Intermittent fasting is often a popular eating plan for those of you who are looking to improve their health. It cycles between a period of eating and a period of fasting. When you are fasting, you cannot eat anything with calories in it, therefore nuts cannot be consumed. However, you are able to eat nuts when you are in your eating phase of intermittent fasting.
What is Intermittent Fasting?
Intermittent fasting is often used by those who are looking to lose weight or to stay healthy. Instead of being like the other diets, intermittent fasting focuses on when you can eat instead of what you can eat. While intermittent fasting, you only eat during a specific time. There are several types of intermittent fasting, the most popular being the 16/8 intermittent fasting.
The 16/8 intermittent fasting involves you eating 8 hours a day and then abstaining from foods or liquids with calories for 16 hours. Usually, this means skipping either breakfast or dinner to fit your eating window into 8 hours.
The 5:2 fasting involves you eating a normal diet for 5 days in the week and then fasting for 2 of the days in the week. Some people even do alternate day fasting, this is when you eat normal one day and the next day you completely fast or eat only around 500 calories.
When you are in your eating period, it is a good idea to eat a healthy and varied diet that is good for your body. Although there are technically no restrictions to what foods you can eat while you are not fasting, it is still better to eat foods that are of good quality and beneficial to your body.
When you are fasting, you are not allowed to eat or drink anything with calories. This includes not being able to eat any type of nuts. This means that it is alright to drink black coffee, unsweetened plain tea and water. This is because these drinks do not contain any calories and does not raise your blood sugar levels.
Eating Nuts During Your Eating Period
You are allowed to eat anything you want during your eating period in intermittent fasting. This means that you are free to enjoy the different types of nuts as they can be enjoyed in all kinds of diets. Nuts can be incorporated into your healthy diet as it contains a good source of nutrients.
Nuts are not only tasty and convenient, it is also very nutritionally rich and contains a lot of vitamins and minerals that your body needs. They are high in healthy fats that has proven benefits to your health. They are high in mono-unsaturated fats and poly-unsaturated fats, both of these are good for your heart. They can also help lower your bad cholesterol levels and provide you with omega-3 fatty acids.
If you are using intermittent fasting to help you lose weight, then nuts are also pretty beneficial for your diet. Even though nuts are considered to be high in calories, many scientific research has found that nuts are beneficial to weight loss. Nuts contain a few nutrients and phytochemical that are hard to digest. This means that we might not be able to digest around 5% to 15% of the calories in the nuts. Almonds in particular has been shown by studies to help promote weight loss.
While you can eat nuts in the eating phase, you should still be mindful about how many calories you are eating. Even though they are high in nutrients and are healthy for you, nuts are still high in calories. 14 almonds contains around 100 calories and it only takes 11 cashews to hit 100 calories. Nuts are calorie-dense and therefore contain more energy than other foods. It is very easy to overeat on nuts and therefore it could lead to weight gain if you don’t account for the calories in the nuts.
The nutrients of nuts differ, however it does not matter much which types you eat because all of them are good for you. Generally, it is recommended to have around 30 grams of nuts per day on some days of the week. 30 grams of nuts is around 1/3 of a cup or around 1 handful. This also equates to around 30 almonds, 15 cashews, 15 macadamias and 30 pistachios.
It is much more healthy for you to be snacking on nuts than on cakes or biscuits. You should combine nuts with low energy dense foods such as vegetables. You can always sprinkle a bit of nuts to your favourite salad.
As always, you should always check in with a doctor before trying intermittent fasting, especially if you have any underlying health conditions.