Intermittent fasting is an eating pattern where you cycle between periods of eating and fasting.

Now, throughout human evolution, fasting has been practiced an awful lot. Think about it… ancient hunter gatherers didn’t have access to food all year round. And, some days nothing could be found to eat! So, humans evolved to be able to function pretty well without the constant ingestion of food.

In fact, fasting for an extended period of time occasionally is more natural than consistently eating 4 or 5 meals a day, or every 3 hours!

During the fasting periods, you eat either very little or nothing at all and there are several different ways to practice intermittent fasting.

These are the most popular methods:

• The 16/8 method: This involves skipping breakfast and restricting your daily eating period to 8 hours, such as 12.00 – 8.00 p.m. You would have wanted to eat your dinner the night before at 8.00pm (16 hours gap). So, you fast for 16 hours, then eat for 8. You can do this as often as you like.

• The 5:2 diet: You consume only 500–600 calories on two non-consecutive days of the week. For the other 5, you eat normally (ie at your daily energy requirement to remain weight).

• 24 hour fast: This involves fasting for 24 hours, once or twice a week. The most common way to do this is to eat from dinner one day until dinner the next day.

Here – we are covering two of the main fat burning benefits, among many!

I also personally practice the 16/8 method of fasting on some days through the week and so do lots of the women in the Health with Bec Tribe once they’ve gone through the 3 Week body Reset.

And, whilst we are on that topic, before I even dive in to these benefits– I just want to say that personally, I have never ever instructed anyone I’ve worked with to throw fasting into their lives straight away. I truly believe that you should prep your body for it FIRST and make it easier on yourself by changing your diet in a way that lowers insulin and blood sugar levels … this is why I don’t introduce it till week 3 of my 3 Week Body Reset.

Some brief ways to do this (prep your body for fasting for a few weeks):

·      Cut out added sugar

·      Eat protein with each meal

·      Follow a lower carb diet

·      Eat lots of whole-foods and healthy fats

I also want to say that by reading this blog,  you agree not to use the information as medical advice to treat any medical condition in either yourself or others. Please consult your own physician for any medical issues that you may be having.

OK! Let’s run through some of the exciting and promising benefits of intermittent fasting, but mainly focus on the 2 that relate to weight loss!

(If you prefer to listen over reading, click here to listen and subscribe to it on my podcast!)

1. Intermittent Fasting Changes the Function of Your Cells, Genes and Hormones

When you don’t eat for a prolonged period of time, several things happen in your body. As one example, your body starts important cellular repair mechanisms and alters hormone levels to make stored body fat more accessible.

These are some of the key changes that occur in your body when you fast.

• Insulin levels drop:

Blood levels of insulin drop significantly, which accelerates fat burning (1).

• Cellular repair:

Your body induces important cellular repair processes, such as removing waste material from cells (2) This is called autophagy, and is the bodies way of cleaning out damaged cells, in order to regenerate newer, healthier cells.

 Intermittent fasting and low carb diets are known to trigger autophagy.

• Gene expression:

Fasting induces beneficial changes in numerous genes and molecules that are related to protection against disease and longevity.  (3, 4)

• Human growth hormone:

This is the most exciting one I think! I’m going to go into a little more depth on this one.

Growth hormone is the main hormone that helps you burn fat and is the highest when we go through puberty, and then declines each year as we age.

Growth hormone helps you preserve protein (for example your hair, nails, skin, collagen, bone and ligaments), so it’s the ultimate anti-aging hormone. It is also vital in cell growth, cell regeneration, helps you retain calcium, and helps to keep your cognitive function strong.

So, where does fasting come in?

Fasting can raise your blood growth hormone levels as much as 5-fold! (5, 6). And, higher levels of this hormone facilitate muscle gain and fat burning  (7, 8) – 2 things we desire when trying to lose weight. We want to preserve our muscle mass!

So, high levels of this hormone are super beneficial.

In fact, studies have compared regular calorie restricted diets with diets that include intermittent fasting and have found that the fasters retained, if not GAINED muscle mass, whilst the calorie reduced group lost muscle mass.

Losing muscle mass whilst dieting is not favourable at all, as that will, in turn, slow out metabolism down and make It very easy to gain weight again post diet.

This is just one of the reasons why I love including some intermittent fasting in my meal plans for women, whilst they are also calorie controlled.

Side note: how else can you keep growth hormone high?

• Through following a sugar free, lower carb diet to keep insulin levels low

• Through keeping stress levels controlled

• By doing some high intensity exercise

Many of the benefits of intermittent fasting are related to these changes in hormones, gene expression and function of cells.

2. Intermittent Fasting Can Help You Lose Weight and Belly Fat

Hell yes! It goes to say, that many people who try intermittent fasting are doing it in order to lose weight and, generally speaking, fasting will make you eat fewer meals.

Unless if you compensate by eating a whole heap more during your other meals, you will likely end up consuming fewer calories naturally!

Additionally, intermittent fasting boosts hormone function to accelerate weight loss like spoken about before. Higher growth hormone levels, lower insulin levels, and increased amounts of noradrenaline all accelerate the breakdown of fat from your bodies stores and facilitate its use for energy.

Because of this, short-term fasting can actually INCREASE your metabolic rate by 3.6-14%! Which, in turn, helps you burn even more calories throughout the day (9, 10).

To put this again in other words, intermittent fasting works on both ends of your calorie balance. It reduces the number of calories that you consume (reduced calories in) AND it boosts your metabolic rate (increases calories out).

In a 2014 review of the scientific literature, intermittent fasting can produce weight loss of 3-8% over 3-24 weeks (11). is a huge amount.

The people also lost 4-7% of their waist circumference, which indicates that they lost lots of belly fat, the harmful fat in the abdominal cavity that causes disease. One review study also showed that intermittent fasting caused less muscle loss than continuous calorie restriction (12).

All things considered, intermittent fasting can be an incredibly powerful weight loss tool.

So, you can see that intermittent fasting helps to boost your metabolism, helps you take in fewer calories and is a very effective tool to use to lose weight and belly fat.

 Among the fat burning benefits, there are many more!

Intermittent fasting also may:

• Reduce oxidative damage and inflammation in the body, which should have benefits against aging and the development of numerous diseases.

• Be beneficial for heart health. Studies have shown that numerous risk factors for heart disease improve including cholesterol levels, blood pressure, triglycerides and inflammatory markers.

• Help prevent cancer. One study showed that it may help reduce the side effects of chemotherapy and it has been shown in animal studies to help prevent the growth of cancer.

• Have important benefits for brain health by increasing the synthesis of new neurons and safeguard the brain from damage.

• Help prevent Alzheimer’s disease! Animal studies have found that intermittent fasting may be protective against Alzheimer’s and other neurodegenetive diseases.

• And lastly (but most excitingly), intermittent fasting may extend your lifespan! Studies done on rats have shown an increased life span when they intermittent fast (13, 14)

Given the known benefits for fat burning, metabolism and all sorts of health markers, it totally demonstrates that intermittent fasting could be worth a try if you haven’t yet!

Who is it not for?

It’s important to know that everyone is different. Some people love it, some people don’t. Always be your own detective and ensure you get your bloods checked at least twice a year.

I recommend working with a naturopath to keep your hormones in check too, as some women experience hormonal imbalances when they intermittent fast.

It’s also not appropriate for:

• People who need to take certain medication with food in the morning

• Pregnant women, breastfeeding women or women trying to conceive

• Anyone with history of eating disorder

• People with blood sugar issues such as diabetes or hypoglycaemia

• It’s also advised to not fast as much in the week lead-up to your period

Want to know what you can / can’t eat and remove all of the guesswork from fasting with a simple guide?

Download my FREE guide to intermittent fasting:

Ready to start your sugar free, low carb journey to prep your body safely and effectively for intermittent fasting with my 3 Week Body Reset? Click here!