While most diets are focused around the types of food a person can eat and how much of it at one time, intermittent fasting determines when you can eat. While most diets cut out fat-heavy, carb-heavy, and sugar-heavy foods, or encourage their consumption in moderation, there is no specific restriction when it comes to intermittent fasting because it cuts hours of eating time from your day.
While food is constantly readily available thanks to apps like UberEats and GrubHub, which means caving is certainly easy, there are large support groups online for people who are interested in tackling the new diet fad. There are ways to ease into it because cutting out hours of eating per day is difficult to jump into.
One intermittent fasting Facebook group member started out by skipping breakfast and night-time snacks every other day, and then eventually transitioned into a 60-day challenge that required completely fasting every other day.
Some people attempt fasting as a way to curb snacking habits and limit the total time they spend eating per day.
A specialist at the University of Illinois at Chicago claims that "it's just another way of fooling your body into eating less calories."
An easy and popular approach to beginning a fasting diet is to limit eating to an 8-hour period and fast during the day's other 16 hours. Time-restricted feeding can include the time when you're asleep, so it's an easier approach than fully committing to fasting for full days at a time.
Some people eat just one big meal a day, some adjust their eating windows to include more or less time, and some fast every other day or so. It's a very personalized dieting technique, and though the studies done on its health benefits are minimal, it's been taking over diet culture due to the simplicity of the practice.