Intermittent Fasting

carpp107

Hey Gang,

Has anyone tried or had experiences with IF as a way to promote fat loss?...especially the last 10-15 pounds...I'm reading a lot of research on the internet that supports IF as a legitimate way to lose weight....Any thoughts would be appreciated...Thanks.

-Rob

psuLemon

Bump. I am interested in this as well. i am working to cut the last 4% of my body fat. Have thought about doing this.

JThomas61

Bump, I am in the same boat would like to know what others think.

rileysowner

I use it as do many others. Go to this group http://www.myfitnesspal.com/groups/home/49-intermittent-fasting where we share information.

jcstanton

My mom has been trying this recently, but I haven't had any updates from her as to how it's working for her. I know I do a 24hr fast once per month to help flush excess fluids from my system (I have problems with water retention). I always feel alot better internally...cleaner somehow...after a fast.

AiryM

Thanks for posting this. I'm interested in this as well ever since I found the Primal Blueprint.

glenr79

I don't really agree with this because when you fast you spike your insulin levels and when you finally eat because of the high insulin levels everything you eat gets stored as fat in the body.... not a good idea

chazspk

I do it every week .. I love it ...

Sidesteal

This is a mixture of personal opinion after reading both leangains, several posts on bodybuilding.com, and my own experiences.

1) I don't quite buy into the physiological effects of IF as I'm still fully supporting the idea that nutrient timing plays minimal to zero role in body composition outside of it's effects on performance. There are studies showing acute effects but not long term effects and in weight loss, often times the acute effects are meaningless when you zoom out, so to speak.

2) Ghrelin is a hunger signaling hormone that adapts to behavior and this part of IF is amazing. You'll eventually get used to the fasted portion of the program and when this happens it's awesome. You won't really be hungry during the fasted portion which means more food, essentially. (X calories during 1 hour feels like more food than X calories during 12 hours, for example).

I used IF but not STRICTLY, while I did my last cut from about 190 to 177. It was amazing and when I start my next cut I'll be doing IF again and I usually do what amounts to a 16/8 but for me it was more like 18/6.

Fasted training is hit or miss for people. I can train fasted and perform great.

I think it's legit and worth trying. I don't think it's for everyone and I still think that nutrient timing/meal frequency should be left to personal preference as the primary reason in all cases.

Helloitsdan

I intermittent fast from 10pm -2pm daily. Unless i'm off with the wife.
I eat 2k on rest days and 2800-3k on heavy lifting days.

Because my primary goal is fat loss with concurrent lean mass gains I only heavy lift 3 days a week.

Hormonally i'm more sensitive to insulin because of the fast.
I dont have to do cardio because i'm already pretty strong in that regard and the fast is already burning fat after about 8am.

I suggest you read the ENTIRE www.leangains.com website and add Martin Berkhan to your twitter and Facebook.

IOf you need solid IF dietary numbers please send me an PM and i'll run your info.

queenshebah

Me too! I have recently committed to daily 12 hour fast, where I happily have my last meal @ 5:00 here in brooklyn. my wife and i committed to juice fasting for 8 days and it was amazing! now we have solid foods six days out of the week and drink tea and water on one day. i always feel refresh afterward. i'm @ work now but ill post more information soon. bless!

carrie_eggo

I just started yesterday...16 hour fast, 8 hours to eat. I will not be training fasted though as my schedule will not allow. :drinker:

Quickster34

http://www.precisionnutrition.com/intermittent-fasting ,
very good FREE e-book that explains all types of IF and what may or may not work for you, I have done one day every other week or every week depending on my schedule, It's difficult but its definitley a good experiment to try!

rileysowner

I don't really agree with this because when you fast you spike your insulin levels and when you finally eat because of the high insulin levels everything you eat gets stored as fat in the body.... not a good idea

I would love to see actual support for this in a double blind scientific study. Yes, your insulin goes up when you eat, that is true for everyone when they eat insulin spike, but due to the fast insulin sensitivity is much higher as well, so saying it "spikes" would be a vast overstatement. A healthily functioning body produces enough insulin to do the job. It is when people are insulin resistant that they produce way too much to get the sugar out of their blood. For that matter, the thought that all that food goes to fat is simply incorrect. Due to the fast, especially if your worked out fasted, your muscle and liver are both majorly depleted in glycogen which means the first place the sugar in your blood stream will go is to your muscles and liver to fill them up with stored glycogen.

Acg67

I don't really agree with this because when you fast you spike your insulin levels and when you finally eat because of the high insulin levels everything you eat gets stored as fat in the body.... not a good idea

Wow, you're ignorance isn't limited to thinking everyone needs 50-60% cho in their diets

Helloitsdan

I don't really agree with this because when you fast you spike your insulin levels and when you finally eat because of the high insulin levels everything you eat gets stored as fat in the body.... not a good idea

Wow, you're ignorance isn't limited to thinking everyone needs 50-60% cho in their diets

Lol

Yanicka1

I do the leangain.com 16/8 IF and do break my fast just after training (I so a mix of heavy strenght training and cardio) It just plain work for my life. I just love sitting in front of a big plate of food at diner time. It took me about 2 weeks to not have headach anymore. I am on day 12 of a 60 day cut cycle and lost 2.5 pounds (some of that was TOM weight to tell the truth) In november, I was 23% body fat as mesured by my DR office, my hope is to get to 18%

glenr79

ok some people don't like what I said... lol but good for you!! Here are some reasons why you should not INTERMITTENTFAST

A Supplecity site visitor asked about "intermittent fasting," after having read about its many wonders on various blogs and postings written by people with credentials completely unrelated to diet and fat reduction.

The idea behind this is you starve your body of calories just long enough to tap your fat stores but not long enough to trigger your body's starvation defenses. Looking at it from just this perspective, it would appear to be just the thing for a person who wants a magic bullet for losing fat. It's not.

This practice has several serious shortfalls. For starters, it reduces nutrient absorption, causes insulin swings, and plays hell with your kidneys. If you want to go into a coma or wind up on dialysis, this approach is perfect. Otherwise, stay away. It's Dangerous (notice the capital D there?).

Let's step back a moment and look at the bigger picture. If your goal is to "lose weight," then of course mindlessly reducing calories for a short enough period that you don't go into the low-metabolism, calorie conserving mode makes sense.

But, that's not a sensible goal. A sensible goal is fat reduction. And that is hugely different (no pun intended) from weight loss. And so are the consequences. After all, you can lose weight very quickly by having your limbs amputated. Do you think a runner who wants to go faster should lose weight by such a method? Of course not. And it doesn't make sense for anyone else.

You can lose weight by losing lean tissue, and most weight loss methods result in that. What you really want to do is lose excess fat, because that's how you get rid of a root cause of disease.

Nobody has ever gone to a doctor and heard, "Well, your arteries are clogged because you have too much lean mass." No, the problem is the excess body fat.

That excess fat comes from too many calories. But simply cutting calories doesn't fix the fat problem. There's a bit more to it than that.

Your body needs a certain amount of calories each day to:

Maintain healthy bone and muscle.
Maintain healthy organs.
Maintain adequate brain functioning.
Further, you cannot build new muscle on a restricted calorie diet. This means that, for sustainable leanness and fat loss, this diet works against you by inhibiting muscle growth.

Your body also needs a certain level of fiber flow through the digestive system to reduce cancer risk and generally detoxify your system.

When you go on intermittent fasting, all of this stops.

You stop building new muscle, which means you reduce the amount of fat you burn just by sleeping. You will, in fact, lose muscle. And why on earth would you want to risk your job by showing up with a brain that isn't firing on all cylinders? Do you want to drive a car on our dangerous roads in that condition?

This diet, like all other "silver bullet" diets, ignores fundamental principles and tries to get something for nothing.

If you want to reduce your body fat, you will find out how to safely and effectively do that in our other fat loss articles. Go here to see what they are: Weight loss and fat loss articles.

Some general principles of fat loss are as follows:

Get adequate nutrition. Did you notice that the intermittent fasting method violates this?

Eat six meals a day. Did you notice that the intermittent fasting method violates this, also?

Control your portion size to limit calories to what your body needs to maintain lean tissue, based on your lean tissue composition and activity level.

Avoid or eliminate highly processed foods.
If you follow just those four principles, you will see your body fat level go to well within the "Look at that tight bod!" level. Yes, there's more you can do to fine tune things and get really "cut." And maybe you would like more information on the details of doing so.

But it you just follow these four principles, you will get results. You won't need to experiment with a health-challenging, unsustainable, uncomfortable practice like fasting. Intermittently or otherwise.

glenr79

what are your qualifications? to be saying that.... obviously you do not know science

I don't really agree with this because when you fast you spike your insulin levels and when you finally eat because of the high insulin levels everything you eat gets stored as fat in the body.... not a good idea

Wow, you're ignorance isn't limited to thinking everyone needs 50-60% cho in their diets

carrie_eggo

ok some people don't like what I said... lol but good for you!! Here are some reasons why you should not INTERMITTENTFAST

A Supplecity site visitor asked about "intermittent fasting," after having read about its many wonders on various blogs and postings written by people with credentials completely unrelated to diet and fat reduction.

The idea behind this is you starve your body of calories just long enough to tap your fat stores but not long enough to trigger your body's starvation defenses. Looking at it from just this perspective, it would appear to be just the thing for a person who wants a magic bullet for losing fat. It's not.

This practice has several serious shortfalls. For starters, it reduces nutrient absorption, causes insulin swings, and plays hell with your kidneys. If you want to go into a coma or wind up on dialysis, this approach is perfect. Otherwise, stay away. It's Dangerous (notice the capital D there?).

Let's step back a moment and look at the bigger picture. If your goal is to "lose weight," then of course mindlessly reducing calories for a short enough period that you don't go into the low-metabolism, calorie conserving mode makes sense.

But, that's not a sensible goal. A sensible goal is fat reduction. And that is hugely different (no pun intended) from weight loss. And so are the consequences. After all, you can lose weight very quickly by having your limbs amputated. Do you think a runner who wants to go faster should lose weight by such a method? Of course not. And it doesn't make sense for anyone else.

You can lose weight by losing lean tissue, and most weight loss methods result in that. What you really want to do is lose excess fat, because that's how you get rid of a root cause of disease.

Nobody has ever gone to a doctor and heard, "Well, your arteries are clogged because you have too much lean mass." No, the problem is the excess body fat.

That excess fat comes from too many calories. But simply cutting calories doesn't fix the fat problem. There's a bit more to it than that.

Your body needs a certain amount of calories each day to:

Maintain healthy bone and muscle.
Maintain healthy organs.
Maintain adequate brain functioning.
Further, you cannot build new muscle on a restricted calorie diet. This means that, for sustainable leanness and fat loss, this diet works against you by inhibiting muscle growth.

Your body also needs a certain level of fiber flow through the digestive system to reduce cancer risk and generally detoxify your system.

When you go on intermittent fasting, all of this stops.

You stop building new muscle, which means you reduce the amount of fat you burn just by sleeping. You will, in fact, lose muscle. And why on earth would you want to risk your job by showing up with a brain that isn't firing on all cylinders? Do you want to drive a car on our dangerous roads in that condition?

This diet, like all other "silver bullet" diets, ignores fundamental principles and tries to get something for nothing.

If you want to reduce your body fat, you will find out how to safely and effectively do that in our other fat loss articles. Go here to see what they are: Weight loss and fat loss articles.

Some general principles of fat loss are as follows:

Get adequate nutrition. Did you notice that the intermittent fasting method violates this?

Eat six meals a day. Did you notice that the intermittent fasting method violates this, also?

Control your portion size to limit calories to what your body needs to maintain lean tissue, based on your lean tissue composition and activity level.

Avoid or eliminate highly processed foods.
If you follow just those four principles, you will see your body fat level go to well within the "Look at that tight bod!" level. Yes, there's more you can do to fine tune things and get really "cut." And maybe you would like more information on the details of doing so.

But it you just follow these four principles, you will get results. You won't need to experiment with a health-challenging, unsustainable, uncomfortable practice like fasting. Intermittently or otherwise.

what are your qualifications? to be saying that.... obviously you do not know science

?

Acg67

what are your qualifications? to be saying that.... obviously you do not know science

I don't really agree with this because when you fast you spike your insulin levels and when you finally eat because of the high insulin levels everything you eat gets stored as fat in the body.... not a good idea

Wow, you're ignorance isn't limited to thinking everyone needs 50-60% cho in their diets

Right, cause you need a degree to speak intelligently on a subject. You have a degree and posted a bunch of broscience

Some general principles of fat loss are as follows:

Get adequate nutrition. Did you notice that the intermittent fasting method violates this?

Eat six meals a day. Did you notice that the intermittent fasting method violates this, also?

How does IF violate getting in adequate nutrition, when you are eating the same number of cals and macros as you would, just in a compressed time.

Why would you have to eat 6 times a day, when it yields no metabolic advantage?

Resalyn

Does anyone follow Eat-Stop-Eat by Brad Pilon? I haven't purchased his e-book yet, still researching which is better for me, Lean Gains or ESE.

My understanding is that ESE promotes a 24-hour fast once or twice a week and Lean Gains promotes a daily fasting with a window in which you are supposed to eat, like 16/8, meaning 16 hours fasting, 8 hour window for eating. (Please correct me if I'm wrong! I'm still researching!)

Has anyone tried both methods and can comment on which worked better for them? I plan on trying ESE for 3 months and then Lean Gains for 3 months as a personal trial to see which one works best for me....

Resalyn

How does IF violate getting in adequate nutrition, when you are eating the same number of cals and macros as you would, just in a compressed time.

Why would you have to eat 6 times a day, when it yields no metabolic advantage?

^^^^^ THIS ^^^^^^ Nothing I have read about IF indicates a restricted caloric intake, simply a restriced window of time....

Yanicka1

ok some people don't like what I said... lol but good for you!! Here are some reasons why you should not INTERMITTENTFAST

A Supplecity site visitor asked about "intermittent fasting," after having read about its many wonders on various blogs and postings written by people with credentials completely unrelated to diet and fat reduction.

The idea behind this is you starve your body of calories just long enough to tap your fat stores but not long enough to trigger your body's starvation defenses. Looking at it from just this perspective, it would appear to be just the thing for a person who wants a magic bullet for losing fat. It's not.

This practice has several serious shortfalls. For starters, it reduces nutrient absorption, causes insulin swings, and plays hell with your kidneys. If you want to go into a coma or wind up on dialysis, this approach is perfect. Otherwise, stay away. It's Dangerous (notice the capital D there?).

Why would it do that? Can you explain why the kidney would be affected?

Let's step back a moment and look at the bigger picture. If your goal is to "lose weight," then of course mindlessly reducing calories for a short enough period that you don't go into the low-metabolism, calorie conserving mode makes sense.

But, that's not a sensible goal. A sensible goal is fat reduction. And that is hugely different (no pun intended) from weight loss. And so are the consequences. After all, you can lose weight very quickly by having your limbs amputated. Do you think a runner who wants to go faster should lose weight by such a method? Of course not. And it doesn't make sense for anyone else.

You can lose weight by losing lean tissue, and most weight loss methods result in that. What you really want to do is lose excess fat, because that's how you get rid of a root cause of disease.

How can someone start losing muscle after only 16 hours fast.....the body is way more resilient then that.

Nobody has ever gone to a doctor and heard, "Well, your arteries are clogged because you have too much lean mass." No, the problem is the excess body fat.

Hummmm..... I think it is simplifying heart disease greatly and I really do not see the link with IF

That excess fat comes from too many calories. But simply cutting calories doesn't fix the fat problem. There's a bit more to it than that.

IF has nothing to do with very low calories.

Your body needs a certain amount of calories each day to:

Maintain healthy bone and muscle.
Maintain healthy organs.
Maintain adequate brain functioning.
Further, you cannot build new muscle on a restricted calorie diet. This means that, for sustainable leanness and fat loss, this diet works against you by inhibiting muscle growth.

I totally agree with you but again IF has nothing to do with calorie restriction

Your body also needs a certain level of fiber flow through the digestive system to reduce cancer risk and generally detoxify your system.

When you go on intermittent fasting, all of this stops.

You stop building new muscle, which means you reduce the amount of fat you burn just by sleeping. You will, in fact, lose muscle. And why on earth would you want to risk your job by showing up with a brain that isn't firing on all cylinders? Do you want to drive a car on our dangerous roads in that condition?

Again, the body will not go into starvation mode in only 16 hours fast

This diet, like all other "silver bullet" diets, ignores fundamental principles and tries to get something for nothing.

If you want to reduce your body fat, you will find out how to safely and effectively do that in our other fat loss articles. Go here to see what they are: Weight loss and fat loss articles.

Some general principles of fat loss are as follows:

Get adequate nutrition. Did you notice that the intermittent fasting method violates this?

Again IF has nothing to do with starving yourself

Eat six meals a day. Did you notice that the intermittent fasting method violates this, also?

Meal timing has nothing to do with metabolism

Control your portion size to limit calories to what your body needs to maintain lean tissue, based on your lean tissue composition and activity level.

Avoid or eliminate highly processed foods.
If you follow just those four principles, you will see your body fat level go to well within the "Look at that tight bod!" level. Yes, there's more you can do to fine tune things and get really "cut." And maybe you would like more information on the details of doing so.

But it you just follow these four principles, you will get results. You won't need to experiment with a health-challenging, unsustainable, uncomfortable practice like fasting. Intermittently or otherwise.

rileysowner

ok some people don't like what I said... lol but good for you!! Here are some reasons why you should not INTERMITTENTFAST

A Supplecity site visitor asked about "intermittent fasting," after having read about its many wonders on various blogs and postings written by people with credentials completely unrelated to diet and fat reduction.

The idea behind this is you starve your body of calories just long enough to tap your fat stores but not long enough to trigger your body's starvation defenses. Looking at it from just this perspective, it would appear to be just the thing for a person who wants a magic bullet for losing fat. It's not.

This practice has several serious shortfalls. For starters, it reduces nutrient absorption, causes insulin swings, and plays hell with your kidneys. If you want to go into a coma or wind up on dialysis, this approach is perfect. Otherwise, stay away. It's Dangerous (notice the capital D there?).

Let's step back a moment and look at the bigger picture. If your goal is to "lose weight," then of course mindlessly reducing calories for a short enough period that you don't go into the low-metabolism, calorie conserving mode makes sense.

But, that's not a sensible goal. A sensible goal is fat reduction. And that is hugely different (no pun intended) from weight loss. And so are the consequences. After all, you can lose weight very quickly by having your limbs amputated. Do you think a runner who wants to go faster should lose weight by such a method? Of course not. And it doesn't make sense for anyone else.

You can lose weight by losing lean tissue, and most weight loss methods result in that. What you really want to do is lose excess fat, because that's how you get rid of a root cause of disease.

Nobody has ever gone to a doctor and heard, "Well, your arteries are clogged because you have too much lean mass." No, the problem is the excess body fat.

That excess fat comes from too many calories. But simply cutting calories doesn't fix the fat problem. There's a bit more to it than that.

Your body needs a certain amount of calories each day to:

Maintain healthy bone and muscle.
Maintain healthy organs.
Maintain adequate brain functioning.
Further, you cannot build new muscle on a restricted calorie diet. This means that, for sustainable leanness and fat loss, this diet works against you by inhibiting muscle growth.

Your body also needs a certain level of fiber flow through the digestive system to reduce cancer risk and generally detoxify your system.

When you go on intermittent fasting, all of this stops.

You stop building new muscle, which means you reduce the amount of fat you burn just by sleeping. You will, in fact, lose muscle. And why on earth would you want to risk your job by showing up with a brain that isn't firing on all cylinders? Do you want to drive a car on our dangerous roads in that condition?

This diet, like all other "silver bullet" diets, ignores fundamental principles and tries to get something for nothing.

If you want to reduce your body fat, you will find out how to safely and effectively do that in our other fat loss articles. Go here to see what they are: Weight loss and fat loss articles.

Some general principles of fat loss are as follows:

Get adequate nutrition. Did you notice that the intermittent fasting method violates this?

Eat six meals a day. Did you notice that the intermittent fasting method violates this, also?

Control your portion size to limit calories to what your body needs to maintain lean tissue, based on your lean tissue composition and activity level.

Avoid or eliminate highly processed foods.
If you follow just those four principles, you will see your body fat level go to well within the "Look at that tight bod!" level. Yes, there's more you can do to fine tune things and get really "cut." And maybe you would like more information on the details of doing so.

But it you just follow these four principles, you will get results. You won't need to experiment with a health-challenging, unsustainable, uncomfortable practice like fasting. Intermittently or otherwise.

Based on this response, it seems both your knowledge of what Intermittent Fasting is and of the latest research on diet and weight loss are lacking. The whole six meals a day thing has been showed to be incorrect by numerous studies. I posted the following in another thread,

There are several studied done recently on meal timing and all of them point to the same thing, when you eat does not matter. They did everything from one meal a day to several meals a day. In 2007 Stote et al in the A Journal of Clinical Nutrition http://www.ajcn.org/content/85/4/981.abstract?ijkey=6ff83cee7da2101afdc159e7f8dd1a61a4d9f746&keytype2=tf_ipsecsha did a study of people half the group eating one meal a day (dinner in early eveing). The other half did three meals a day. After the test time they let the whole group eat as they normally would for 11 weeks to normalize their eating pattern, then the switch the groups around. The study time was 8 weeks, and they were eating enough to maintain their body weight. The results, 3 meals a day no change in weight. 1 meal a day lost 3 pounds and an average of 4.6 pounds of fat (probably because it is difficult to eat all your calories in one meal). That is not old science, it is recent. When you eat makes no difference. See also Smeets et al British Journal of Nutrition 2008 finding no metabolic rate change between 2 or 3 meals a day; and Farshchi et al Am Jrnl of Clinical Nutrition 2005 http://www.ajcn.org/content/81/1/3.full using 3, 6 or 9 meals a day again finding no change in metabolic rate.

The multiple meals a day may help you feel more satisfied, it may, but it will do nothing to significantly increase your calorie burning. I believe the numbers for calories burned for 100 calories of protein is like 10. You would be better off not eating that rather than thinking eating something will help you lose weight.

As Parks et al say in their article in the Am Jrnl of Clinical Nutrition, "Simply put, the question of whether there is a health benefit from the consumption of multiple small meals will ultimately depend on how much energy is consumed, as opposed to how often or how regularly one eats."

Acg67

Glen wins the Broscar for his broscience

holeshottdr

IF works for me and my schedule. I usually run 16-20 hours with little to no calories and a 4-8 hr feeding window. It's just a different way of hitting your calorie goal and macros for the day. Works for some people and others disagree with it.

duetwithjosh

I have an elderly coworker who is vegan and in amazing shape -- she's strong, vibrant, and always full of energy. She fasts one day a week, every week. Not for weight loss or anything in particular, just to fast.

Anecdotal experiences like those and also the amazing historical precedence of fasting (especially in various ancient religions) make me wonder if there isn't something to it -- more so for overall health than for weight loss, though.

mamitosami

I'm bumping this so that some of my MFP pals can get in on this...

As for me, I'm still in the learning stages of this. I do one or two fasts a week (ESE style) and the rest of my eating days are structured around the LG method. I like not eating and I love eating!! I would rather eat my calories in a short window of time because it seems like more and I realllly appreciate food now. I've been doing this for three weeks now.

I'm still having trouble figuring out how many calories I should eat (too many? too little?)... so it's a learning process. I have read the leangains website, Eat Stop Eat, the Precision Nutrition study and several other pieces of research... It's the same with any other method of weight loss, healthy eating or lifestyle, you have to figure out what suits your body best.

PepeGreggerton

Since when did the body supposedly get so bad at it's job? E.g. regulating hormones... This thread is full of broscience, WTG Glen.

wvualum

I love how people make comments that they have no idea what they are talking about.

I'm on my 3rd week of ESE as well. I love it so far. I've started losing weight again and I too love not eating. I like to eat a meal and feel full, with ESE I can do that easily. I wasn't sure how I would handle the fast days, but I do not find them hard to do at all. By the time I do eat dinner on my fast day, I am no more hungry than my non-fast days. I have way more energy overall and feel like this is something that I will be able to do easily to maintain my weight, once I get there.

My plan is to stick to ESE with 2 fast days a week. If my weight loss stalls, I will maybe start doing fast five, but probably more like 20/4, because of my schedule.

Anyone doing IF, feel free to add me as a friend.

Would be interested to know how many calories people on ESE are eating on their fasting days?