The Benefits of Intermittent Fasting (For the Nightshifter)
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Lately it seems like many fitness magazines, weight loss blogs, and personal trainers have been preaching the benefits of intermittent fasting. Intermittent fasting is an eating schedule that provides specific times for people to eat and fast.
Unlike many diets which focus on the types of food that people consume, intermittent fasting is an eating pattern that is primarily concerned with when people consume them. During eating periods, people can eat anything they would like, but during the fasting periods, people either don’t eat anything at all or eat very few calories.
Most people who participate in intermittent fasting follow one of these schedules:
- The 16/8 method: With this schedule, participants fast for 16 hours a day and eat during an 8 hour window of time. For example, someone might only eat from noon to 8 p.m. every day.
- The 5:2 method: With this schedule, participants eat what they would normally eat during the week, but limit their caloric intake to 500 calories for two days a week. For example, they may decide that they will only eat 500 calories on Tuesday and Thursday of each week.
There are other schedules that are less common, like fasting for 24 hours once a week or skipping breakfast every day. Regardless of the specific schedule, the key to intermittent fasting is utilizing separate windows of time for eating and fasting.
While this eating pattern might seem out of the ordinary, many people swear by the results. As this trend is continuing to grow in popularity, you might be wondering if the benefits of this eating schedule truly live up to the hype.
While intermittent fasting is typically applauded for helping people drop a few pounds, it has been shown to do a lot more than aid weight loss. It also supports cell repair, reduces insulin resistance, and promotes brain and heart health.
Intermittent fasting has a host of health benefits to offer, especially for those who work the night shift. If you are considering whether or not you want to try an intermittent fasting eating schedule, here are some health factors to keep in mind:
1. Intermittent Fasting Contributes to Weight Loss
When you work nights, you become more susceptible to excess weight gain.
The non-traditional hours of night shift work can make it difficult for you to find time to exercise each day, and the fatigue from working long shifts and experiencing low quality sleep can lower your motivation to complete a workout.
Shift work sleep disorder can also hinder your body’s ability to support muscle growth and lower your metabolic rate, causing your body to work much harder to burn calories each day.
Working nights has also been linked to increased appetite. When you are not able to get an adequate amount of high quality rest each day, your body produces less leptin, a hormone that suppresses appetite. Your body will also produce more ghrelin, which triggers feelings of hunger.
Considering all of these factors, it’s no surprise that many workers pick up a few extra pounds when they switch to working nights.
This is why intermittent fasting is a game changer for many night shift workers.
Intermittent fasting helps support weight loss in a few key ways:
- The short periods of fasting helps increase the body’s metabolic rate
- Eating during specific time windows helps decrease unhealthy snacking
- This eating pattern reduces ghrelin levels
- Intermittent fasting helps decreases belly fat
If you’re trying to stave off extra night shift weight, intermittent fasting can be a useful tool with far more health benefits than a traditional diet.
2. Intermittent Fasting Promotes Heart Health
In addition to increasing the likelihood that you’ll gain extra weight, working nights also increases your risk for cardiovascular disease. In fact, night shift workers can be as much as 40% more likely to develop heart disease than people who work during the day.
Intermittent fasting helps prevent this by decreasing blood pressure and promoting cell health.
During periods of fasting, your body’s cells begin to repair themselves. This fasting improves the cells ability to regenerate, helps stem cells create new white blood cells to boost your immune system and fight against heart disease, and increases mitochondria, which energizes cells. Healthy cells can help support and protect the heart and make it easier for blood to get to the heart, reducing the risk of cardiovascular disease and bolstering the immune system.
Intermittent fasting also reduces cholesterol levels and inflammation, protecting the heart and fighting off chronic health issues. This is because it reduces oxidative stress and pro-inflammatory cells in the blood. Inflammation is harmful for the heart because it destroys healthy heart tissue, and it severely increases the risk for heart disease. Intermittent fasting combats inflammation and other health issues that can wear on your heart over time.
With intermittent fasting, you can prevent night shift work from damaging your heart and prolong your life.
3. Intermittent Fasting Boosts Mood
Working nights can be stressful. If you’re like most night shift workers, you are doing important work that helps keep people safe and happy.
Many night shift workers are dispatchers, healthcare workers, first responders, or line workers creating essential products people need to survive. While these jobs are incredibly important and rewarding, they also tend to be high-pressure and stressful.
Couple the challenges from these jobs with a lack of quality sleep, and it’s only natural that many night shift workers feel overwhelmed, anxious, and stressed. This can start to wreak havoc on their mental health over time, leading to depression and other mood disorders.
However, when it comes to managing these feelings, intermittent fasting can make a difference.
Although intermittent fasting can raise cortisol levels, it has been shown to cause increased stress resistance, allowing the body to better cope with stress. Furthermore, fasting releases endorphins and increases serotonin levels, which helps boost mood and decrease anxiety.
Night shift work doesn’t have to make you feel down in the dumps. With intermittent fasting, you can naturally improve your mood so that the stress of working nights doesn’t wear you down.
Should You Try Intermittent Fasting?
While it is ultimately up to you to decide whether or not you want to try intermittent fasting, there is no denying that it can have a significant impact on your health. Intermittent fasting has the potential to help you lose weight, improve your heart health, and lift your mood, which are welcome health benefits for night shift workers.
Working nights comes with a unique set of challenges that can be hard to overcome. If you want to take a step toward losing extra weight you’ve gained since working nights, reducing your risk of heart disease, and improving your stress and anxiety, you should consider trying intermittent fasting.
Night Shift Nutrition is a community focused on living your best life, while working nights. We do this by sharing our experiences and science based educations. The point is to not only survive working nights but to thrive! If this sounds like something you’d like to be a part of you can apply to join our facebook group or subscribe to our email list.
