Has anybody had success with Intermittent Fasting?

It is the ONLY thing that has EVER worked on me for weight loss. I have never lost doing anything else other than intermittent fasting or long term fasting.

People will argue of "how bad" fasting is on this board. You are about to get bogged by it. You'll soon find this out. But most all of them have never tried fasting.

I have had the best results from it. I have tried many different kinds and for different lengths. The one that worked best for me was one or two days every week and then normal eating (but healthy) the rest of the week. I drop 2 or 3 lbs a week doing that on average. Twice I lost 5 lbs doing that. I don't gain it back as long as i am healthy the rest of the week. I only gain it back when I stop fasting and start slowly pigging out more and more until I am back to eating like a sow and have stopped my exercising.

My health/weight loss thrived on a 16/8 or 14/10 schedule. Super easy if you plan your fast to be from right after dinner (6/7pm) until 10/11am for a big lunch.

Like anything else that is a "change" for your body's metabolism, you will see a big drop in weight within the first week, (water weight,) and side effects such as crankiness, sleeplessness, cravings) but after a week or so, you will see steady weight loss (about .5-1lb a week,) and get used to more food, (I love my 800-900cal meals!) less often.

Check out Leangains and there is a women's board on facebook for that diet, too. (Fierce Fit Fearless)

Helps for me whether I am fasting from a meal or for a day..
I also try to up my calories off and on - trick my body or just let it know that no worries, I am not starving it!

Only way I can manage my appetite a lot better. I basically eat after getting home from work. Routine is usually like the below.

M-F: wake up at 6am go to work, come home around 5pm workout with BCAA then eat from 6pm to 10pm.

Weekends arent too much different I may just not fast longer.

P.S. You can still have liquids (actually, I think the limit is 50 cals or under will not break your fast so I added a dollop of skim milk and sweetener to my coffee,) when you are fasting so that is how I kept myself distracted and satiated before my big lunch. After awhile, though, my body just waited until right before I would break the fast, (it's amazing how our bodies "readjust" to new habits,) to send me hunger cues. I wouldn't be hungry until that time, which was great

That's exactly what I do!

I.F. rocks

I'm actually going to give it a try starting tomorrow, & see how I do/ if I can do a couple weeks Tuesdays & Thursdays being my fasting days. Some people on here seem to have some good success with it/ 5:2 & under 500 cals on fasting days. I eat more at night so I'm thinking of fasting through the day until like 6pm. I don't get to sleep til 2am+ anyway.

I already eat pretty well, but I like trying new things & I'm curious to see how my body responds to it.

Just for the record: some of these methods, (i.e. where you limit your calories EXTREMELY for a whole day or two a week,) are not the same as Intermittent Fasting and will produce different results/side-effects than the method that many of the previous posters practice, (those who mentioned 16 or 18 hours of fasting followed by 8 or 6 hours of feeding,). To clarify, OP, the intermittent fasting that involves those numbers/ratios still requires the faster to consume all of his/her daily calories in that time period. (actually, when I IF'ed---8 months pregnant right now so I'm on a break, obviously---I would eat MORE than normal b/c I was also weight training) That would be about 1600-2400 calories in 6-8 hours for the average IF'er.

I think that's important to clarify when we have people talking about eating less than 500 calories a day a couple days a week on a regular basis. I personally WOULD NOT recommend/practice that, although I know that some tenents of that approach are included in the Eat, Stop, Eat method where the practitioner fasts one day a week but makes up the calories during the other days.

I'm actually going to give it a try starting tomorrow, & see how I do/ if I can do a couple weeks Tuesdays & Thursdays being my fasting days. Some people on here seem to have some good success with it/ 5:2 & under 500 cals on fasting days. I eat more at night so I'm thinking of fasting through the day until like 6pm. I don't get to sleep til 2am+ anyway.

I already eat pretty well, but I like trying new things & I'm curious to see how my body responds to it.

I'm on it tomorrow too.

Honestly, that's how I do everyday all day!! lol

A fasting plan I heard was to allow yourself 500 calories for breakfast then not eat again until the following day, since they on average recommend you have 400 calories for breakfast normally anyway - obviously most people here are on a lower calorie diet anyway but the average person shall we say - I see that working I'm on 1500 a day so that would be 1000 calories gone if I did it. I'm only here to lose a small amount of weight so I've personally never tried it, but I assume that's what they are referring to here:

"Just listened to the news on the radio (Australia) and scientists have completed a study that shows intermittent fasting (2 non-consecutive days a week) reduces your chances of getting chronic diseases such as diabetes and heart disease. This was allowing up to 500 cals (???) on the fasting day, don't know if the radio journo meant 50 cals as 500 is the equivalent to 2 small meals... From what others have posted, I am assuming 50 cals. Could this include green juices without fruit? celery, cucumber, kale, silverbeet?? "

Just listened to the news on the radio (Australia) and scientists have completed a study that shows intermittent fasting (2 non-consecutive days a week) reduces your chances of getting chronic diseases such as diabetes and heart disease. This was allowing up to 500 cals (???) on the fasting day, don't know if the radio journo meant 50 cals as 500 is the equivalent to 2 small meals... From what others have posted, I am assuming 50 cals. Could this include green juices without fruit? celery, cucumber, kale, silverbeet??

That study is from doing 2 non-consecutive fast days of 500 calories. It's popularised under the names "5:2 Diet" or "Fast Diet".

I do 5:2 myself and have lost 12lbs in 4 weeks. I don't really worry about which days I do the 2 fast days on; I just tend to slot them in around my schedule and pick the days I'm busiest (and therefore most distracted.) It also doesn't really matter when you eat the 500 calories on fast days if you're doing 5:2 fasting - I tend to save all mine for one meal in the evening (which generally works out around 22hrs of total fasting from the evening meal on the day before) but that's simply because I find it easier.

I REALLY want to try this, but to be honest I'm not really sure how to go about it, i.e. what to eat/what not to eat, when etc. Any advice? I may try it tomorrow.

Eat your maintenance level calories on non-fast days and eat 500 on fast days. It doesn't matter what you eat to make up that 500, though I tend to find that soup is the most filling option.

That's it. It's not a complicated plan by any means. As for starting - whenever you like. I started on a Monday...but that's only because I'm as grumpy as all hell on a Monday anyway so thought I may as well compound it by not eating much either ;-)

Information:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5:2_diet

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I've been trying the 5:2 diet and I have found it to be really good. The main points I'd say about it are:
- don't have your two fasting days next to each other
- when you fast you can have 400-500cals for women and 500-600 for men
- for the health benefits, aside from weight loss, you should not eat more than 35g protein in your 500(f)/600(m) calories
- stay hydrated while you are fasting, otherwise you might get headahces
- during the fast you can have very low cal soup to keep you going (I have 29cal miso soup at lunch) but this needs to count in your total calorie intake for that day.

I find it really hard to sleep if I am hungry so I eat the evening before and then don't eat again until dinner the following evening. It isn't nealry as hard as I expected it to be and I find I can be more alert than I am otherwise (no 3pm slump). Hungry pangs come and go and if you are busy it is pretty easy to just sail through the day without noticing.

Oh, I also don't do heavy exercise on my fasting day - the one time I did, I felt dreadful. Light exercise like yoga or something is fine for me though.

jehavin makes a good point. When you read these descriptions of the varying fasting techniques, the tendency is to casually group them all together in such a way that each of them seem to describe whatever anyone is doing. I'm left wondering, "Wait!?!? Am I fasting, 23/1, intermittent fasting, 16/8, simply calorie restricting, 5:2, etc.?" I honestly have no idea--course, I haven't REALLY stopped for a minute to wonder what the heck I am doing because I'm currently in a "test-wait-and-see" fasting mode. So jehavin--or anyone else reading--what AM I doing, and what's your suggestion for me adjusting my routine for better results? I know that "whatever works for you," is the standard mantra, but I'm seeking general guidance on what typically works well for most--however difficult that may be to actually gauge. What I'm currently doing is quite simple:

Every day--Sunday through Saturday, seven days a week--I eat at 6:00 PM, whatever I want until full. This does not result in a "pigging out," but rather, after no eating all day, I quickly become full within 15 to 30 minutes, and I'd imagine I'm eating no more than 500 to 800 calories of food daily. I then don't eat until 6:00 PM the following day. I'm not hungry throughout the day; I'm not starving; I merely eat once a day. I drink zero-calorie sodas primarily, some water, some coffee at random. And that's it. I'm not really monitoring what I eat in terms of "eat this amount of carbs etc." I've been doing this for about three weeks now daily recording on my Withings scale and casual observation. Like I said, I'm in testing mode; so I haven't been doing any conscious monitoring of water weight, as I drink whenever I want. So who's to say what and when I was drinking at the time of each recording. But here are some comparisons:

Thursday, 05/30/2013 @ 8 AM was 164.5 lb.
Thursday, 06/06/2013 @ 8 AM was 163.8 lb.
Thursday, 06/13/2013 @ 8 AM was 162.2 lb.

Now my weight throughout the day fluctuates wildly, which is normal as I understand it; so I'll need longer term monitoring to really see what's going on here. But to do this "right," I want to know what I should adjust. Should I for example, instead of eating daily, fast for a full 24 hour period, say, eat at 6 PM one day, then do not eat at all the next, and then eat at 6 PM the following day? There's so many different schools of thought that I want to keep things working for my body and not run into a plateau. As it stands now, I'm not quite sure whether my body is doing really anything, and I won't know for sure until longer term monitoring kicks in. But at the very minimum, what exactly is this type of "fasting" I'm doing called? Thanks to any and all in advance!