Kind of a followup question from my other one. If hypothetically, i maintain a 500 calorie deficit daily (1600 calories) WITHOUT IF compared to doing it with IF, would there be a difference in outcome after lets say, a year or so?
I would say there is a big difference: one your hungry all the time and the other is much more managed. I have done cico for years with great success but i always felt like food was a battle. If i keep my weight down I am hungry. I started at around 250 and stay between 190 to 200 at 6 ft 2. With intermittent fasting i still get hungry for my meal times but i am not always hungry. I feel much less munchie too. Cool thing is that losing weight has been a lot easier for me and i have dropped 10 lbs in 2.5 months.
IF also has a ton of other benefits for health as well.
Intermittent fasting is not about counting calories, it is about managing your insulin.
Every time you eat, your body produces insulin which is the hormone that converts excess to be stored as fat. Certain foods (carbs, sugar) give a higher insulin spike compared to others, so it is often recommended to avoid these foods to try to keep your insulin low. If you eat fewer meals, fewer times a day, your insulin will be lower than someone who eats snacks between every meal.
When you are no longer producing insulin, your body goes into fat burning mode.
Like how you carry money in your wallet, it is more convenient than going to the bank to take out money, but if you keep putting money back in your wallet the reserves in the bank will never be spent. Good financial advice, but if you think of it this way, you never get to spend the fat in your reserves.
The longer you can spend in a fasted state, the more you are burning fat and therefore longer fasts are always more beneficial. Obviously fasts longer than 24hr+ are hard for a variety of reasons, so most people choose to fast for a little bit each day to get the benefits of IF, but still eat one or more meals.
When choosing your meals for intermittent fasting you not only avoid foods that give high insulin spikes (because it takes a long time to go back into fat burning mode), but you choose to eat foods that keep you full and satiated for longer.
Sugar is the highest spike of insulin, and you know what it’s like to get a sugar high that is quickly followed by a crash. Refined carbs are also bad for high insulin spikes and are not nutritional for the body. Protein gives a medium spike to insulin, but keeps you full a long time, and fat gives almost no insulin spike at all and is a good long burning fuel.
If you pick the right foods, fasting is easy because you don’t suffer cravings, and you don’t feel weak or hungry. Lots of fasting adopters will tell you how much energy they have and even sometimes forget to eat.
You obviously have to be in a deficit to lose weight, but you aren’t strictly counting calories. You are eating whole foods that are natural, efficient sources of fuel that are healthy for you. You can eat whatever you like, if you want McDonald’s can be your meal every day if you are in a deficit, but you will always fare better if you eat sensibly.
Keto based diets are very good for IF and often they go hand in hand.
If you severely restrict your calories, you will struggle no matter what.. but intermittent fasting is about changing your lifestyle, controlling your insulin and eating whole foods. If it comes out of the ground, or from an animal you can probably eat it. But if it had to be manufactured at a factory and put in a box with a label, it is probably bad for you.
Eat only what you need, don’t snack between meals, and realise it’s a journey. Most people have ups and downs, but those with the biggest losses kept at it and it took time to see the changes, but they listened to their bodies and tried to stay on track
I’ve only been doing IF for 9 weeks now, mostly 16:8 with a few OMADs here and there. My caloric targets are similar to yours for a 500 a day deficit, and at least according to my crappy bathroom scale this morning, I’m down 17 pounds. For me, IF has made it easier to maintain a deficit, since it’s one less meal I have to try to fit inside those sub 1600 a day calories.
Metabolically speaking, I don’t know that there would be a difference in 1600 calories spread out throughout the day or 1600 calories compressed into my 8 hour window, though I’m aware that IF is supposed to help manage your insulin responses to food. I can only say that this is the first thing that’s consistently helped me lose weight that I’ve tried in years, and I think IF makes it easier for me to stay on track.
I recently read the book ‘the obesity code’ by Dr Fung, he explains very well how weight Loss is not a matter of caloric deficit but harmonal imbalance. The catch is that you will burn fat only if your insulin levels are low. Maintaining caloric deficit and eating throughout the day will surely help you lose weight. All diets work, but for a period of 6 months after that most of the weight comes back because your metabolism slows down. Your brain is no fool that it will keep spending the same calories no matter how many calories you intake. So calories in and calories out are not independent variables. You must therefore focus on harmonal factors and not on the calories.Our body has set weight and it tries to come back to it. If you eat in a caloric deficit you will lose weight but your body will gain weight again and return back to the set weight because you haven’t changed the body set weight. But when you practice IF, you eventually lower your insulin levels and change your body set weight, giving you a sustainable weight loss . And also, IF increases your metabolism despite of you being in a caloric deficit. Bingo!
Here’s my two cents for what it’s worth on the just CICO vs just insulin camps. Even Dr Fung seems to have walked back some of his earlier statements on this, his more recent content talks about the necessity of deficits and/or eating under maintenance. Telling folks that they can eat whatever they want in a narrow window sets up a false expectation of weight loss.
Yes, insulin is an important hormone that tells the body and cells what energy sources it should be preferring, but the body is still only going to draw from body fat if it needs to draw from body fat.
Putting aside actually processing, if someone drank a gallon of olive oil once a day at \~30,000 calories. They are not going to lose weight just because they are fasting for 23 hours. And to be clear, I don’t think anyone is claiming something that preposterous, but clearly it’s not just insulin.
It’s a caloric deficit that forces the body to find other sources of energy, it’s a lack of insulin that tells the body to prefer to get that energy from body fat. So it’s not that IF is somehow faster at burning body fat, but it is simply better at pointing that deficit at what we want it to do.
IF, especially mild version like 16:8, is primarily a tool to help maintain a calorie deficit. Some just find it easier to eat less often than to eat smaller meals.
So to answer your question: no and any differences would be anecdotal at best.
Hope it helped!