Are you a frustrated female who has tried everything to lose weight but can't seem to get the scale to budge? If so, you're not alone. And if there's a male friend, family member, or significant other in your life who seems to drop pounds with ease, it can be quite disheartening.

Over the past several years, taking regularly scheduled breaks from eating — in other words, intermittent fasting — has become something of a phenomenon. But does intermittent fasting really live up to the hype? Is fasting really good for your health, or is it an unhealthy option in the long term?

Your body is incredible. It works constantly to keep you alive and functioning. Your hormones — chemical messengers that coordinate bodily functions by carrying signals through the blood to the organs, muscles, tissues, and cells — play a huge role in this. There are over 50 different hormones in the human body, and in the context of weight loss or gain, insulin is thought to be one of the most significant.

To date, thousands of women have used the Simple app to support their intermittent fasting journey. Whether it's losing weight, improving their health, having more energy, or all of the above and more, Simple's female users have enjoyed many benefits from intermittent fasting — a dietary approach that involves alternating between periods of eating and fasting.

Have you heard you'll lose more weight if you eat frequent, small meals — and that if you don't eat often enough, your metabolism will slow down? Good news for anyone freaking out about breaking their metabolism because they missed their seventh snack of the day: this is a myth.

Our bodies, being the wonderfully efficient machines that they are, have a kind of self-cleaning function called autophagy. The research is still very new, but there are some promising results that point to intermittent fasting and autophagy being a sort of health and wellness dream team. Intermittent fasting may trigger the process of autophagy. And the intermittent fasting benefits we know and love (listed below) may actually be due to their connection with autophagy. Some of these fasting benefits are: weight loss, specifically from fat loss, improved cognitive function, reduced inflammation, lower risk of metabolic syndrome, improved heart health, reduced risk of diabetes.

If you're a guy who's having a rough time losing body fat, you're not alone. Whether it's a packed schedule, work, family, travel, getting older, or any number of other life demands, finding time for healthy habits can be hard. Plus, food tastes good.

It's probably no surprise that your heart is pretty dang important. The constant beating of your heart circulates oxygen-rich blood to each organ, muscle, and tissue down to the very last cell. Heart damage or disease can rapidly affect your entire body. So, it pays to take good care of your heart — as well as the associated structures, like blood vessels — that do all of this crucial work.

If you've been thinking about starting a new diet, maybe doing a little research on the best ways to drop a few pounds, chances are you've come across intermittent fasting.

Intermittent fasting involves a repeated cycle of eating windows (where you consume the calories and nutrients you need for the day) and fasting windows (where you take a break from consuming calories). There are many different ways to fast — from time-restricted approaches like intermittent fasting 16:8 to off / on approaches like the 5:2 diet, alternate day fasting, and eat stop eat — but how does an intermittent fasting timeline actually play out in your body?