Hi everyone,
There is been an argument between my IF friends and I would love your educated opinion on the matter:
I’m looking into IF to have a heltier life, I don’t need to lose weight and I’m interested in IF only because I think it makes me healtier, not as a quick or efficient way to change my body.
My theory is that IF needs to be achieved skipping dinner rather then breakfast, especially if in front of you you have a busy day, work wise plus phisical activity.
I keep insisting that it’s not healty to run your day on a completely empty stomach just to achieve the 16h fasting.
What do you guys say on the matter? Am I wrong?
Looking forward to hear all sides of this debate
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EDIT: I genuinly don’t know the answer, I want to know what people think and their reasoning
You are indeed wrong. You say that you keep insisting, but what evidence are you basing your insistence on? There are people who fast for days at a time who are perfectly healthy and long term fasting is associated with numerous health benefits.
Well, if you do 16:8 (fast for 16 hours and eat for 8), your tank is never truly empty I think. I stop eating around 8pm then start again next day at noon. I have black coffee and water in the morning. So it’s nowhere near a “day” of fasting because much of that time is spent sleeping.
You’re wrong and you’re right.
It’s not better to skip dinner rather than breakfast because of random energy needs— you have about 24 hours worth of glycogen in your liver. Glycogen is the starch that’s readily available to keep blood sugar up. The decision to skip breakfast or dinner is arbitrary if you’re talking about energy needs, which it sounds like you are.
That being said, your insulin response is much larger later in the day, and considering lots of metabolic diseases basically boil down to insulin resistance and persistently high insulin levels, eating early in the day will limit how high your insulin gets.
This is secondary to fasting, though. It’s much better to skip breakfast and have lunch and dinner but no snacks than it is to graze all morning and stop eating at 3pm or whatever.
TL;DR: there might be a benefit to be had with eating earlier rather than later because of the smaller insulin response, but it has nothing to do with how much you need to work. I had my best weight lifting session ever when I was 70 hours fasted.