There’s no doubt that pregnancy weight gain can take some time to come off after childbirth. While it’s important to always embrace your postpartum body and praise it for giving you your bundle of joy, many women hope to drop the weight once they’re ready.
If you’re determined to finally shed those few extra pounds, you might want to try one of the most popular diets – Intermittent Fasting. There are many intermittent fasting benefits for women related
to weight loss, psychological, stress reducing, and more.Learn all about the rules of intermittent fasting and how to stick to your weight loss goals with the DoFasting App
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What is Intermittent Fasting?
An intermittent fast is any time you go without eating when you would typically eat. Basically, it is time-restricted eating that can take one of two forms.
The most common form is to skip a meal (breakfast or dinner) and extend the nighttime fasting (when you’d be asleep). This will result in a 12 – to 20 hour period of fasting.
For example, if you finish dinner at 7 pm and wait until 1 pm the next day to eat, you’ve fasted for 18 hours and have a 6-hour eating window (16:8). This can be done as many days per week as you’d like. I’ve done a 16:8 fast daily for months at a time.
Another form of intermittent fasting is 5×2. In this form, you do a 24 hour fast twice per week, eating regularly the other five days.
This might be where you eat dinner on Sunday night and don’t eat again until dinner on Monday night. Then you eat dinner on Thursday night and don’t eat again until dinner on Friday night.
Intermittent Fasting Rules
Intermittent fasting is a pretty simple concept. It’s essentially an eating pattern that cycles between periods of not eating (fasting) and eating.
It is kind of a misnomer to say there are rules around intermittent fasting as there are various ways to implement this approach. One can experiment with them and see which one works best for you.
The 16/8 method is the most common. It involves restricting your daily eating period to 8 hours, such as 12–8 p.m. Then you fast for 16 hours.
The Eat-Stop-Eat method involves fasting for 24 hours, once or twice a week. And finally, the 5:2 diet involves eating only 500–600 calories on two nonconsecutive days of the week then eating normally the other 5 days.
Each of these methods should result in weight loss if you don’t compensate by eating much more during the eating periods.
Other intermittent fasting rules:
- No intake of sugar and salt.
- Avoid fats and processed food.
- Increase intake of water.
- Don’t break your fast with sugary foods or drinks. This will cause a blood sugar spike and is very damaging to the body.
- For beginners, start with a smaller window of fasting and increase the fasting window with the passage of time. For example, start with 12, 14 hours fasting and gradually increase to 16 to 18 hours of fasting window.
- If you feel hungry you can add bone broth or herbal tea but the hunger subsides the longer you practice IF. Coffee with a small amount of cream (try to stay under 50 calories) will help with hunger also.
Make Intermittent Fasting Easier with the DoFasting App
While any diet can be hard to stay on track, intermittent fasting requires a lot of discipline to maintain. If you can do it with a partner or friend, this will help you stay accountable, but not everyone has that option.
Instead, try using the DoFasting App as your own personal accountability partner and health coach. The DoFasting App makes it easy to stay on track with alarms, positive affirmations, and goals.
DoFasting is the new, easier 3-in-1 solution for weight loss. You first choose a fasting method that fits best into your lifestyle, then learn to prepare healthy meals and implement simple workouts into your daily routine.
Instead of strict dieting, DoFasting offers healthy food recipes that actually taste amazing. Instead of exhausting fitness routines, they give you workouts that you can complete every day.
The DoFasting App has really helped me to stay on track with my diet and stick to my goals. Here are some of my favorite features:
- Set Goals and Challenges
The challenge mode gives you a daily agenda with your fasting hours and useful advice. Join challenges with friends, family, or strangers to test your limits and advance in your diet.
- Meal Recommendations
Select and save your favorite meal recipes right in the app to make your fasting diet even more effective. All recipes are chosen by professional nutritionists and can be adjusted according to your allergies and dietary preferences.
- Progress Tracker & Calendar
Start tracking your weight loss progress from the very first day of fasting! Your DoFasting profile shows your starting, current, and goal weight to keep you motivated and help to achieve desired results.
- Daily motivation boosts
Intermittent fasting takes time to get used to. The first few days, even weeks may seem a bit more challenging than you thought. However, those are the days that actually determine whether you will reach your goal or not.
You will either build a sustainable foundation for further fasting, form new habits, or lose interest.
To guarantee your success, DoFasting is there for you through the best and the toughest days of fasting with motivational boosts and friendly reminders.
- Effective training routines
Set up your workout schedule, choose a fitness level, and tone up your body without spending additional money on gyms and equipment.
DoFasting exercise suggestions feature professionally visualized training routines – warmups, workouts and stretching guides. Only 10-30 minutes a day will result in improved posture, lean muscle gain, reduced weight, and improved overall body health.
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Tips for Intermittent Fasting
- Avoid food obsessions: stop thinking too much about food as this may increase hunger pangs which may break the fasting program.
- Keep yourself hydrated: throughout the day, whether fasting or in the eating window, drink plenty of water.
- Rest and relax: if you fast intermittently, you should avoid strenuous activities.
- Increase the taste and flavor of your food. You can spice up your meal with herbs, garlic, and vinegar. They are low in calories.
- Don’t overdo it. Choose something that’s challenging but not a huge stretch, and stick with that. It’s much better to be consistent than pushing yourself and quit down the line.
- Still think about your nutritional intake. Especially at the start, you will get hungry and you might go for unhealthy meals to break your fast. With fewer meals in the day, don’t disregard nutrition.
- Hot liquids are your friends throughout the day. A good cup of tea always helps make me feel full, and if I feel really hungry, a cup of beef broth is always a good option that doesn’t break your fast technically.
Frequently Asked Questions
How quickly can you lose weight with intermittent fasting?
While intermittent fasting isn’t meant for a drastic reduction in calories eaten, it does typically result in a slight reduction as it is really hard to eat as much in a restricted eating window.
Most people who do intermittent fasting make better food choices as well. Both can help with weight loss.
It is best to find a slow, sustainable weight loss and avoid chasing the scale. I find intermittent fasting to be a good strategy for breaking plateaus rather than a quick weight loss protocol.
Can you have lemon water with intermittent fasting?
If you’re being strict about fasting then consuming any type of calories will technically break a fast and spike insulin levels. Yet, your metabolism is complex and doesn’t operate like an on-and-off switch.
While lemon water doesn’t provide a ton of calories or carbs, I might stick with black coffee and regular water during this time. It’s always best to stay hydrated though, so if you need lemon in your water to drink more of it, then this is a better plan than becoming dehydrated.
So, honestly, drinking plain lemon water, which contains minimal calories, is unlikely to affect your fast. If lemon water helps you maintain your fast, go for it.
Do you get hungry during your off hours of intermittent fasting?
Yes, you can get hungry during the off hours but only in the beginning. After a week’s time, the body gets used to it.
This is especially true if you are on a low-fat diet. Fat, despite being more calorie-dense, is very satiating.
What should you do if you’re hungry during intermittent fasting?
Work on finding the foods to eat during the eating window that leave you satiated for longer. For most people, this is fat and protein. Nutritionally dense foods help you go longer without food.
Also, recognize that hunger is not dangerous. In fact, it is good to get in touch with our bodies and know what real hunger feels like. So many of us eat mindlessly (emotional, stress, boredom) that it is good to feel hunger from time to time and settle into it.
If you get hungry during your fasting hours you could try sipping on hot coffee or tea, which can help to suppress your appetite. But really, you need to make sure that you’re eating enough during your non-fasting hours.
Who Should Not Do Intermittent Fasting?
If you are feeling weak, fatigued, or dizzy while fasting then it’s best to break your fast and eat. This could be a sign that your blood sugar levels are imbalanced or that you’re not eating enough during your eating window.
In addition, you should not fast if you have an eating disorder or have had one in the past, are pregnant or breastfeeding, or are under the age of 18.
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If you’re taking the next step in your diet and ready to try out intermittent fasting, you’ll definitely want to try out the best intermittent fasting app. Have a personal health and fitness coach with you at all times to maximize your weight loss and work out goals.
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