From the moment I dove down the health and wellness rabbit hole, one thing became unsettlingly apparent: the health and wellness industry loves shoving fast weight loss strategies down your throat. Whether it is a magic detox pill, a silver colon cleanse bullet, a miraculous recovery elixir, a full proof workout plan, or a shred 30 pounds in 30 days starve yourself diet plan. There seems to be a never-ending list of options to achieve the shredded body that they’re telling you that you should want. Among these one of the most recently popularized diets for guaranteed weight loss is a system of eating known as Intermittent Fasting (IF from here forward in this article).
I have spent the past 4 years experimenting with various weight loss techniques, diets, workout regiments, and lifestyle hacks. If you name a diet plan or a workout regimen there is a good chance that I have tried it and stuck with it long enough to anecdotally know if it worked for me or not. I’d like to share my experiences with intermittent fasting and talk to you about why it may not be for you.
What is Intermittent Fasting?
Put simply, IF is an eating regiment that requires you to only eat during a certain window of time each day. This window is known as the feeding window and can vary depending on the IF plan you choose. Common feeding window structures for an IF diet might look as follows:
– 8 hours to eat and 16 hours to fast
– 10 hours to eat and 14 hours to fast
– 12 hours to eat and 12 hours to fast
Regardless of which feeding window duration one chooses, the point of the diet is that the dieter is supposed to intermittently fast daily for at least 12 hours.
The Health Benefits of Intermittent Fasting
The diet industry offers a laundry list of research backed health benefits and reasons to subscribe to this diet choice. Here is a list of just a few of the health benefits of IF:
1. Hormone regulation (specifically insulin) — by fasting for greater than 12 hours insulin levels in the blood will drop drastically, which is an indicator to our internal systems that we need to burn fat as energy. (Barnosky, Hoddy, Unterman)
2. Fat burning — once insulin levels drop, our bodies will resort to alternative forms of energy, specifically fat mobilization through the release of ketone bodies (I’m sure you’ve also heard of the keto diet… well IF and Keto are very much intertwined in their physiological goals). (healthline)
3. IF stimulates cellular repair — there is a phrase known as ‘cellular autophagy’ otherwise known as the breaking down of damaged cellular tissue. The body will then utilize the constituent parts to regenerate healthy cells. (Kim, Lemasters)
4. Reduces inflammation and oxidative stress — generally those damaged tissues mentioned in point 3 can be the source of chronic inflammation. By stimulating autophagy of damaged tissue, inflammation and oxidative stress will inherently reduce within the body. (Johnson, Cutler, Martin)
5. IF slows down the process of aging — the previous 4 health benefits all sum up to a healthier and leaner body with less chronic oxidative stress. It makes sense then that the impacts of aging would be diminished as another health benefit. (Goodrick, Ingram, Reynolds)
Whoa, that’s a lot of great health benefits, and each one of them has research to back them (if you’re so inclined give the linked references a read). So if it’s so amazing, why isn’t everyone on some form of intermittent fasting diet?
Why Isn’t It for You?
If you read my writing frequently, you know that my goal is almost never to simply define and then list the health benefits of a given term. My goal is always to delve into the ‘why’. So, let’s move forward.
There’s an expression in my industry that I love: ‘mowing the lawn while the house is on fire’. If you’re a suburban guy like myself, then overgrown grass is definitely a problem that concerns me and needs to be addressed once weekly on a non-water day. However, if on that same day, my house happened to catch fire (knocking on wood as I write this analogy), it would likely make sense for me to put the lawn mower down and try to stop my house from burning down. Short version: the burning down house is a bigger and more urgent problem then the overgrown grass.
The diet industry is notorious for selling you the lawn mower while ignoring the burning house.
Ok, enough cryptic analogies, how does this tie into IF? If you are considering IF as a diet plan, my very first question as a certified nutrition specialist is, ‘why do you want to do this diet?’ That question would immediately be followed up with something to the effect of ‘where do you perceive yourself to be on your health journey today?’ These are important questions because they are the framework for you to identify what the lawn mower is and what is the burning house in relation to your health and wellness. (hint, for many folks Intermittent Fasting turns out to be the lawn mower).
If you’re eating fast food for lunch 5 days a week and washing it down with sodas, then odds are that IF is not the magic bullet that’s going to lead you to a healthier body. Rather, learning some lifestyle skills (like packing a lunch and switching out a few of those sodas with some club soda or iced tea) will be a far more effective and manageable tool towards the goal of weight loss and a lean body.
As you make minor lifestyle adjustments what you define as your personal ‘lawn mower problem’ and ‘burning down house problem’ will gradually shift as you progress. For many folks who are just starting out on the path to a healthier lifestyle, something as strict as IF is not what they need. What they need are more bite sized lifestyle adjustments that aren’t so daunting at the onset.
But I Really Think Intermittent Fasting Is Right for Me
Ok fair enough. There are a lot of health benefits to a well-played intermittent fasting diet, and I wouldn’t fault anyone for wanting to give it a try. So, let’s talk about the ‘how’.
All too often I see folks start an Intermittent Fasting diet on a Monday and quit on Friday. The reason for this is simple: they think will-power alone will allow them to successfully only eat 8 hours out of the 24-hour day when the week before they weren’t monitoring their feeding window at all. What if we remove will-power from the equation and approach it from a skills perspective? Let’s list a few of the precursor skills necessary to successfully manage an intermittent fasting diet: planning, scheduling, meal prepping, workout/activity timing to name just a few.
Each of these skills is important to develop if you want to successfully intermittently fast multiple times per week. What I suggest is that you start with small adjustments that focus on the development of these skills in conjunction with a transition into a sustainable IF protocol. Here are the steps that I follow to help set up a successful IF diet.
1. Identify what time you usually start eating each day and what time you usually stop eating each day on your normal routine.
2. Next, figure out what your normal feeding window is (for instance if you normally eat breakfast at 8AM and your last late-night snack at 10PM, then you’re eating 14 hours per day).
3. Ask yourself if you are more partial to your earlier meal or your later meal? Of course, the meal you are less partial to is the one we will adjust to meet an IF protocol.
4. Now, we know what time we’ll start or stop eating and work forward or backwards from there (for simplicity’s sake, let’s say in this example that you like breakfast more than your late-night snack, so we’ll work forward from breakfast).
5. Let’s work to shave a couple hours off of that, so we’ll plan a more filling dinner to eliminate the need to eat a late-night snack. Or perhaps replace the late-night snack with a cup of tea just so you have something else to look forward to while you adjust to the new eating schedule.
6. Gradually make incremental adjustments every couple of weeks until you close the feeding window down to your preferred duration (12h eat/12h fast, 10h eat/14h fast, 8h eat 16h fast, etc.). These gradual adjustments might include pushing your breakfast time out by 15–30 minutes a day and/or pulling your dinnertime in by the same amount every week for a few weeks.
7. Ask yourself this very important question every single week: “How’s this working for me?” Then use outcome-based decision making to move forward with your fasting schedule. If what you’re doing is working and even feels easy, then turn the screws a bit tighter and close the feeding window just a little bit more. If you’re eating schedule feels stressful and difficult to deal with then maintain it or relax it for a week until it normalizes.
If you set up your fast following these steps, then you are essentially building your IF skills as you go rather than jumping in headfirst and setting yourself up for failure.
Conclusion
Remember, the best diet is the one you can stick to for a long time. If you want to jump on the intermittent fasting band wagon, then by all means… do it. But do it intelligently and in a way that will leave you feeling empowered to succeed rather than frustrated and stressed due to taking on too much all at once.
I personally use the 7 steps I outlined above to transition into an intermittent fasting lifestyle. As it stands at the writing of this article, I consistently fast at least 13 hours per day and eat 11 hours per day. I started with those same numbers but inverted. I didn’t make the shift all at once, rather I’ve gradually tweaked my eating schedule by 15–30 minutes at a time over the course of 4 months. Today it just feels normal to only eat from 9AM to 8PM every day and I can tell you anecdotally that the health benefits are very real.
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Previously Published on Medium
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