I. F. Question

I best as I know you would have to fast yourself to starvation level before your body starts burning muscle only after the fat is gone!
I have been doing a five day 16:8 fast for a few months now and have had great success. I also try to keep my daily calories in the 1600-1700 range.
On weekends I "Zig-Zag" deit and allow the calories to go up to around 2000. This keeps my metabolism from getting too comfortable. I also exercise 5-days a week.
Once a month I do a 23-hour fast to reach autophagy. I have also done a 35-hour fast. It was all rather easy, just drink water whenever you're hungry and it will go away!
Let us know how it works out for you!

I find it confusing. Proponents of IF say you want to fast until insulin goes down so you can burn fat. (image)

There was a study comparing same calorie consumption but one group did every other day fast, in lean individuals. Both groups lost weight but the non fasting group lost more fat.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34135111/


I have type 2 diabetes. My dr does not recommend I fast over 14 hours and I am not lean. It is good you are active. That will help prevent muscle loss, I believe.

I wish I had advice, but I have been stalled in weightloss. I was hoping fasting would help but so far no change

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I try to do 16:8 every day, sometimes I can make it to 18:6 and on the very rare occasions, I get to 20:4. I don't know about the fat burning aspects of it, but I find for me, that it helps me control what I eat. Being conscious of a smaller window of eating, I tend to make my meals count instead of mindless grazing like I used to do. I've been doing it for 2 months now, and hair loss is minimal. I have lost 20 lbs.

For people confused by terms 16:8 is 16 hr fast with 8 hr eating window, OMAD is one meal a day. 5:2 is eating regular meals 5 days, restricting calories 2 days/week.

stv1520 wrote: »

cmriverside wrote: »

@stv1520

You don't mention what you're hoping to accomplish/achieve by fasting nor do you mention what type of fasting you are considering.

There are dedicated Intermediate Fasting groups on this site, you'd have to join it to post, but it has a lot of people that could talk more in depth with you. Here, from the search of Groups:
https://community.myfitnesspal.com/en/groups/browse/search?Search=intermittent+fasting

This one from the search has nearly 900 members, looks pretty active:
https://community.myfitnesspal.com/en/group/120735-fasting-diet-intermittent-fasting

And then there's OMAD (One Meal A Day)
https://community.myfitnesspal.com/en/group/20634-omad-revolution

I’m currently down 28 lbs. I have around 32-33 more to go to reach my goal weight. 2 weeks ago I played hockey 5 out of 7 days. I also had a deficit every day. I was excited to weigh in on Monday but was frustrated to see that I gained a pound. Fortunately this past Monday when I weighed in I did lose 2 lbs. I’m wondering if IF would aid me in losing more weight quicker by shaking up my system. I’d probably try 16:8 to see how it goes.

I'd encourage you to have a good think about what constitutes body weight: Water (which is around 60% of body weight for the average adult), fat, muscle, bones, other useful tissue. In addition, there are things that show up on the scale that strictly speaking aren't one's body at all: Digestive contents on their way to being waste, and one's microbiome.

Of those things, water and digestive contents are going to account for most scale-weight shifts that are quite quick and multi-pound, like 2-5 or so pounds over a day or so. A sensible rate of fat loss is slower, more days to a few weeks to show up clearly on the scale, because it plays peek-a-boo with the water/digestive contents. The other stuff is even slower/smaller in a healthy person.

If you don't usually play hockey 5 of 7 days, it's very possible that your water retention was higher than normal (for muscle repair, basically). One needn't have sore muscles in order for that to be an explanation, but if you *did* have sore muscles, there's a high probability that water was retained.

We're trying to lose fat, right? If so, it makes sense to figure out how the water/digestion aspects work in one's own body, and ignore them. Trying to game them for weight management is profitless, IMO.

If you haven't run across it before, I'd recommend this as a really good, useful read:

https://physiqonomics.com/the-weird-and-highly-annoying-world-of-scale-weight-and-fluctuations

If it works better for you to weigh weekly - like if the scale stresses you out - that's fine. However, that does limit your ability to gain experiential knowledge of how water weight in particular fluctuates in your body. I'm a daily weigh-er, have been for years (totally unstressed and unobsessed by it). I've had many weeks during around a year of loss, almost 6 years of maintenance since, where weights 7 days apart would've given me an extremely inaccurate view of what my weight had been doing, by hitting a lowish weight on day 1, and a highish one on day 8, when somewhere mid-week there were new lows.

It's just my opinion, but I don't think you *need* a new weight-loss strategy, probably, in order to keep losing weight. I think it would help you to have a clearer understanding of how *fat* loss works, and how it's not always exactly the same as weight loss. If you want to pursue a fasting strategy for variety or better sustainability or something like that, I'm not trying to talk you out of it. Sensible fasting strategies can be a good tool. But I think it's kind of a tangent, outside of those variety/sustainability things, given what you've said about your goals and recent experience.

lorib642 wrote: »

For people confused by terms 16:8 is 16 hr fast with 8 hr eating window, OMAD is one meal a day. 5:2 is eating regular meals 5 days, restricting calories 2 days/week.

Are you talking to me? Just because I wrote that I sleep eight hours doesn't mean I think I'm supposed to eat the other 16.

16:8, yes. I know what it means.

If eat at 9AM, Noon, and 5PM and then don't eat from 5PM to 9AM, that's 16:8.

Xellercin wrote: »

coryhart4389 wrote: »

Avoiding all the technical stuff, I will give my opinion to your IF question. You stated you play hockey a lot, do you think Brad Marchand or David Pastmak uses IF to increase performance and maintain weight? I would guess no. Why not do what the best do in your chosen activities? Eat a nutritious diet, burn more than you eat, and use playing better hockey as your motivation, JMHO.

I have a number of friends in MMA and some of them do IF. Although the research shows that IF isn't great for endurance athletes, most average people aren't doing professional-level endurance exercise. For some people it's highly energizing, and may help them be more active in general.

Different bodies react differently to IF, and there are tons of different ways to IF, and even more types of diets to eat while on IF. So it's really tricky to generalize.

Sure, might work for some. However, not something I'm going to do and that's my 2 cents, which it's worth about 2 cents...LOL. I could believe a MMA person cutting weight might be very inclined to use IF.

stv1520 wrote: »

AnnPT77 wrote: »

stv1520 wrote: »

coryhart4389 wrote: »

Avoiding all the technical stuff, I will give my opinion to your IF question. You stated you play hockey a lot, do you think Brad Marchand or David Pastmak uses IF to increase performance and maintain weight? I would guess no. Why not do what the best do in your chosen activities? Eat a nutritious diet, burn more than you eat, and use playing better hockey as your motivation, JMHO.

Definitely not. BUT- they’re already in top physical shape. I’m trying to lose weight, and was a bit miffed when I saw I gained a pound after all that activity. But from all the terrific answers I’ve received, I know now that there’s a lot that affects weight fluctuations. I’ll continue to eat clean, make sure I’m in a daily calorie deficit, and keep up the physical activity.
Apparently you’re a B’s fan using those guys as examples??? All good- Marchy is one of my favorite players and Pasta is unbelievable skill wise.

Even the "clean" part is probably optional, honestly. Good, well-rounded nutrition is important, and so is eating in a way that you find satisfying/filling. If that's your definition of clean, that's great. But if your definition is some kind of list of good foods to eat, and bad foods to avoid . . . ?

There are lots of definitions of "eating clean". A fair number of those definitions involve things that are irrelevant to weight loss or health, or are majoring in the minors - in very extreme cases, pursuing "clean" by very strict definitions can make it *less* likely a person will have good overall nutrition.

I say that as a long-term vegetarian who thinks it's useful to get plenty of protein/healthy fats, 5-10+ daily servings of varied, colorful veggies/fruits, so I'm not team "eat all the Oreos all day every day" either.

Appropriate calories for one's goals (in your case, not-too-extreme calorie deficit), well-rounded nutrition routinely, regular physical activity: IMO, that's the goods.

I guess "clean" for me right now is a lot of fish, vegetables, greek yogurt, berries, whole grain bread, turkey, string cheese, pork, and some steak too. I also enjoy hummus and carrots, as well as chick peas by themselves. Sunflower seeds as a snack (high sodium I know) but also hydrating well throughout the day. As long as I'm at a deficit every day, I feel good. Plus, if I have a few beers with the boys after hockey I don't feel any guilt!

Nor should you feel "guilt". As long as your beers fit within the lifestyle that you want for yourself, then there should be no guilt, just decisions about what you want to consume and how much of it.

As for what the scale does, try to ignore it except over longer periods of time.

Here's something I observed in recording my weight loss for 4 years: if I eat more calories for a week, like on vacation, I don't see the gain for 2 weeks.

Like clockwork this happens. I'll overeat over Christmas, then weigh in on Jan 1st and think "wow, not bad, I'm pretty close to my pre-Christmas weight, that's great!" And then I'll get back onto my normal eating and exercise routine and the scale won't drop at all, it will stay kind of stuck at that same number for the first week, then over the second week, it will steadily climb up.

So I'll have been under the illusion that the overeating magically didn't cause at gain, and then under the impression that running a consistent deficit for two weeks magically fails to produce a loss.

Until I saw this pattern happen multiple times, I was so baffled and frustrated by weight loss because it seemed to have no relation to what the scale said. Only it did, there was just a lag.

I now know to be patient and trust that what works, works. Rushing is what leads to frustration and giving up.

If you find a sustainable routine that works, then you don't even have to think about it, time will take care of the weight for you.