During the season of Lent, many Catholics had spent 40 days practicing fasting and abstinence.  Over the years, others have taken up this increasingly popular discipline during most of the year for weight loss rather than spiritual reasons.

The best way to take the weight off and to keep it off is a combination of diet, exercise and modifying one's behavior. The simplest answer is to eat less and move more. Weight loss is directly related to the difference between an individual's energy intake and energy expenditure.  In other words, if you eat less and burn more calories than you consume, you will lose weight. 

 Easier said than done. 

With all the diets that have come around over the years, fasting has gained traction in the past 15 years due to social media. This is known as time-restricted eating (TRE), where certain hours of the day are spent fasting, and a consistent daily window is spent eating.

The most common type of TRE is 16:8 intermittent fasting (IF), where one fasts for 16 hours, and you are allowed to eat regular meals during an eight-hour period. Another fasting approach is 5:2 which involves eating regularly five days a week and limiting the two other days to just 500–600 calories for the whole day. 

Intermittent fasting supposedly works by prolonging the period when your body burns through the calories consumed during your last meal and begins burning fat. But if you go crazy and eat too much during the period where you are allowed to eat, then it still adds up to too many calories.  In 16:8 IF, this would allow for two regular meals and a small snack.

Studies have shown that intermittent fasting can help with weight loss, boost memory, as well as improve blood pressure and control of diabetes.  What has become more evident now is not just the number of hours spent fasting, but the timing of when you fast and eat.  If we align our fasting and eating periods with our circadian rhythm, or the normal internal clock of the body, the benefits are much greater.