and causes you to gain fat much quicker when you inevitably give back into your food cravings. Intermittent fasting can be beneficial, but also very tough when your just starting out.
2. Don’t go way too extreme in your exercise routine. You will put too much strain on your body and it will end up setting you back months on your goals.
3. Don’t choose fad diets that severely restrict your food intake. They will work in the beginning and will fool you into thinking you have beat your food demons. Next thing you know, you will have gone from losing 50 pounds to gaining 100.
4. Don’t stick to a routine for a couple of months and then splurge for a night, telling yourself you earned it. The first couple years of your weight loss journey are crucial in changing your mindset. I’ve made this mistake at least five times. It will most likely break your resolve and you will head straight back to your old weight.
5. Don’t start with exercise and work your way up to eating well. You would think this would work, but in the beginning, it is much better to start with the food. Food is everything is to your weight loss. Exercise is merely the fuel to supercharge it and the foundation for keeping it off when it is gone.
6. Don’t obsess over every little mistake you make. We are human. You are going to make a poor choice on your journey. The more you shame yourself, the more you will stress out and head back to the food to cope. It’s a brutal cycle.
7. Don’t break your diet just because you ate a bad meal. I can’t tell you how many times I told myself that I might as well go big and binge for the rest of the day or week because I already screwed up. This line of thinking keeps you stuck in the mindset of food addiction. It reinforces food as a useful tool to achieve happiness and hurts even worse when you are reminded that it will never provide it.
8. Don’t make your whole life about it. I have spent every waking moment in periods of my life all in service to getting that “perfect” body. I had to have the perfect diet, perfect workout, and perfect mindset. It took such a toll on my relationships and heart. And in the end, I looked at the mirror, having lost over a hundred pounds and still was miserable. Think about that, I had lost what many of us on here would love to be rid of. I was healthy, looking good and on my way to six pack. Yet all I could think was: Not good enough. Write down why you want to lose the weight. Who you're doing it for. What it will give you that you can't have right now. If you start to notice that what you're searching for, you can have right now, then no amount of weight loss will ever change it.

So what is the best way:

1. GET THROUGH THE FIRST 3 DAYS. In those first three days, your mind is going to play tricks on you. Tell you every excuse in the book on why you can eat what you want. Ignore it all. Set your mind on anything else. Each morning that you wake up, having stuck to your diet the day before, you will feel better and stronger in your goal. After three days, I still struggled, but I felt good enough to just let go and see this goal to completion.
2. Momentum is your friend. The first month is the hardest. But every day, every week, and every month that you remain steadfast, it gets easier to just continue on. Remember, change is just a matter of time. Nobody magically stops wanting all the bad foods. They have simply been sticking to their routine for so long that the choice to keep going is an easy one to make.
3. Find foods you can enjoy right now that will help you lose weight.
4. Find support and accountability so that when you are feeling weak in your resolve, they will help you.
5. Walk in the morning before you eat anything. This has been known to be very effective if you do it at 65 to 70 percent of your heart rate because it burns off your excess glycogen stores and sets up your body to eat away at your fat for the rest of the day.
6. Add in resistance workouts when you have reached 30 percent of your weight loss goal. Building your endurance will help set you up to up your exercise game when you inevitably plateau.
7. Learn to cook. This is a big one for me. When you know how to make tasty, healthy alternatives, you have a much easier time choosing them over fast food.
8. Stick to 50 percent protein, 30 percent carbs, 20 percent fats while you're losing the majority of your weight. It will give you less energy in the short term, but it always kept my cravings lower and it meant that my body would go after my fat quicker. Once you're closer to your goal and pushing harder in exercise you can switch to 40/40/20 macros.
9. Build muscle. I am always hungry. I always want more. So I need to be able to eat a large amount of calories. That’s the beauty of muscle. The more you have of it, the more food your body needs. DON’T GLOSS OVER THIS. Build up a lot of muscle and you can eat a lot of food.
10. End the night with protein. It is better, in the beginning, to eat most of your carbs in the day time and stick to veggies and protein at night. For most of my 100-pound weight loss, I ate chicken or fish and some veggies for dinner. Then about 30 to 60 min before bed, I would have a protein shake. This would keep my body working through the night and help me to not wake up starving right off the bat.
11. Choose realistic goals. Don’t place too much pressure on yourself. It will back fire. If you can’t find joy in your life outside of being fit, then it will never fully come even when you have your flat stomach.
12. Choose other goals alongside weight loss. I have been struggling to stay in this lifestyle. It is easy to lose weight and hard to keep it off. But a friend of mine has suggested a great way to keep my journey going: Competitions. By choosing to train for a spartan race where I will need to be at a certain fitness level in order to complete it, I have a meaningful motivator to push my body to new heights. Even more important, I have watched how the people around me have taken their struggle to overcome a race like spartan and easily translated it to their career, relationship and life struggles. This how you lose weight and change your life. You make your weight loss goals serve your life goals.

Try these ideas out.

If you have any questions, feel free to comment below!

The mistakes in Ketogenic Diet Plan?

Here Are The Exciting Pros and Cons Of The Ketogenic Diet.

Personally I love Keto, but in order for it to be effective you must apply Intermittent Fasting.

These 2 eat strategies helped me lose a total of 71 pounds since January of this year. I also teach other people how to do it in my “Intermittent Keto Fasting” 90 Day Coaching Program. If you are interested simply send me a DM.

Anyway below are the Pros and Cons of Keto.

1. Expensive – (New clothes, expensive more high quality food) the clothes are going to be too big for you.
2. Friends – Jealous of your weight loss and youthful appearance.
3. Tons of Energy – Different to figure out what to do.
4. People look at you weird.
5. Difficult to socialize with friends.
6. Transition Symptoms – (Classical Keto) Keto Fatigue, Keto flu, Keto rash.
7. You will not be appreciated by food industry / Drug Companies.

Downside of High Carbohydrate Diet:

1. Expensive – Buy new bigger clothes.
2. Buy a lot more food.
3. Expensive medications and more insurance – Diabetes, Cholesterol, High Blood Pressure
4. High Risk – Heart disease, diabetic retinopathy, cataract, glaucoma, kidney disease, dementia, Alzheimer’s, brain, nerve problems like peripheral neuropathy
5. More irritable – blood sugar
6. Tired all the time – Need a lot of naps – peeing all night long – Sleep Apnea Machine that is preventing you to have high quality of sleep
7. Bloated after eating
8. Doctors will stay in business and food manufacturing companies will just simply love you.

Which do you prefer? keto or high carb diet?

The best way to lose 10kg in 3 weeks?

Losing weight in such a short period of time is very much like crash dieting. It’s good for the duration, and provides fast results. Although, long term, it will not be sustainable, and may cause you to re-gain the weight you lost and quite possibly, gaining even more back!

I don’t recommend crash dieting, although I do have a method that can assist you to lose weight quickly, closer to the number you were after. This method requires some conscious effort, and allowing yourself to be a little bit hungry, for a duration of time. This is not going to cause the body any distress.

6 ways intermittent fasting helps you lose weight fast, and keep it off for life

1. By burning visceral fat. This is the stubborn fat we have on our bodies. It’s allocated deep around the abdominal organs. During a 6 month fasting duration, people on an intermittent fasting diet were able to shed 4–7 percent of their visceral fat (3) (4).
2. It kick starts ketosis. Ketosis usually happens under extreme limitations of carbohydrates. Intermittent fasting provides a short cut towards this ultimate fat burning state. Once the body is drained of glucose the primary source of our bodies energy - it is forced to burn through fat reserves for energy, through a process called Ketosis. Ketosis has the power to reduce inflammation markers, burn through extra fat and drop weight at a faster rate.
3. Lowers your insulin levels - making you more insulin sensitive. Low insulin levels is the cue your body needs to make in order to switch in burning stored fat instead of glucose (7).
4. Improves cholesterol. Fasting impacts your cholesterol by decreasing your levels of LDL and VLDL cholesterols. This is the bad cholesterol. Although it’s more apparent on obese people, who may also have an increased risk of cardiovascular disease; keeping your cholesterol levels in check benefits your health long term.
5. Reduces inflammation. Lowering inflammation markers is the key to weight loss, and improving your longevity. You also have the added benefit of reducing your risk of Alzheimer’s disease and cancer. Fasting decreases oxidative stress and inflammation across the whole body.
6. Boosts your metabolism. When your resting metabolism is boosted, it helps you burn more calories throughout the day, even when asleep or at rest.

In order to get the most long term fat loss benefits (and health ones of course!), here are some added tips that will turn you into a fat burning machine

3 added tips to get the most out of fasting

1. When breaking your fast, eat high quality protein, veggies and fat.It’s very important that when you break a fast, you are only filling your body with nutritious foods. It can be tempting to eat something sweet, but do resist this urge. Pre-prepare your meals earlier, so you always heat and eat your foods.
2. Eating lower carb. Get most of your carbs from the cruciferous veggies you are eating, as well as limited amounts of sweet potato. This will make it a lot easier to get into ketosis.
3. Use MCT oil. Try having 1–2 teaspoons of MCT oil to break your fast, before ingesting any food. Better yet, include it in your black coffee when fasting has ended. This will nourish your body with good fats and boost your fat burning potential even more.

Don’t forget that this method works well with time. Allow yourself at least a month to get into a habit of feeding and fasting. You can chose to fast for 12–16 or 20 hours. I personally fast from lunch time - 12, and wont eat again until 5am. This allows me to re-feed after training, as I find I’m a lot more hungry before lunch time. This also allows your body’s digestion some calmness, and regenerating during the night. If you have gut issues (as I do) this method works perfectly to decrease inflammation markers in the gut. Don’t forget to alter the duration of the fast daily, so your body does not become accustomed to it, and you get the best results. Give it a go.

I do hope these tips help you somewhat along your journey. I’m happy to discuss this in more detail if you would like to ask me a personal question.