Intermittent Fasting: Ayurveda’s stand on the 16 hours fasting and benefits

intermittent fasting window clock (body detox)

Intermittent Fasting is a proven modern day fasting method for all your goals. Whatever your goal may be, whether you are doing it for weight loss, reduce body fat percentage or even for muscle gain and keep yourself in good shape. This proven fasting method has a lot to offer you in all your fitness goals.

 

intermittent fasting window clock

 

Intermittent fasting and it’s benefits-

Intermittent fasting is based on the 16/8 rule which suggests that you should divide your 24 hours into 16 hours of fasting and 8 hours of eating window. When you fast for 16 hours your body gets enough time to heal itself and improve the digestion drastically.

What Ayurveda has to say:

Although intermittent fasting has come into limelight in recent times, Ayurveda has mentioned and told its benefits thousands of years ago. Ayurveda has more advanced techniques of doing intermittent fasting.
According to Ayurveda as well as modern science, our digestive fire is high under the presence of Sun and as the Sun goes down our digestion becomes poorer.

sun digestion graph

 

Thus, keeping this in consideration, Ayurveda suggests we keep the 8 hours eating from 10:00 am to 06:00 pm as generally the Sun sets after 6 pm and our digestive fire becomes weak and so does our digestion.

Now let’s discuss the 3 major benefits of intermittent fasting-

1. Reset for all the organs- You might be aware of the fact that our body is the best doctor for itself, when we fall sick, our body has the capacity to heal itself. Medicines just work as a helper to get our body in the position to make the healing process faster. When we do not eat for 16 hours our body does not need to do its hardest job, which is to digest the food that we have eaten and the body gets enough time to work on healing itself.

 

organs

 

2. More productivity and energy- This might come as a surprise to you. Fasting is always tied up with weakness and loss of energy but the reality is very much different that what people think. In the recent studies, this has been found that when we fast, our energy level actually increases. Ayurveda has been very clear about it since beginning.

Digestion is directly related to heat and heat is directly related to energy. Thus when we digest our food, our body has to burn energy to produce heat to digest the food that we have eaten. And when we keep fast for considerable amount of time which is 16 hours in this case, our body do not need to work continuously and the energy is preserved hence making us feel more energetic and productive.

 

productivity

 

3. Better nutrient absorption- When we keep eating on short intervals and the eating window is longer, our body has to work non-stop to digest the food that we have eaten. In this process, when we have eaten something and our body is in process of digesting and absorbing nutrients from it, we end up eating something else. And thus, we do not take benefits of all the nutrients in the food that we have eaten.

When we do intermittent fasting, we give our body ample amount of time to digest what we have eaten and absorb all the useful nutrients that the food consists. Hence we end up taking full advantage of the tasty and nutrient rich food that we ate.

So, this was the stand of Ayurveda on intermittent fasting and the advantages in general. Would you also want to know what is the method, diet plan and schedule that one should follow while doing intermittent fasting? If yes, do let us know in the comments.

Would you like to read about 5 food combinations which are delicious in taste and super healthy according to Ayurveda? Make sure to checkout this link: https://ayurvedablogger.com/healthy-ayurvedic-food-combinations/

Would you like to read more about intermittent fasting and the facts behind it? Make sure to checkout this Wikepedia link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermittent_fasting

 

Thank you for reading!

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