I’ve been a yoyo dieter my whole life, a gym rat that’s never gotten into shape, but intermittent fasting is turning that around. I’m down 55lbs in 4 months and here’s what I’ve learned so far.
For those of you who are not familiar with intermittent fasting it is essentially increasing the time between your meals. You start off by cutting out snacks and giving yourself what’s called a “feeding window.” You eat inside that time and that is it. Some typical windows are:
- 20/4 – You have your meals in the 4 hour window and fast for 20.
- 18/6 – You have your meals in the 6 hour window and fast for 18.
- 16/8 – You have your meals in the 8 hour window and fast for 16.
The only limit is your creativity and lifestyle. I’ve tried several combinations including 15/5, 12/12 but the most successful for me was the 20/4. After doing that window for a couple of months I have worked my way to OMAD or one meal a day. Essentially a 23/1 intermittent fast.
Honestly, diets don’t work, lifestyle changes do. If you have been letting yourself go and have been inactive and you find yourself with extra around the middle you are probably one of the millions of people who are borderline diabetic. Intermittent fasting can get you away from diabetes and on the path to a healthier lifestyle.
When you eat throughout the day you repeatedly spike your insulin levels which causes your body to store fat. I was on the keto diet and I was eating 300 calorie low to no carb meals every 3 hours and though I would lose a little weight it just wasn’t coming off.
Bad eating habits over a long period of time causes your body to become insulin resistant, impairing your bodys’ ability to absorb glucose into the blood, setting the stage for type 2 diabetes.
Intermittent fasting can help you reset your insulin resistance by reducing the frequency of insulin spikes in your body. Over time, if you follow a ketogenic diet or very low carb diet and combine that with intermittent fasting you can help rid your body of excess insulin and become “fat adapted” which means your body now uses fat for fuel instead of looking for carbs.
The transition takes time, that’s one thing you have to accept from the start. Everyone will adapt at their body’s own pace depending on your level of insulin resistance. When you find yourself feeling moments of frustration just remember how many years of bad eating and lack of exercise it took for you to get to this point.
When I finally became fat adapted and worked my way to the 20/4 intermittent fast the changes really started to kick in:
- Zero cravings for carbs
- No hunger at all
- Complete mood stability throughout the day (no blood sugar spikes)
- No stress eating/late night snacks
- Weight started to steadily drop off
- Inflammation that kept me from walking at times was gone!
At this point my diet consisted of two small, roughly 600 calorie meals and a snack in the four hour window. Over time my body adapted to the point where I was really having to force the second meal down as I was not hungry at all. So I made the commitment and started eating one meal a day OMAD plus a snack.
Now I enjoy an approximately 1500 calorie meal and a snack. I intend to follow the ketogenic/fat adapted diet until I reduce my body fat percentage to between ten and fifteen percent. At my current rate that should be around five more months.
After I reach my target body fat percentage I’m going to gradually introduce healthy non processed carbs back into my diet and see how my body responds. I do plan on sticking to the OMAD eating strategy, that works for my lifestyle, it might work for yours too.
Experiment with your feeding window, adjust it as needed to make it fit your lifestyle and it will be much easier to maintain. You may find your meal timing conflicting with social events but you will definitely see how much time you spent eating that you should not have.
When you start learning more about intermittent fasting and insulin resistance you’ll hear that it is equated to resetting our bodies back to a caveman era pattern of eating. Some days food might be abundant, some days there might be none. Your body adapts its storage needs accordingly. There were no processed carbs back in that time period so you did not take on a ton of empty calories.
You can trace the roots of diabetes and obesity back to the birth of processed food around the 1940’s. There are unlimited graphs and charts all over the internet showing a perfectly matched chart of processed food consumption, diabetes and obesity increasing at an almost identical rate. Then you can follow the expansion of processed food from the west to just about every other country and the results are the same. Amazing how processed food has not been declared a national health crisis….
Get your body running the way it was designed to and you will find it’s very easy to see what foods work for you and what foods are your enemy. Good luck on your journey!
Fred Ost