Intermittent Fasting

How does IF violate getting in adequate nutrition, when you are eating the same number of cals and macros as you would, just in a compressed time.

Why would you have to eat 6 times a day, when it yields no metabolic advantage?

ok some people don't like what I said... lol but good for you!! Here are some reasons why you should not INTERMITTENTFAST

A Supplecity site visitor asked about "intermittent fasting," after having read about its many wonders on various blogs and postings written by people with credentials completely unrelated to diet and fat reduction.

The idea behind this is you starve your body of calories just long enough to tap your fat stores but not long enough to trigger your body's starvation defenses. Looking at it from just this perspective, it would appear to be just the thing for a person who wants a magic bullet for losing fat. It's not.

This practice has several serious shortfalls. For starters, it reduces nutrient absorption, causes insulin swings, and plays hell with your kidneys. If you want to go into a coma or wind up on dialysis, this approach is perfect. Otherwise, stay away. It's Dangerous (notice the capital D there?).

Let's step back a moment and look at the bigger picture. If your goal is to "lose weight," then of course mindlessly reducing calories for a short enough period that you don't go into the low-metabolism, calorie conserving mode makes sense.

But, that's not a sensible goal. A sensible goal is fat reduction. And that is hugely different (no pun intended) from weight loss. And so are the consequences. After all, you can lose weight very quickly by having your limbs amputated. Do you think a runner who wants to go faster should lose weight by such a method? Of course not. And it doesn't make sense for anyone else.

You can lose weight by losing lean tissue, and most weight loss methods result in that. What you really want to do is lose excess fat, because that's how you get rid of a root cause of disease.

Nobody has ever gone to a doctor and heard, "Well, your arteries are clogged because you have too much lean mass." No, the problem is the excess body fat.

That excess fat comes from too many calories. But simply cutting calories doesn't fix the fat problem. There's a bit more to it than that.

Your body needs a certain amount of calories each day to:

Maintain healthy bone and muscle.
Maintain healthy organs.
Maintain adequate brain functioning.
Further, you cannot build new muscle on a restricted calorie diet. This means that, for sustainable leanness and fat loss, this diet works against you by inhibiting muscle growth.

Your body also needs a certain level of fiber flow through the digestive system to reduce cancer risk and generally detoxify your system.

When you go on intermittent fasting, all of this stops.

You stop building new muscle, which means you reduce the amount of fat you burn just by sleeping. You will, in fact, lose muscle. And why on earth would you want to risk your job by showing up with a brain that isn't firing on all cylinders? Do you want to drive a car on our dangerous roads in that condition?

This diet, like all other "silver bullet" diets, ignores fundamental principles and tries to get something for nothing.

If you want to reduce your body fat, you will find out how to safely and effectively do that in our other fat loss articles. Go here to see what they are: Weight loss and fat loss articles.

Some general principles of fat loss are as follows:

Get adequate nutrition. Did you notice that the intermittent fasting method violates this?

Eat six meals a day. Did you notice that the intermittent fasting method violates this, also?

Control your portion size to limit calories to what your body needs to maintain lean tissue, based on your lean tissue composition and activity level.

Avoid or eliminate highly processed foods.
If you follow just those four principles, you will see your body fat level go to well within the "Look at that tight bod!" level. Yes, there's more you can do to fine tune things and get really "cut." And maybe you would like more information on the details of doing so.

But it you just follow these four principles, you will get results. You won't need to experiment with a health-challenging, unsustainable, uncomfortable practice like fasting. Intermittently or otherwise.

There are several studied done recently on meal timing and all of them point to the same thing, when you eat does not matter. They did everything from one meal a day to several meals a day. In 2007 Stote et al in the A Journal of Clinical Nutrition http://www.ajcn.org/content/85/4/981.abstract?ijkey=6ff83cee7da2101afdc159e7f8dd1a61a4d9f746&keytype2=tf_ipsecsha did a study of people half the group eating one meal a day (dinner in early eveing). The other half did three meals a day. After the test time they let the whole group eat as they normally would for 11 weeks to normalize their eating pattern, then the switch the groups around. The study time was 8 weeks, and they were eating enough to maintain their body weight. The results, 3 meals a day no change in weight. 1 meal a day lost 3 pounds and an average of 4.6 pounds of fat (probably because it is difficult to eat all your calories in one meal). That is not old science, it is recent. When you eat makes no difference. See also Smeets et al British Journal of Nutrition 2008 finding no metabolic rate change between 2 or 3 meals a day; and Farshchi et al Am Jrnl of Clinical Nutrition 2005 http://www.ajcn.org/content/81/1/3.full using 3, 6 or 9 meals a day again finding no change in metabolic rate.

The multiple meals a day may help you feel more satisfied, it may, but it will do nothing to significantly increase your calorie burning. I believe the numbers for calories burned for 100 calories of protein is like 10. You would be better off not eating that rather than thinking eating something will help you lose weight.

As Parks et al say in their article in the Am Jrnl of Clinical Nutrition, "Simply put, the question of whether there is a health benefit from the consumption of multiple small meals will ultimately depend on how much energy is consumed, as opposed to how often or how regularly one eats."

ok some people don't like what I said... lol but good for you!! Here are some reasons why you should not INTERMITTENTFAST

A Supplecity site visitor asked about "intermittent fasting," after having read about its many wonders on various blogs and postings written by people with credentials completely unrelated to diet and fat reduction.

The idea behind this is you starve your body of calories just long enough to tap your fat stores but not long enough to trigger your body's starvation defenses. Looking at it from just this perspective, it would appear to be just the thing for a person who wants a magic bullet for losing fat. It's not.

This practice has several serious shortfalls. For starters, it reduces nutrient absorption, causes insulin swings, and plays hell with your kidneys. If you want to go into a coma or wind up on dialysis, this approach is perfect. Otherwise, stay away. It's Dangerous (notice the capital D there?).

Let's step back a moment and look at the bigger picture. If your goal is to "lose weight," then of course mindlessly reducing calories for a short enough period that you don't go into the low-metabolism, calorie conserving mode makes sense.

But, that's not a sensible goal. A sensible goal is fat reduction. And that is hugely different (no pun intended) from weight loss. And so are the consequences. After all, you can lose weight very quickly by having your limbs amputated. Do you think a runner who wants to go faster should lose weight by such a method? Of course not. And it doesn't make sense for anyone else.

You can lose weight by losing lean tissue, and most weight loss methods result in that. What you really want to do is lose excess fat, because that's how you get rid of a root cause of disease.

Nobody has ever gone to a doctor and heard, "Well, your arteries are clogged because you have too much lean mass." No, the problem is the excess body fat.

That excess fat comes from too many calories. But simply cutting calories doesn't fix the fat problem. There's a bit more to it than that.

Your body needs a certain amount of calories each day to:

Maintain healthy bone and muscle.
Maintain healthy organs.
Maintain adequate brain functioning.
Further, you cannot build new muscle on a restricted calorie diet. This means that, for sustainable leanness and fat loss, this diet works against you by inhibiting muscle growth.

Your body also needs a certain level of fiber flow through the digestive system to reduce cancer risk and generally detoxify your system.

When you go on intermittent fasting, all of this stops.

You stop building new muscle, which means you reduce the amount of fat you burn just by sleeping. You will, in fact, lose muscle. And why on earth would you want to risk your job by showing up with a brain that isn't firing on all cylinders? Do you want to drive a car on our dangerous roads in that condition?

This diet, like all other "silver bullet" diets, ignores fundamental principles and tries to get something for nothing.

If you want to reduce your body fat, you will find out how to safely and effectively do that in our other fat loss articles. Go here to see what they are: Weight loss and fat loss articles.

Some general principles of fat loss are as follows:

Get adequate nutrition. Did you notice that the intermittent fasting method violates this?

Eat six meals a day. Did you notice that the intermittent fasting method violates this, also?

Control your portion size to limit calories to what your body needs to maintain lean tissue, based on your lean tissue composition and activity level.

Avoid or eliminate highly processed foods.
If you follow just those four principles, you will see your body fat level go to well within the "Look at that tight bod!" level. Yes, there's more you can do to fine tune things and get really "cut." And maybe you would like more information on the details of doing so.

But it you just follow these four principles, you will get results. You won't need to experiment with a health-challenging, unsustainable, uncomfortable practice like fasting. Intermittently or otherwise.

I don't really agree with this because when you fast you spike your insulin levels and when you finally eat because of the high insulin levels everything you eat gets stored as fat in the body.... not a good idea