Question: Won’t fasting on just 500 or 800 calories per day, slow down your metabolism?
Answer: No. Typical dieting does tend to slow down our metabolism.
If you live on 1500 calories a day when your normal maintenance calories are 2000, then after a couple of months, your metabolism will start slowing down from 2000 calories a day to 1500 a day to match your dieting trend. This means you have to cut calories even more to keep losing fat… or keep going but with no progress. Either way, it’s bad news.
However, this does not tend to happen when we either fast or follow a “fast-mimicking” diet of less than 800 calories per fasting day. Instead, when we do this, our metabolism increases due to hormonal changes in the body.
If you eat normally and then suddenly take in zero calories for a whole day, your body increases your metabolism and you start actually burning more calories than usual. Biologists say, this may be to do with your hormones kicking in, to put you in hunter mode, to give you the boost of energy you need to go and find some food.
Question: Won’t sudden reduction in calories lead to a loss of muscle?
Answer: No. If you were to do regular dieting, you might lose muscle if you have a massive calorie reduction and don’t take in enough protein.
However, if you take in a normal amount of calories and an abundance of protein on your non-fasting days, then one day of fasting will have almost no impact on muscle maintenance and growth, let alone cause muscle loss.
Think about it…
Your body has developed this incredibly intelligent mechanism of storing excess energy as fat so that it can be used in the case of a lack of food. Your body isn’t stupid. It’s not going to suddenly keep hold of all of that fat and start burning the hard-earned muscle you’ve built and need, instead of burning excess unneeded fat for energy.
Question: If I’m doing an Islamic fast, and I’m hoping to lose fat by doing it, how do I know my intentions are in check and just for God?
Answer: Very simple, did you drink water while you were fasting? If you were fasting just for fat loss, then it would be crazy for you to not drink water, so you kind of knowing you’re doing a ‘proper’ Muslim fast, for the sake of Allah, the Transcendent.
By doing an Islamic fast, you stop eating and drinking at a very specific point in the morning and you don’t take in any food or liquid until a very fixed time in the evening. If you were just doing it for health and fitness, you would probably drink an abundance of water, which would make the fast a lot easier, albeit less spiritually rewarding.
Plus, by restricting your physical desires without indulging in unhealthy, potentially harmful foods, you’ll probably get more spiritual benefit from the fasting day than usual. Fasting days, in spirit, are meant to be a time of restriction, not indulgence.
Question: Can I eat whatever I want on the other non-fasting days?
Answer: Well, kind of. This is not a competition to see how badly you can mistreat your body on five non-fasting days a week, while fasting on the other two days.
If you want solid fat loss, then as long as you don’t go over your maintenance calories on the non-fasting days, then you’re fine to eat pretty much whatever you want. (You can Google to find out ways of figuring out what your maintenance calories are. It’s probably around 1800 to 2,500, depending on how big you are and your gender). However, If you want very rapid fat loss, then I recommend you cut back on dry carbs and sweets on non-fasting days and on top of that, fast two days a week on just 500 calories a day.
If you take this approach, I wouldn’t do it for more than about six weeks, but it might be just the kick your body needs to get you into great shape for summer time.
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