Hey everyone,
I (M/30) started doing intermittent fasting about 45 days ago.
I was really happy with the results. I dropped about 19 pounds in the first 4 weeks, bringing me from 359lbs down to 340lbs. I find that I feel a lot better on IF than other methods I have tried to change my diet.
I initially started doing a 16:8, with an eating window between 8am-4pm. A morning eating window I know is better for me as most of my unhealthy eating happens at night. My plan was to start with 16:8 for about 30 days and then eventually shorten the eating window to 18:6 and stop eating at 2.
But something weird happened. As planned, about 2 weeks ago I shortened my eating window to 18:6, and my weight loss has halted. I’m trying to figure out if it’s related to that change somehow, or if I’m simply hitting a wall. Curious if there’s any info about cases where 16:8 could produce better results than 18:6?
I think there’s a natural psychological tendency to snack or overindulge when your hours become more restrictive. I had to “loosen the reigns” a little in recent months because I felt like I was ignoring my body’s hunger/satiety cues for the sake of a keeping my refeeding window nice and short, and I plateaued hard.
Not a doc, however I don’t believe so.
You need to have your body purge whatever sugars are in your liver and start burning the fat in your body. That takes time. The only thing that could have stopped or plateaued you is things like alcohol, coffee with cream, soda, juice, or other things that might alter the process outside the window. Also if you ate ‘too many’ sugars late it could also cause a problem. Like, if right at the end of your window you ate a giant chocolate cake. You have a few hours for digestion and a few hours for your liver to remove the sugars til your body can then start burning the fat in your body. What can happen is if you ate Chocolate Cake at 4:00pm and you ate enough chocolate cake, by the time your body digests it, and then your liver starts to break down the sugars and runs out, now you are in bed. At that point, you are not burning much in the way of calories so your body doesn’t have to burn much fat in the process because you are asleep. Then you wake up, and right when it would be peak time for your body burn, you eat breakfast.
If anything, the ideal would be to eat one larger meal first thing in the day, and then the last meal would be more along the lines of a keto-friendly meal, with vegetables, no pasta, no starches so whatever you had for Breakfast, would be burned off early giving your body time to burn your own fat from say, after 9 pm to 9 am.
The more ‘junk’ you eat closer to the start of the fasting window, the less likely you are to burn anything.