Are rolling 5 day fasts with two day breaks healthy? I want to lose a substantial amount of fat and I feel my body is up to it. I want to do this over the course of 6 months to lose 75 kgs (165lbs). I’m a 27 yr old female and my height is 160 cm (5 foot 3 inches).
While there are plenty of people on this reddit who have had no problem with similar regimens, I would coordinate with your Doctor, just to be sure. Even with everything going great (i.e. no problems and the weight systematically comes off), this will still be a big change for your body nonetheless. Having some coordination, maybe even periodic blood panels done via your Dr. would, at the very least, confirm you are on the right track with no adverse effects, while the weight is coming off. Good luck!
I interacted with a guy in the Life fasting app who was doing a similar schedule. He fasted through the week and his eating window was on the weekends. He reached his goal that way. Lost significant weight
I did variations of rollling 168s ( did some longer up to like 240 as well early on) for an average of 90-100 hour fasts and lost 70’pounds in 3 months. Male 6 foot 3 , 245 to 175 poundsDid longer fats like 7 days early the. Settled into around 96s on average eat for a day or 2 and start again, or for a month or so I would eat one meal and start again.I also would do some cardio daily. About 3 miles walks/ with around 10-15 HIIT like for me really hard hit, this hill with a ton of stairs , I’d run up it like 3-10 times then walk/ jog the mile or so back home. Probably did this not quite fault,’ but more than half the time. Or just take nice walks out in nature, get amongst the trees and zen out
It’s absolutely doable, I would just make sure you’re eating good nutrient dense foods when you eat and maybe even take a multi every once in a while to make sure you get all the nutrients you need.
The other side of it that I’ll touch on more though is make sure you don’t burn yourself out. Fasting 5 days a week every week is no small feat, and you want to ensure that you’re going to be able to stick with your plan for the long haul. It would be better to do less days for longer if it means success than trying to do too much and failing.
To be clear though, I think you absolutely CAN do it, and accomplish what you’re going for, but just advising to listen to what you feel, and if you start to get discouraged, don’t beat yourself up if you back off a bit, because you can always go back to your schedule after you’re feeling a bit in a better mood.
That’s pushing the limit of what you can expect weight loss wise. It also depends on your age/sex/current weight/ height among other things. For the sake of the calculation I’m going to assume you’re an average sized 30 year old man with a daily kcal need of 2400.
So the first part of this is considering how long you’re in a fasted state. With a 5 day rolling fast with a 2 day feeding lets round up and say you’ll be in a fasted state 75% of the time. While in a fasted state your MBR will increase about 10% giving you a MBR need of 2640 kcals. So your fasted state kcal gross total over 6 months will be 356,400 kcal. Your total fed state BMR will be 108,000. Giving your total BMR over this time a caloric need of 464,400. This nets you a loss of 132 pounds. Factor in your meals on your fed days lets just average it out and say a loss of 120 pounds.
To get to 165 you will need to burn 45 pounds though exercise. That is to burn 157,500 kcals over 180 days. That comes to 875 calories a day in exercise. Which is just shy of 3 hours of moderate intensity cardiovascular exercise a day.
So to answer your question. Yes. 165 in 6 months is possible to do so in a healthy manner depending on a lot of factors, but it’ll be hard and will require exercise.