Have you ever tried intermittent fasting? If you’ve never heard of it, here’s a brief definition: intermittent fasting is the practice of limiting your time window for feeding throughout the day. Rather than eating whenever you feel like it, you designate anywhere from 12-20 hours where you abstain from food. Richard Hawthorne, first person ever to lift 11 times their own bodyweight and owner of Core Strong Living in Biloxi, shares some light on the topic.
After talking to Hawthorne, he ensures us that humans have actually been doing this since the beginning of time. He says, “Intermittent fasting allows your body enough time throughout the day to operate on an empty stomach. This way the body can work on itself by cleaning, eliminating, and healing rather than constantly digesting food, which takes a majority of your energy.”
The benefits of fasting are weight loss, better sleep, faster recovery, and clearer thinking to name a few. With digesting being such a drain of your energy, taking time to allow the body to process all you’ve ingested allows for greater mentally clarity and increased fat loss.
Practicing intermittent fasting in the modern world can be hard. Refined sugars in your regular diet often create intense cravings to eat and drink things that are not beneficial to your health and often lead to late-night snacking. Hawthorne gives three tips and tricks to stick to your intermittent fasting goals:
• Make sure to stay busy throughout your fasting period of the day.
• Get rid of all the snacks in your reach or vicinity of accessibility.
• Keep water on you and when you crave a bite to eat, drink the water to curb the craving.
Studies are showing that time-restricted eating has great benefits. Hawthorne says, “Our bodies were made to operate optimally on an empty stomach. Thinking that we need to constantly eat food to keep energy and strength is the lie that we’ve been told by the food industry to keep us constantly eating and having frequent visits to our family physician.”
