6. Intermittent fasting
Intermittent fasting is a dietary strategy that cycles between periods of fasting and eating.
Various forms exist, including the 16/8 method, which involves limiting your calorie intake to 8 hours per day. There’s also the 5:2 method, which restricts your daily calorie intake to 500–600 calories twice per week.
While it’s primarily known as a diet for weight loss, intermittent fasting may have powerful benefits for both your body and brain.
How it works
Intermittent fasting restricts the time you’re allowed to eat, which is a simple way to reduce your calorie intake. This can lead to weight loss — unless you compensate by eating too much food during allowed eating periods.
Health benefits
Intermittent fasting has been linked to anti-aging effects, increased insulin sensitivity, improved brain health, reduced inflammation, and many other benefits (29Trusted Source, 30Trusted Source).
Both animal and human studies show that intermittent fasting may also increase heart health and extend lifespan (31Trusted Source, 32, 33Trusted Source).
It can also help you lose weight.
In a review of studies, intermittent fasting was shown to cause 0.8–13% weight loss over a period of 2 weeks to 1 year. This is a significantly greater percentage than many other methods (34Trusted Source).
Other studies found that intermittent fasting can increase fat burning while preserving muscle mass, which can improve metabolism (35Trusted Source, 36Trusted Source).
Other benefits
While certain diets can have a lot of rules, require frequent trips to the grocery store, and can be difficult to follow, intermittent fasting is known as a more simple-to-follow eating plan.
Due to the nature of the diet, there are fewer meals that you need to prepare, cook, and clean up after.
Downsides
In general, intermittent fasting is safe for most healthy adults.
That said, those sensitive to drops in their blood sugar levels should talk with a health professional before starting intermittent fasting. These groups include people:
who have diabetes
who have low weight
who have an eating disorder
who are pregnant
who are breastfeeding or chestfeeding
