Is this technically intermittent fasting?

OAS5 wrote: »

Hmm interesting discussion. Maybe I'll try something different and not eat till lunch time at work at 11:15. I guess that is still only 14 hours. Do you think that would jump start things to get off this last 15 pounds? That first meal, which would be lunch at 11:15 for me, do you eat more than you normally do? I'm kinda interested now.

With the caveat that, as I think you already know and don't need to be informed, it all boils down to the # of calories you consume; the eating schedule itself is not going to determine your weight loss but, rather, it can just establish a platform on which you can hit your calorie target more easily ...

14:10 is a solid way to get started with IF. That's 14 hours fasting, 10 hour food window. I started that way and so have many others. It typically looks something like 9 am to 7 pm. Basically it's the "no snacking at night" plan. A very legit way to toe-dip into the world of IF, and a good place to learn the essential skill of IF - actually not snacking outside the food window, from whence all the benefits of IF accrue (even though the same thing could be accomplished without IF by "simply" not snacking, but unfortunately for many it isn't that simple).

The next step up from that is the uber-popular 16:8, which looks something like a food window of 11 am to 7 pm. Basically this is the "skip breakfast, and no snacking at night plan". The upside of 16:8 is getting to have 2 full-sized "non diet-y" meals per day (lunch and dinner) while still hitting a dieting calorie target. This is where I ended up for a long time. Benefits continue to include not snacking at night, but now also include and getting two real, legit meals along with probably some desert every day, but also many people (including me) discover that once you stop eating breakfast, you wake up utterly not hungry and that whole issue of expending precious calories before your day even gets started is taken completely off the table. I have literally never been less hungry or interested in food in the morning as when I started IF.

The next step up from 16:8 is to make the window tighter, like 18:6 or 20:4. It sounds like it'd be harder because you have more hours of fasting, but actually 17:7 or 18:8 seems waaaaay easier to me. Once you've broken in your mind and your stomach juices to the notion that "if we ain't in the window, food ain't happening", which is a learning process, then extending that fasting period by an hour or two is nothing, nada, zip on the difficulty scale. BUT ... compacting the eating window from 8 to 6 hours means you can easily glide straight from lunch to dinner without obsessing about food, because it isn't enough time to get ravenously hungry. I actually like 17:7 best of any IF approach: noon to 7 pm for me.

One thing that is oft debated on these threads is whether you need to really "do" IF 100 % if you're going to do it. In other words, is it OK to have a little snack outside the window, etc. In my opinion, having done IF almost every day for 8 months, yes and no. Yes, in the sense that it's kinda insane to never let yourself have an IF break or a snack if you're stomach is growling and lurching while you're trying to get to sleep. No, in the sense that you can - and many do - train their minds and bodies to learn to just suck it up when it's fasting time and not eat anything, from whence the weight loss benefits come, because you do get used to it and you stop craving food when it isn't feeding time. So in the first month, it's a really good idea to fight the hunger, both physically and emotionally/mentally, and learn to be a little hungry. Most of that hunger subsides after a few weeks; the human mind does a great job of adapting to whatever the status quo is, and you want to lock it into that little amygdala in your brain that the status quo is: "no food outside the eating window". Once you've got that locked down tight after 4-8 weeks, there's no reason not to inject a little flexibility into the program; over the long term, for any kind of diet, flexibility and going easy on yourself makes things orders of magnitude easier to keep going with it.

IMO, none of it is really a "fast" and it's a kind of silly term (except to the extent that "breakfast" is a commonly used term). (5:2 and the like also don't involve real fasts, but I think the name fits better since the fast days are low cal days.)

I recently came across the phrase "time-restricted eating" or "TRE," and IMO this is what most of these ways of eating are, and that concept makes sense to me. I don't see why it should matter if someone decides they are only eating between 7 and 7 or, say 12 and 4, or 7pm and 8 pm (although OMAD has a special name, if one wants to refer to that specifically). I can see how deciding that you only eat at certain times (or within certain times) could make hitting a calorie goal or avoiding certain kinds of overeating much easier.

As for other benefits, there's a lot of debate and a lot of research yet to be done, but I think there's at least as much claim for eating more cals in the morning or not eating outside of a 12 hour window to be beneficial as shorter windows, especially when later in the day, and there's no "IF" police to decide what gets to be considered IF or not.

My recommendation, which everyone can ignore, of course ;-), is that it all be referred to as TRE, and anyone eating at specific times or, specifically, within a limited window with specific personal rules about not eating outside it is doing that.