One of the latest trends in healthy eating is Intermittent Fasting (IF). The basic premise is that when you fast for an extended period of time your body burns stored fat that hasn't been accessible during the "fed" state (8-12 hours after your last meal). There are a few popular IF plans..16:8 ...you fast for 16 hours and limit your eating to within an 8 hour period; 5:2..you eat normally for 5 days per week and reduce your calories to 500-600 per day for 2 days per week; ADF...alternate day fasting where you fast continuously every other day. Another version of IF is the warrior fasting, where you eat like a warrior - fast for 20 hours and eat your daily calories within 4 hours. This is what I have been doing for the past few weeks and have noticed changes in my weight and metabolism. (Weight down, metabolism up). Also, my lunch expenditures have reduced to zero.
Wondering if anyone else has tried IF and how it went.
So first and foremost, everyone is different, and some things that work for some people do not work for others. It depends not only on your metabolism, but also on your lifestyle.
I have a friend who swears by this and stays very skinny despite eating whatever he wants during his non fast times.
I tried it two ways (the 5:2 and the 16:8) and made the following observations.
For 16:8
1) I tried to time my fasting so that I would go from dinner time (say 6 pm) until a late breakfast (10 am). You definitely wake up really hungry and it was very tough for me not to have a snack in the evenings. This was also a bummer in terms of alcohol (no beer in the evening).
2) A bigger issue from a logistical perspective was just not having the same schedule every day. In other words, I couldn't always stop my life to make sure that I would eat dinner at 6 pm, which would push back my first meal of the next day which would screw everything up.
3) I also found it tough to work out as normal (i.e. if I work out hard, which usually occurs in the evenings, I need a snack afterwards).
For 5:2, on paper this seems easier, BUT:
1) For the "fast days" I was able to limit my caloric intake pretty easily by eating fruits, veggies, sashimi, grilled chicken, etc. However, I was hungry at certain periods during those days, which made me very cranky (my spouse was not thrilled). It might work better if you can do a bunch of tiny meals throughout the day (e.g six 100 calories meals), but my lifestyle is not conducive to that.
2) Also, it was almost impossible to work out on the fast days. I usually work out between 2 and 4 hours per day, so I'm not sure that the benefits from the fast outweight the benefits lost from not working out.
3) If you totally pig out on the "5" days, this obviously won't work. You need to eat somewhat sensibly on non-fast days for this to work.
4) It's also tough to manage this with your schedule, i.e. do you really want to be doing a fast day for your big work presentation?
I did each of these for a couple of weeks and didn't notice huge differences. My best results in losing weight (260 to 225, kept it off for 5+ years) was just tracking calories every day. I don't worry much about what I eat, just the total delta between calories burned and calories consumed.
