Is intermittent fasting the way to go?

estherkrukar

Two years ago I met with my physician. Concerned about my rising A1C and inability to lose weight, he recommended intermittent fasting. Six months later, my weight dropped by 35 pounds and my A1C went from 7.1 to 5.4. I felt amazing! To be fair, I added boot camp to my workout of body pump three times per week and walking 18 holes of golf 2-3 times per week. I also was very aware of how I ate. I logged all food on my fitness pal and checked in often to be certain that I was reaching nutritional values.
Since then, I have slowly gained about 8 pounds. I still log my food, work out (no boot camp). No matter what, I can’t seem to lower the number on the scale. Did I mess with my metabolism by doing intermittent fasting? Your thoughts and suggestions are much appreciated!

AnnPT77

I think IF is great for people for whom it's a happy eating pattern, or if it helps someone get their calorie level where they needed for weight loss, but personally I wouldn't even consider it based on what I know now. Just losing weight got my bad blood tests and blood pressure where I needed them, and staying at a healthy weight has kept them there. Impulse control is not my strong suit in the first place, and I kinda like being impulsive, so IF would decrease my net life happiness. But that's just me.

I've never seen anything suggesting that IF causes metabolic damage. I've seen research suggesting that extremely fast weight loss can cause surprisingly large adaptive thermogenesis, which some call "metabolic damage" (I wouldn't call it that). Did you lose very fast, with the IF?

If you've slowly gained, I wonder what's changed. You mention that you're working out, but have dropped boot camp. Are you eating the same number of calories as when you were doing the boot camp, and are you burning about the same total number of calories via exercise? If yes, how do you estimate the exercise calories? Any chance of discrepancies there?

You don't mention your total timeline precisely. In the big wide world, there's been this pandemic thing going on (heh), resulting in quite a few of us working from home, doing less incidental walking or other movement from the work day, staying home instead of going out and doing as many social things, shopping less often (or getting deliveries), and generally moving less. Would that be true for you? There have been other people who gained weight from that simple kind of lifestyle change.

Eating 100 calories over maintenance calories on average daily is going to add roughly 10 pounds of body weight in a year. It doesn't take much decrease in movement to add 8 pounds in . . . are you saying something over a year, maybe?

In addition, I'd ask about seasonality. I burn fewer incidental daily-life calories in Winter vs. Summer. It's not a huge difference, but I've been calorie counting for nearly 7 years now, and I can see it. Small effect, would add up if I didn't adjust.

Just a couple of thoughts, speculating, may not apply to you.