It seems like researchers and health writers are constantly finding more benefits of intermittent fasting: weight loss, reduction in diabetes risk, protection from heart disease, increased energy, improved brain health, and more.

At its root, the way intermittent fasting works is very simple. A person regulates their eating schedule to incorporate regular periods of no food consumption each day. By fasting, you’re allowing your body to burn energy from fat rather than energy from food. Researchers have found that people who participate in intermittent fasting tend to lose more weight and keep more weight off than those who participate in traditional calorie cutting diets.

To get more technical, eating causes the body’s insulin level to rise, which helps process and store energy. Sugars can get linked into long chains, called glycogen, and then are stored in the liver. Once the liver reaches capacity, it starts to turn excess glucose into fat to use for later. If the energy does not get used later, the fat continues to accumulate. Intermittent fasting allows your body to use this stored fat, essentially “eating” itself for energy. Since we evolved without eating three meals a day, fat storage was vital for our early ancestors’ survival, but today, the amount of fat many of us carry causes an array of health issues.

The most common intermittent fasting schedule is sixteen hours of fasting with an eight-hour window for eating. With this schedule, you would eat all of your daily calories within an eight-hour window and then abstain from consuming anything other than coffee, tea, or water for sixteen hours. For most people, this means skipping breakfast and starting the eight-hour window around 11 am-12 pm.

It’s worth mentioning that for intermittent fasting to work, you have to consume healthy foods within the eight-hour window. This means a lot of vegetables, whole foods, protein, and a moderate amount of carbohydrates. While there are many benefits to intermittent fasting, there are still many unknowns, so if you’re interested; it’s worth doing more research to see if it could
fit your lifestyle. You should not try intermittent fasting if you are: underweight, pregnant, breastfeeding, under 18, or suffer from any autoimmune disorders.

Max Gottlieb is the content manager for Senior Planning, a free resource for seniors.