Intermittent Fasting

You can certainly try it, it's marvelous for some people.

But if you're having issues with weight loss, the solution is very likely to revolve around your calorie and macronutrient intake, your energy expenditure, or both, and not a meal timing issue. If IF helps you manage that, then more power to you.

Your body produces HGH after 15 hours of no calories. There is not much benefit after 24 hours and its a good limit because then you eat something every day no matter what. Also working out fasted does the same thing, like if you go straight to the gym before eating in the morning and hit the weights, then just 20 minutes of easy cardio, then wait one hour before eating (Rusty Moore has an article that talks about this). There are lots of articles out there about it. Rusty Moore on the Fitness Black Book, Marks Daily Apple, and Brad Pilons Eat Stop Eat, all those websites talk about the benefits of intermittent fasting. It helps keep you withiin a weekly calorie budget if you do it once or twice a week.

The key is you eat "normal" and then take a break from eating. Then go back to eating normal. And you can do whatever length you want. I stumbled across this on my own at the start of my weight loss journey. So I just did my own diet thing, cherry picking from all the diets I had done. Once I had the portions down so I started eating what I called "mini meals" and put my food in small portions on a small dessert plate. One diet said don't eat after 7pm so I followed that. I ate healthy foods that I like, lean in the carb department. I limited myself to one or two very small servings of carbs a day, focused mainly on protein and veggies. I did not count calories. I got a feel for the right portions because the scale trend was going down fairly consistently. So some days I realized I probably had enough to eat so I stopped at 5pm or even 3pm. It was hard. I went to sleep at night feeling hungry and it was not fun, but I always felt great when I woke up and the weight consistently went down at a slow rate and I felt strong at the gym.

So I lost 40 lbs doing my own thing and I called it "mini meals" and "mini fasts" because I realized for the first time in my life I was fasting from my last afternoon meal until breakfast the next day. I was really excited and was working patrol with one of my super fit colleagues and I told him my story. He said he lost 30 lbs the same way and told me to look up "Eat Stop Eat" on the web. I trust this guy and he is my friend but I was leery of the ESE book. But my friend who I trust said it was good. I researched reviews and it seemed that even the skeptics ended up saying it was good and backed with very good research. So I decided to get it. Along with it was a special deal for a workout, so after waffling around with my decision I finally decided to get the workout as well. This is when my life really changed. Between the IF, learning the truth about calories, and bumbling across a workout that I could sink my teeth into (any good workout would have done that, but it's the combo of all these things that created my success).

results so far?

Been doing ADF since 5th August 2012. 31lbs down. Working for me.

I would say so - way to go!