The Ultimate Fasting Guide

Health enthusiasts have been promoting Fasting as one of the best diet habits in 2021.  When Fitness expert couple Josh and Sarah Bowmar featured a fasting episode on their Podcast, it became one of their most popular episodes. Feeling the need to reach a wider audience, Sarah decided to blog about it to.  They’ve discussed simple and basic steps on how you can start your own fasting journey, also called IF. 

Sarah and Josh identified the two states of fasting: Fasting state and Fed state. This mainly focuses on the time that you eat and the time that you should not eat. 

During fasting state, you cannot eat anything. Zero calories. The total number of calories that you consume during your feeding state would be enough to supply your body with what it needs. Most fasting benefits can be seen during the 16-hour mark. The calories in your body stay the same whether you are in an 8-hour feeding window or 12-hour feeding window. This is an awesome way to start your diet.

Fasting Types and Benefits. When it comes to diet, everyone is very keen on the benefits of fasting. Sarah and Josh detailed the two types of fasting and their benefits for easier identification of which type can be beneficial to an individual.

• Short fasting or intermittent fasting. This type of fasting is also well-known as IF which records many benefits such as: fat loss, mental clarity, and glucose-dependent friendly. Study shows that training fasted can help in fat loss or body recomposition. Having a shorter feeding window is harder to overeat. For mental clarity, the energy that your body doesn’t use to digest food leads to other important functions on your brain that could also help you get rid of brain inflammation.  IF is also helpful to a glucose-dependent person as it uses glucose as a source of energy of the body throughout the day. Therefore, if you fast, your body will start to use fat for energy. It may not feel good at first but your body will gradually adjust. 

• Prolonged fast (20-48 hours). The type of fasting should be done once a month and not frequently than that. At the 20-hour mark of your fasting, your healthy cells breakdown the damaged/old cells for the source of energy. This helps you age slower, have higher mental clarity, heal faster, and have your vascular functions improved. 

TIPS! For beginners, you should start with a 14 or 16-hour fasting. Do go beyond a 48-hour fast as this is not recommended for any general fitness or religious reasons. 

During fast, you can have water, black coffee, and tea. Pre-workout, greens and EAAs are in what we call the “gray area”. Supplements are not also recommended if you are going for the cellular autophagy benefits. However, if you are fasting for body composition reasons, we think having these supplements would be okay since you are not spiking your insulin.

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