Many people including top celebrities have started doing Intermittent Fasting recently to take advantage of the many health benefits. For those not familiar with the term, intermittent fasting is an eating pattern where you cycle between periods of eating and fasting.

Interested to know how you can benefit from it? Let’s explore further the benefits of this diet, as well as all the pros and cons of it.

Before we start, it’s important to know that there are different versions of it, but the general idea for all of them is that you eat normally some days of the week and drastically reduce your calories on other days.

You can eat mostly what you want on days when you don’t fast. But to lose weight and get the nutrients you need, you should stick to healthy foods and limit treats like desserts and processed foods.

On fasting days, you’ll eat very little food or none at all. For example, the ‘Every Other Day Diet’ says to eat no more than 500 calories during each fast day.

The most popular plan is to fast for 16 hours and eat for 8 hours.  This plan seems to suit most people.  Personally, I like to stop eating at around 7 pm in the evening as this is the time when I’m tempted to eat crap food.  I start eating again at 11 am the next morning so it’s very straightforward and easy to follow.

Other plans encourage you to skip food entirely for up to 24 or 36 hours at a time. On others, such as the Every Other Day Diet and the 5:2 Fast Diet, you can have some food but only get about one-fourth of your regular calories.

The 5:2 Fast Diet involves eating 5 days a week and fasting for the other 2 days, when women can get no more than 500 calories and men no more than 600.

That’s a quarter of the amount you likely eat on the days when you don’t fast. Whether you eat those calories in one sitting or spread them across micro-meals throughout the day, is up to you.