The Military Diet already works as a fast weight loss method because it’s a blend of a low calorie diet with fat burning food combinations.
But did you know, you can make the Military Diet even more effective with a simple hack?
How can I improve on the already effective Military Diet?
The answer is simple; eat only during an 8 hour period every day. For example, have breakfast at 8am and your last meal at 4pm. Or start eating at 1pm and have your last meal at 9pm. The 8 hour eating window fits all schedules.
Eating this way is a form of intermittent fasting which has been all the rage in the diet world for a few years as a way to lose fat, live longer and build muscle. There are other forms of intermittent fasting like not eating at all for 24 hours, but don’t worry, we’re not suggesting that! The form of intermittent fasting we suggest splits the day into an eating period and a fasting period. A person eats for 8 hours and fasts for 16 hours.
The Fed and the Fasted State…
When your body is busy digesting and absorbing food, it is in the ‘fed’ state. The fed state begins at the first bite of food and lasts for up to five hours. You will not burn fat in the fed state because your insulin levels are too high. It takes about 12 hours after a meal to enter the fasted state. Your insulin levels are low and your body starts burning fat. If you think about it, most of us rarely go 12 hours without eating so we are almost never in a fasted state unless we do it intentionally. Fasting puts us into the fat burning state we rarely encounter during our normal eating schedule.
The Benefits of Intermittent Fasting
When you fast, several things start happening to your body on a cellular level and all of them are pretty amazing. Weight loss is the number one benefit of intermittent fasting. According to a study, people also lost up to 7% of their waist circumference with intermittent fasting. Fasting is great for losing the harmful belly fat that builds up around our organs and causes disease. Belly fat is the most dangerous (and unattractive) kind of fat. For any woman interested in losing weight, decreasing belly fat is always on her mind.
The benefits of intermittent fasting go way beyond just weight loss. IF also has numerous benefits for our metabolism and helps prevent chronic disease like diabetes and heart disease. Intermittent fasting extends our life too.
More benefits of intermittent fasting:
A boosted metabolism. Short term fasting can make your metabolic rate up to 14% faster.
Levels of Human Growth Hormone (HGH) increase up to 5 times. That’s crazy! Higher levels of HGH mean fat loss and muscle gain.
Autophagy! It sounds bad but it’s really good. Normally your cells are too busy because we are always in a fed state instead of a fasted state. When you give the digestion system a good rest, the body attends to other business it doesn’t normally have time for. Like cell repair. Autophagy is the body’s way of cleaning house and recycling the old to make room for the new. With the extra time your cells have, this means you clean out dead cells, dispose of them and clear up toxins.
Insulin levels drop. When we eat, insulin increases. When we fast, insulin lowers. With lowered insulin, stored body fat starts to burn.
The Military Diet is already a fat burning process, but the simple change of eating only 8 hours a day results in changes to the body that make fat burning even easier.
