Can Intermittent Fasting Provide Similar Effects As Intense Exercise

How Does Intermittent Fasting Compare To Intense Exercise

Everyone knows or should know how it feels to exercise intensely. The common method of losing weight is to create a calorie deficit and that in turn will allow you to lose weight over a certain period of time.

Well, in this post were going to explore two different methods that both cause a calorie deficit and see how they compare with each other.

The findings might surprise you.

What Is Intermittent Fasting?

Intermittent fasting is a method of fat burning by which the person on the fast does not ingest calories for a short period of time. Usually, the duration of the fast is only between 22 and 30 hours. A safe bet for a good time period would be only 24 hours at a time.

By performing an intermittent fast only once or twice a week, you can reasonably expect to create a daily calorie deficit of around 30%. This is significant and can amount to some serious progress.

The main proponent of using intermittent fasting for a calorie deficit is Brad Pilon. He studied the effects of intermittent fasting for his graduate work and found that using this method did not cause him to lose any lean muscle mass or become harmful to a person's metabolism. In fact, he found that the use of this method actually could improve a person's metabolism.

Lots More Intermittent Fasting Information

What Conditions Need To Be Met For Losing Weight To Occur?

In terms of eating, your body can only be in two states. Fed or Fasted.

Each time you eat food, your body releases a hormone called insulin into the blood. Insulin allows your body to absorb the food that you have ingested and broken down into the blood.

When you are in the fasted state, insulin levels of the blood are very low. This is because there is no food to be absorbed and it is not needed.

It has been found that insulin is a key hormone for controlling weight gain. When you are in the fasted state, your body can more easily release free fatty acids (FFA) and it is not likely that you will store fat. However, it is almost impossible to lose weight when blood insulin levels are medium to high. Insulin is the gate keeper, no weight can be lost until insulin levels are low.

So to review, what needs to occur for weight loss? We need to keep insulin levels low or we are not going to lose any weight at all. This is why intermittent fasting works well as well as intense exercise. They both cause insulin levels to drop to levels that allow for weight loss.

Intermittent Fasting VS. Intense Exercise

What has been shown in recent studies is that using an Intermittent fast is very close to intense exercise when it comes to fat burning power.

When comparing insulin levels in the blood, they are very low with both exercise and fasting. This is a big requirement if you are going to lose any weight. So going on a short intermittent fast lowers insulin levels in the blood and intense exercise also lowers insulin levels.

It has also been shown that an intermittent fast can raise a person's natural levels of human growth hormone in the blood. HGH is another key hormone in human's that has been studied quite a bit lately in research. It has been found that higher than normal levels of the hormone play a pivotal role in shredding fat. This hormone is also elevated with intense exercise. So far were neck in neck between intermittent fasting and intense exercise.

Finally, the amount of Free Fatty Acids released as a result of intense exercise and intermittent fasting are again very similar. They both act to increase the release of FFA's and it increases the action of fat burning.

So as you can see, intermittent fasting and intense exercise are about equal when it comes to their effects on fat burning. What you can do to maximize the fat burning effects of these methods would be to combine them. Exercise 3 to 4 days a week intensely and use intermittent fasting 1 to 2 times a week. You will see some amazing results from doing this.