Doing IF all wrong

I'm not sure why you're mad at yourself.

Eating two meals close together is fine as long as your daily calories are in line.

I do 12:12 and it doesn't matter how many meals you eat in the 12 you're allowed to AS LONG AS you don't exceed your target calorie intake.

A.C.E. Certified Personal and Group Fitness Trainer
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Been in fitness for 35+ years and have studied kinesiology and nutrition

shazia20 wrote: »

So I decided to do 12:12 as the most easiest option. Anyway I read that those doing IF they had 2 meals instead of 3. But what I was doing was cramming my 3 meals within the time slots. So break my fast at 11 and have breakfast and then at 12.30 have lunch. Im such a loser honestly.

2 meals or 3 doesn't really matter...the overall calories are what matter. You probably see most people doing IF eating 2 meals per day because they do 16:8...for me, that would mean skipping breakfast and just eating my lunch, afternoon snacks, and dinner and the skipping of breakfast would be the elimination of calories to arrive at a deficit.

I personally wouldn't even consider 12:12 to really be IF...it's a pretty ordinary eating pattern. I eat dinner most nights at around 8PM and usually eat my breakfast when I get to the office at around 8:30 AM. I think 12 hours fasting overnight while people sleep and then maybe have a busy morning getting ready for work to be pretty normal. I suppose I could see it being beneficial if someone is snacking throughout the night after dinner and/or getting up in the middle of the night and eating...but otherwise I'd consider it to be a pretty standard eating window for most people.

OP, I'm going to offer you some cranky-granny advice: Don't beat yourself up over mistakes. Feeling like a loser doesn't advance your goals one iota. Psychologically, it can even have the opposite effect.

What are your goals? If weight loss, IF is completely optional in the first place. If you'd like to do it as a way to more easily limit your calorie intake (the thing that matters for weight loss), or for any other reason, that's completely fine.

Regardless, beating yourself up isn't helpful. If you try something, and some aspect goes wrong, learn from it. Analyze why the process broke down, revise your plans to include this new knowledge, and run the experiment again to test the new plan. It's like a fun, productive science fair experiment for grown ups. Self-recrimination and guilt burn zero extra calories.

You say you have "zero self control". (I'm betting that's not even literally true, across the spectrum of your life.) How you talk about yourself, even inside your own head . . . that matters. Find a way to reframe this, maybe "I haven't figured out yet how to manage my impulse eating". In your conception of the situation, give yourself some room to work at improvement.

You can make changes in your life, even in your attitudes and skills. (Self control is a skill, not an unchangeable character trait.) Think of ways to work on improving it. As you take the reins, and make change in your life, it will be very empowering.

Go for it. You can do it. Stick with it.

cwolfman13 wrote: »

stevesc1 wrote: »

Honestly I wouldn’t even consider12:12 to even really be IF. A “normal” breakfast time of 7-8 am, and dinner at 7-8 pm is not really anything out of the ordinary for a standard traditional eating pattern. Part of the theory of the benefits of IF is based on the idea that you have an extended period of time that your body is not dealing with food intake, allowing for reduced insulin levels, etc. Modern food culture has gotten so distorted regarding the idea of eating from the time you get up to the time you go to bed with snacks between meals and this is probably a contributor to the overall overconsumption of calories and the associated epidemic of obesity.

I would agree with most of this, but the obesity epidemic started rearing its head in the 70s and people were eating 3 squares a day long before the 1970s. Three meals per day were very common by the late 18th century in cities and towns, and just about everywhere by the 19th century.

On top of that, during subsistence farming/fishing eras - a lot of human history in a lot of places - it would've been pretty common to eat breakfast near dawn, and the evening meal near dusk, to maximize the amount of work one could perform in the daylight hours. (I'm old enough to have had one parent whose family subsistence farmed until he was near adulthood, BTW. Their eating pattern would've been more like that. The calories-out side of the equation was massive, of course. )

Hello. I do IF with an eating window of 8 hrs, sometimes 6 hrs, because for me it is an exercise in discipline. I would snack a lot, even when not hungry at night. I was also notorious for skipping a meal, getting hungry, and giving into a binge at night. With IF I make sure I eat my calories & get my nutrition in at the right times; then I close that window and wait patiently. This teaching me not to mindlessly eat, not to undereat in the day or overeat at night.

That sounds a little like what you may be getting at-- discipline?-- and IF is a fine way to do that for some people. But now you have to figure out for your eating window, what works for you?

Do you need to eat many small meals when your eating window is open? Or does it work better for you to eat a couple of larger meals, and keep some healthy snacks around that you put in your plan for the day?

Are you getting in enough calories, protein, etc. during that window time? That is essential.

Play with different times to eat/snack and see what works for you-- maybe instead of breakfast at 11 am and lunch at 12:30, why not just have a "brunch" at 11, and snack or two until dinner?

Also try to break habits with what you eat at a meal. Like if you're used to cereal or toast for breakfast, maybe they're not filling enough. maybe you'd be better off with tuna fish or a nice chicken breast and some veggies.

If you're getting good nutrition in during those 12 hrs, and sticking to your daily caloric allowance, you should be able to go 12 hrs without hunger and lose weight.

If no matter how you approach it you find yourself getting ravenous at night, maybe IF is just not for you and you need a more steady stream of nutrition.

I'm not an expert in nutrition or anything; I just can go based on my experiences and research on IF. But I encourage you to play around with your timing and find what's right for you.

The OP is having difficulty with 12:12 and probably won’t benefit from comments about how 12:12 is nothing.