Okie doke, I know if you only eat 1,200 calories a day, but spread it out over 3 meals and 2 snacks, you’re keeping up your insulin and you might lose weight, but eventually your body adjusts is metabolism.
With IF, you give your body a better hormone profile, and when you’re not eating food, it gets calories from your butt, or belly, or double chin.
TBH, the last 2-3 weeks I’ve had a hard time getting in more than 600-1,200 calories a day. Some days I manage 1,800 (what I figure is healthy ish). I’ve been worried about tanking my metabolism.
So, based on a post I saw a day or two ago … is it safe to say I’m NOT tanking my metabolism? (with eating windows of 3-5 hours eating whole foods paleo/keto)
So … what I’m hoping is that when I’m done fasting/losing weight, I could go back to eating 3 meals a day of 1,800 calories a day and not gain weight (after 6 months of IF at greatly reduced calories).
Thoughts?
Kind of.
I (healthy weight already) can tell that restricting the hours I eat but not the calories does advantage lean mass - my waist is smaller, proportions better. It’s a small effect but over years it’s made a difference even though my weight is the same.
But the difference is not gonna be material if you are fat and losing weight - main thing is to eat less (not too much less) so that your body has to eat itself, and you will lose weight. All of the ‘tricks’ like keto or IF make a smaller difference than the calories in/out. There’s no magic.
But yes, yes, a thousand times yes, it is easier and healthier to eat less by eating less often, than by eating smaller and more frequent meals.
And getting the weight to a healthy level and keeping it there is likely the biggest and best change you can make for your health.
Oh man, you are so incredibly incorrect.
Metabolism is simply the act of breaking things down into smaller parts. If you eat 1200 calories a day, you will most likely lose weight. For most people, that is too steep of a deficit and they will feel bad. Look into things called “total daily energy expenditure” and “metabolic adaptation.”
In a sense you get calories from your fat stores, but overall, it is dependent on energy balance over time.
No, you aren’t “tanking your metabolism”. Your body will always require a certain amount of fuel to function, but the issue that occurs is that your body will change some behaviors so you will burn less overall.
When you get bigger, you burn more calories, when you get smaller, you will burn less calories.
Your assumptions, unfortunately, are wrong. IF is simply a means to be in a caloric deficit without necessarily having to resort to counting calories. It has nothing to do with hormones or insulin or anything else. Just about every benefit that comes from fasting can be achieved by being in a calorie deficit. Likewise, you can still gain weight doing IF if you are in a calorie surplus
Also, eating too few calories, regardless of whether it’s through fasting or some other method, can lower your metabolism but this is mostly due to the fact that people that diet don’t strength train and don’t eat adequate protein, so they lose a lot of muscle mass when they lose weight.
So are you tanking your metabolism? Not necessarily, but a 150lb person with 20% body fat will have a slower metabolism compared to a 150lb person with 10% body fat
As far as going back to normal eating, by itself, it’s not going to make you regain weight. That will only happen if you are in a calorie surplus