Intermittent Fasting

What is Intermittent Fasting?

Intermittent fasting is based around the idea of only eating within a small window of time. How many hours you eat is up to you and what suits you.

You may do an 8 hour eating window or a 6 hour eating window or a 4 hour eating window. You may choose to eat outside of work hours or after midday. you may choose to eat only at night time.

Basically you can choose to eat for as many hours as you like at whatever time you choose to eat It can be quite flexible.

Facts to remember about Intermittent Fasting

1. You still need to count calories

2. You still need to eat below your maintenance calories if you want to lose weight.

3. There is no proven study that shows that your body will be in fat burning mode during your fasting periods unless you are in calorie deficit. Nor does it create ketosis.

4. There are no proven studies that I have found showing any healing affect from intermittent fasting as is believed.

Rules for Intermittent fasting

1. Anything you eat or drink beyond water during a fasting period has broken the fast. You cannot drink anything including tea, coffee, amino acids etc during a fasting period

2. You still have to count calories

3. You still have to count macronutrients.

Advantages to Intermittent fasting

1. It is difficult to over consume calories in a small eating window.

2. It may suit your lifestyle to eat in small windows of time.

3. You May find it easier to adhere to a calorie controlled diet when you use intermittent fasting.

Disadvantages to Intermittent Fasting

1. It will be difficult for athletes to eat enough food within a small eating window.

2. For muscle gain purposes it is beneficial to consume protein every 4 hours in order to help build muscle.

3. If you have a fast metabolic rate you may find it difficult to eat enough food in a small window.

My personal Experience

I had tried intermittent fasting during a contest preparation and found it difficult to consume the fibre rich high volume foods that I would normally diet with during such a small eating window.

I was using a 16 and 8 fasting window.

If I trained during the eating window I had to make sure that I trained earlier in the cycle so that I didn’t feel so full.

I didn’t train after the eating block because I was too full.

If I trained before the eating window I felt lethargic and hungry and my Workouts suffered.

Results

When using skinfolds as a guide I didn’t see any huge difference in the rate of fat loss than with my normal approach. In fact I found that I had almost no changes.

I did notice that recovery from workouts was slower than normal and I also noticed a greater than normal drop in strength than I would in a normal eating day.

I used intermittent fasting for 6 weeks with very little change in body fat percentage despite being in calorie deficit.

In short I found that my results on intermittent fasting were not as good as the results that I achieved with my normal eating plan.

Conclusion

Intermittent fasting didn’t work great for me but I have had clients use it to great advantage. The clients that had the greatest success were those that had large amounts of fat to lose.

They also found that eating outside of work hours suited them best because those were the times when they craved the most food. Many preferred not to eat breakfast and found they ate better at night time.

If eating in small windows of time suits you then I would definitely say to give intermittent fasting a go.