By Rimsha Ather
Nowadays, many fitness experts recommend ‘intermittent fasting’ as a star-spangled technique for burning your calories without having to go to the gym. What is intermittent fasting, you ask? It is not a diet per se, but more like a dieting pattern. You choose to consume food during a particular window of the day only, while staying hungry for the rest of it. This feasting-fasting mode allows you to torch excess fat (as the body’s fuel-source shifts from glucose to ketones), optimize your immune system, preserve muscle mass, and improve gut health, etc.
Though you might have seen multiple celebrities like the Kardashian clan adopting intermittent fasting, it’s not mandatory that you’ll have similar results. Each body is unique and gives off a different response to any fitness regime.
Coming back to the topic at hand, there are multiple downfalls to intermittent fasting if it’s not done right. You could be starving yourself and not know it, which is the more dangerous outcome. So, do watch out for the following obstacles when you begin your diet so that you can get the best out of it instead of the worst.
Overeating Upon Breaking Fast
Fasting helps you to learn diet moderation, primarily. If you start eating a horde of high-calorie food items upon breaking your fast (there will be a chicken-nugget themed temptation period, trust me!) you’ll defeat the entire purpose of keeping a fast. Thereupon, instead of losing weight, you’ll gain it. This excess intake of unhealthy food items after a period of prolonged hunger has a counterproductive effect on the body, and can waylay your fasting regime terribly.
Relying Too Much on Coffee
Suppose, after your 10 p.m. dinner, you determinedly close your kitchen. Regardless of the hunger pangs you might wake up with, in the middle of the night. Next morning, according to the schedule, you are to skip breakfast. So, to compensate for the lack of nutritional intake, you rely on a cup of fresh, black-roasted joe to boost your energy levels and at the same time, dial down your hunger. But, it doesn’t stop there. You start drinking coffee way too much during the fasting period and then end up getting overweight instead of under. Where did you go wrong? With the overconsumption of coffee, which increased your blood sugar level and amplified your fat storing rate as well. Therefore, steer clear of the coffee ingestion and you’ll be good to go.
Going Headfirst into a 36-hour Fast
One thing you need to understand is that, especially in the fitness domain, slow and steady wins the race. People who undertake every single workout session on their first day of gym, usually end up exhausting themselves to their bones and rupturing their muscle mass.
Your body is not made up of steel.
It deserves to be treated ever so gently and with extra care. If you take on too much too fast, your system will crash and starvation will be the doomed result. So, pace yourself on a moderate speed and begin with a smaller fasting window. Expand the fasting period gradually—journaling your progress in the meantime—once you’re absolutely sure your body can take it.
Not Maintaining a Balanced Lifestyle
Intermittent fasting deprives your body of glucose and dials down your energy levels, only to bring them back up. So, when you adopt this dieting pattern, you’ll feel super-low, energy-wise, in the first few days. You might not even wish to get out of the bed. This air of lethargy and the overall sedentary lifestyle will only undo the positive effects of fasting. I’d suggest that you try to stay active throughout the day, consume only the expert-approved healthy diet, take a complete eight-hour nightly sleep, meditate regularly to reduce your stress levels and try to stay composed + calm.
Wrapping up, you can totally optimize your intermittent fasting regime by staying clear of the aforementioned snags, and by doing so, you’ll feel positively fit in a matter of days.
Rimsha Ather is a professional writer with two years’ worth of practical experience in content creation, curation, and marketing. Her blogging interests range from health & fitness to globetrotting, with the latter gaining special attention from the readers. On the side, she is a metal-enthusiast, an occasional painter and a culinary freak with flavorsome stories up her sleeve, which she occasionally dedicates to this site.
Twitter: @wildflowerdust Instagram: rimshhh.a
