Breakfast vs IF (intermittent fasting)

Thanks people, cleared that up for me. And also....

This IF is only supposed to be done once or twice a week right? I wouldn't be skipping breakfast every day?

What happend if I don't eat the calories I missed at breakfast?

Sorry if my questions are daft.

Most people who IF eat their day's worth of calories in the eating window. I do a 12 hour IF and drink water during that time. After my 12 hour fast, I do a 12 hour eating window. This has helped my digestion problems and makes my weigh-ins more accurate since I am concerned with weighing my real mass and not the mass of unused foods trapped in my body.

It doesn't seem like much of a change doing only a 12hr fast, but extending that 8 hour fasting window (sleeping) to 12 hours can help make sure that your dinner digests entirely and your insulin levels go down before you eat breakfast. The benefit? Any exercise you do during the fasting period is going to use up whatever glucose that didn't get burned while sleeping and will help reduce insulin levels even further all while depriving your body sugar so if it needs more energy (and it will if your cardio is intense) then it will use the fat stores instead.

I've read that people will IF a 20 hour window, eat half their calories in the 4 hours then spend the next day doing a cheat (1.5 day's worth of calories) and still have desirable results. As long as your week's calories are at your maintenance TDEE (or under) you won't gain weight.

Ultimately, IF and eating "breakfast" in early morning can result in weight loss, as long as you follow the golden rule: Calories in versus calories out.

Thanks people, cleared that up for me. And also....

This IF is only supposed to be done once or twice a week right? I wouldn't be skipping breakfast every day?

What happend if I don't eat the calories I missed at breakfast?

Sorry if my questions are daft.

Most people who IF eat their day's worth of calories in the eating window. I do a 12 hour IF and drink water during that time. After my 12 hour fast, I do a 12 hour eating window. This has helped my digestion problems and makes my weigh-ins more accurate since I am concerned with weighing my real mass and not the mass of unused foods trapped in my body.

It doesn't seem like much of a change doing only a 12hr fast, but extending that 8 hour fasting window (sleeping) to 12 hours can help make sure that your dinner digests entirely and your insulin levels go down before you eat breakfast. The benefit? Any exercise you do during the fasting period is going to use up whatever glucose that didn't get burned while sleeping and will help reduce insulin levels even further all while depriving your body sugar so if it needs more energy (and it will if your cardio is intense) then it will use the fat stores instead.

I've read that people will IF a 20 hour window, eat half their calories in the 4 hours then spend the next day doing a cheat (1.5 day's worth of calories) and still have desirable results. As long as your week's calories are at your maintenance TDEE (or under) you won't gain weight.

Ultimately, IF and eating "breakfast" in early morning can result in weight loss, as long as you follow the golden rule: Calories in versus calories out.

I guess maybe I am just massively confused about IF then. So if you do a 12 hour window.. that could be say 8pm-8am? If that is the case then I suppose I technically do that too? I never eat after 8-830 and I don't usually have breakfast until 9am. It's not a conscious fast, it's more the fact that when I started getting healthier I realized eating later in the evening hampered my weight loss and contributed to lack of sleep.

Most fasting windows are larger than what I do but a 12 hour fast would still qualify as an IF. Most people though do a minimum 16 hour fasting and eat in 8 hours maximum. The hardest part is getting all your calories in if you're going to do that though. I like 12 hours because it gives me time to digest between meals and build up my appetite again. Plus, I just can't stomach 900 calories in two meals any more, so I need 3 meals at 600 calories or even 4 at 450.

I have some close friends that eat "4th meal" and then the minute they wake up they eat breakfast. That's only a 4 hour fast! Needless to say they are obese and in the need of a diet/exercise plan....

I really do think it varies by person. I am a tiny person. If I ate all my calories in such a short window... I would rapidly gain. I know this because I used to have a work schedule that forced that type of eating schedule and that is when I gained all my weight. And I was not eating my calories in unhealthy ways. These were healthy but larger meals in close time frames.

Mentally it's easy to blame the close meals as the reason you gained weight, but if you look at how close your dinner is to your next day's breakfast you'll see that it was a longer fast and would have been an equal amount of burn in calories; only just before your breakfast you would have ran out of glucose and you would have burned fat instead. Very likely you were either over-eating due to not measuring your food intake, over-calculating your exercise and not burning as much as you thought you were, OR there was an underlying problem like stress, a thyroid problem, or something like PCOS that was causing the weight gain.

Calories in versus calories out will always result in weight gain/lose. Not meal timing.

Oh the metabolic slowdown. Funny the same people that will argue about meal timing "kick starting" metabolism are usually the same ones that have large calorie deficits from under eating or excessive cardio....which can actually lead to metabolic slowdown. :laugh:

Under eating or excessive cardio aren't any better, IMO. I am not in any way advocating for that. Under eating won't help long term health or weight loss. I talked about metabolic slowdown but I would certainly never advocate for that.

Sorry I was not calling you out personally. It is just a trend I see on these forums. People get all crazy about meal timing or frequency and then spend months on end with a 1000 cal deficit and kill themselves with cardio when they only have a little bit to lose. Then wonder why they cant lose weight anymore.

You can't lose fat without IF.

Made me smile

ha ha!

I've been doing IF for a year now, and I keep a Noon to 8pm regiment 6 days a week. It has to do with the social aspect of eating, I eat dinner with the family (usually I'm making it), same goes with breakfast Sunday mornings.

No one has mentioned it yet, so I will, one of the best sites for IF information is leangains.com as well as the LeanGains Facebook group.

I've seen a lot of women posting, so I'll mention this, Women need to have a shorter fasting window, 12-14 hours seems to be ideal, it just has to do with how your bodies handle calories and metabolism differently.

As far as my progress it has been tremendous. I keep a neutral calorie level, basically neither gaining nor losing much weight, instead I've been replacing fat with muscle (recomposition).

A few bits I've picked up on IF and training. Training during your fasting window has advantages and disadvantages, I crash too fast, so I work out during my feeding window. Also I've seen a few posters talking about working out and running the same day, but at different times... I would NOT recommend IF if you're doing that. You could probably do it, but not really what it is meant for. The near-exclusive workout regiment of IF devotees (me included) is a High intensity resistance training plan at most 3 days a week. IF is great for fat loss, but it isn't for big gains or endurance training, you need lots of extra calories for that, and the shorter eating window makes that quite a bit tougher.

I think I am going to start regularly doing IF.

I just came off of a 24 hour fast. I went from about 2 pm yesterday to 2 today. And it was the first I was able to do that in years. (I am type II diabetic, but my blood sugars have been so much better lately and I monitered them closely. In fact they are getting a lot better and I didn't even remotely dip too low in the 24 hours. I handled it a lot better than I would have thought both mentally and physically.

I think I am going to kill breakfast and then eat lunch around noon, and not allow myself more eating after 7.

It might not work perfectly everyday, but I believe I am gonna try. I have several reasons...one being since using MFP I have not been that hungry of the a.m. anyway. And when I eat, I am just even more hungry.

Of course I will still log food and watch my calories and carbs as I have been. I highly suspect my blood sugars will get even better.

You are not a snowflake.

still laughing about this line...

It just feels silly to debate you. Different bodies react differently- you don't have to have a definable medical condition for that to be true. I can see that you are the type that won't consider other people's opinions though. You have an idea that you believe is right and that's that. I've learned long ago that there is no point debating people like you.

Show me the science that proves your point. The only reason that different bodies would react differently is an underlying health problem/disease. The human body wasn't created with extra hormones, or extra organs, or any other deformity that would prevent our bodies to function the way it was intended to do. If you have something abnormal going on with you that makes your body function differently than it should, then that is considered an abnormality/disorder/disease and you should look into it.

It's not that I am the type of person who won't consider other people's opinions, but this message board has been extra harsh to me when I AM wrong, and the fact that none of my prosecutors have come here and called me out only means that I am in the right and they just don't want to fight with you because you're new.

I agree, this is a waste of time. Good luck with your weight loss and I'm sorry that your close meals together causes you to gain so much weight against the logic of science.

Thanks for the explanation but I have to be honest with you- you are wrong. To think there is one thing that works for every body is misguided. I know what I was doing then vs what I am doing now and how that has changed my overall health. And for me- such a short eating window would not work with my body. Just because it works for some, doesn't mean it works for all.

Assuming that you don't have any underlying health conditions that DOES make you unique, yes, everyone's body DOES function the same way. You are not a snowflake. Calories in versus calories out is the only way a person ever loses/gains mass. If you gained weight and you're a healthy individual, then you must have been over-eating.

This is not quite correct. I have no idea what snowflakes have to do with weight loss or nutrition, other than it's not a good idea to eat the yellow ones. But, if you gained fat then you have been consuming more calories than you used, but you can gain weight without overeating. Water can add a lot of weight regardless of calories consumed.

She was saying that the calories in versus calories out doesn't apply to her. I was merely telling her that she isn't a snowflake and that if she was undereating (but over 1200) with "healthy foods" then it's impossible that she was steadily gaining weight without there being an underlying health problem or without her under-calculating her foods or over-calculating her exercise. Eating meals close together doesn't determine weight gain therefore, an IF would be just fine for her.

Other than not reading the thread and trying to defend her, I agree with everything else you said.

I don't think there's any advantages that are so profound with any particular meal frequency that it would trump personal preference. Dietary adherence is so, so critical, that I think as a general recommendation, doing "whatever works best for you to allow you to hit your macros consistently" should be the top priority for meal timing.

For me: I don't strictly IF by the book, so to speak. However, I don't eat breakfast, I tend to eat a big post workout lunch and then the rest of my cals between dinner and bedtime. It closely resembles a 16/8 IF, I just don't ever let the clock tell me when it's time to eat because I find that behavior just as dogmatic and OCD as the "6-meal-per-day-boost-dat-metabolism" crowd.

I do think there's one point to make (that has probably already been made ITT) -- people who haven't tried grouping your "snacks" together and eating large meals -- for some people this is great for hunger control because that massive lunch keeps you full.

Give IF an honest shot for a month. Log everything
Now give breakfast+small meals throughout the day an honest shot for a month. Log everything.

Look at the stats from each month and compare them (MFP makes this pretty damn easy).

Pick that one that's closest to your goals.