I say this because I am one of them. I’ve used traditional Omad to get to my goal in the past, rebounded, found extended fasting, rebounded even harder. I’m now on my fourth attempt at getting to and maintaining my goal, and I’m at a crossroads. I really would like like to use extended fasting (for the speed, but more for the metabolic effects like hormone production). However, I’m terrified of falling back into a similar uncontrollable spiral once again after.
This obviously will not be true for every person. I’m wondering if anyone has used extended fasting to a goal weight (~10% for males) and maintained it years later.
I lost 70lbs from 220 to 150lbs about 3 years ago. At the time I had 0 muscle and was just starting to go to the gym. I stayed between 140-155lbs for about a year and a half and then I decided it was time to start gaining weight and building muscle. I’m 180lbs not and I’m extremely happy with the results I’m approximately 13-15% bf and I’m very happy with my gym progress. But I would say that I have kept off the weight for years. I did it in a month long fast while in HS and working 35hrs a week as a stock boy so I was extremely active.
6’1, Dropped from about 200 to about 165 eleven years ago doing a combination of IF/EF/OMAD. Maintained it. Sometimes I backslide and plump back up but it’s easy to get it back down again with maybe a month or three of effort. The trap is thinking “Oh, I’m going to hit my goal weight and then be there forever.” That’s not how it works. That’s not reality. Reality is “I used to spend most of my time around 200 pounds, now I spend all of my time around 175 or so.” You’ll go up, you’ll go down again. That’s not a “spiral”, that’s life. The long-term average of where you spend most of your time is what matters, not some imaginary perfect constant.
Periodic fasting is not a substitute for dieting or at least following proper nutrition and eating healthy foods in healthy quantities.
Fasting is a compliment to those things.
Too many think they can eat whatever they want in between fasts.
No, you always need to watch what you eat, period.
Well, of course rebounding sucks. But one thing that we have to take into account is that we lack a counterfactual - we don’t know how things would have gone without fasting.
My view is that this is an example of selection into treatment. For some people, losing weight and keeping it off is easier, be it for genetic, environmental or psychological reasons. For those individuals, entering a CICO or intuitive eating scheme is easy and provides results, so they just have to tweak some of their relationship/knowledge about food and lifestyle and things work out.
For other people, this is much harder. I’m sure that if I was able to follow a CICO diet for a prolonged period of time I would lose weight. The problem is that, again and again, it has not worked for me. People with a profile similar to mine naturally end up looking for more extreme/unconventional weight loss practices, which indeed allow us to lose weight, but it does not work with the core of the problem, which is the reasons we gained weight in the past and lead us to rebound.
For me at least the key is ketosis. I did end up gaining back 60lbs of the 130lbs I lost……. because I started eating more carbs and then my whole life went to shit (homeless) and I ate whatever I could leading to binge eating like most of my life. Almost a week being back in ketosis and feeling great
I lost ~200lbs over 9 month period in 2017. Gained all of it back since.
Don’t know what to do at this point, it’s very disheartening. But I’m approaching things more from a hormonal and mental health/addiction standpoint now. I still fast but also looking into testosterone replacement, various pharmaceuticals, and addiction therapy.
For starters 10% body fat is an unrealistic expectation to achieve by fasting. I don’t think there are studies, but I personally have found muscle loss begins to occur when you try to fast below 15% body fat but YMMV. In my opinion below 15% body fat it’s better to use diet and exercise if your goal is to simply look good, which you need musculature for.
Fasting can be a great way to lose a lot of weight loss quickly when you have a bunch of excess body fat to lose. It’s also great for general health when used intermittently. Weight gain is perfectly normal and hard to prevent without consistent calorie watching once you get below 15% body fat. It seems like that is an ideal set point for the body.
As for rebounding you need to figure out how to improve your diet between fasts. I think it’s unhealthy to look at fasting as something you do >5 days a month to maintain your weight; that means you are eating in great excess between fasts. However a day or brief multi day fast once a month to maintain weight seems reasonable to me.
Tbh, I’ve found the only sustainable dieting is doing a less than 100 cal deficit per day and then throw in a fast or two a month. That’s it. Just live with being fat for an extra few months and take it slow.
You absolutely can use fasting to lose weight and keep it off because it trains you that you don’t really need food but the mistake comes when people think they can just do what they like outside of fasting because they’re just gonna fast again.
No, it doesn’t work that way. Fasting 24hr is hard. Eating 1 large dominos pizza is not, and will undo all that progress.
The real question is: if you’re of a disposition where sticking to a lifestyle is difficult, is there anything you can do to mitigate that and improve? Most all lifestyle is about habits. Try the Power of Habit or Atomic Habits for some advice maybe. Maybe the addiction literature is the place to go.
I maintained for a while but eventually had to add exercise because I couldn’t cut my calories any more. Probably messed up my metabolism or something, because as soon as I took time off (hurricane destroyed my gym) I began a slow and steady climb back up. Regained 80% of what I lost, tried to fast my way back down and I’ve been stuck for 6 months trying different things
My personal take on OMAD is it works, but it also reinforces a bad habit of eating oversized meals.
I prefer two normal sized meals on 20:4 for weight loss, and want to try ADF. It’s harder for me than OMAD, but I think it creates more long term benefit.
Don’t look at a fast as a cut of weight, look at it as rehabilitation for a food addiction a lot of people have. It’s a spiritual cleanse, I’m in day 3 and I hope to kick nicotine, and have not had any nicotine withdrawals. Luckily my hunger has made my nicotine withdrawals suck less. But it’s a HEALING process not weight loss cheat.
I’ve been doing LeanGains IF for three years now. Never done OMAD or any extended fasting. Quite honestly don’t believe in them. I’ve reached my GW quite a while ago and simply maintain at this point relatively easily.
I’m not saying that OMAD and extended fasting doesn’t work but I consider it an extreme form of “dieting” that would be difficult to maintain IMHO
To show my start and stop …47M - 6’2” - SW 265 - CW 217Weight lifting 5x per week… recently after starting yoga… increased decline bench max from 335 to 375.
I’m using fasting to first and for most help me augment my diet. I’m moving from a traditional SAD diet to a whole plant based diet. The initial 7 day fast was to help drop some initial weight for motivation but more importantly allow me to start slowly adding new flavors and adapting my palate. I also plan to continue to use IF and occasional 24-48hr fasts to increase autophage.
I don’t plan to just fast once and be fixed it’s an occasional activity i’ll use as part of my overall health plan.
I used fasting to get down from 210 to about 175-180 last year. I used a mix of 48-72 fasts (my longest being 6 days) and OMAD. Now, I have been hovering around 175-185 for the past 9 months and intermittent fast depending on how I feel for the day. I never eat breakfast and choose to eat lunch if I don’t I do 20:4 for the day. This for me is more sustainable because it is not as strict (especially for the weekends). Every couple of months I throw in an extended 4-6 day fast for autophagy and skin health plus all those other benefits
Gaining weight is multifactoral. What percentage are you gaining back? Are you going from 200 to 220 for a 10% gain? Sometimes gaining weight is within reason. Does your weight mostly pack on around the holidays? That’s pretty normal. What’s your diet like now? Maybe you’re adding on weight because you’re eating things that aren’t good for you. Are there any emotional reasons you gain weight? Emotional eating? Stress? Maybe talking to a therapist would help. Have you had your thyroid checked? Maybe you should get blood work done to check for any deficiencies or hormonal imbalances. Maybe you have a nutritional deficiency and your body is overeating to try to get the proper nutrients. If that’s the case, fasting wouldn’t be a good idea at this time. Were you put in any medications recently that could cause weight gain?
I guess what I’m trying to say is look at your situation holistically and made visit an endocrinologist to check your hormones and other blood work.
Been here for years as well. More of a lurker, but I genuinely beleive that fasting has helped with my scars and it most definitely has helped with weight loss. Trying to get back to doing rolling 3 day fasts.
I started IF in my early 20’s and maintained a good weight and physique through health and fitness for many years. I integrated fasting into my lifestyle to maintain a healthy bodyfat percentage.
In the last 3 years I ended up going from obese (long story on how I got there) to a reasonable weight by using IF and other longer fasts exercise and diet controls. in the last two years have fluctuated through the pandemic as slightly overweight to in okay shape, whilst gaining/maintaining muscle.
I can thank fasting and other such controls I have put in place to not ending up getting too fat again through the numerous yoyo’s of stress, depression, alcohol abuse and rolling lockdowns that had lasted sometimes months on end.
It may seem small to say I never got very very fat again, but it’s something I feel is an achievement given the circumstances even though my goal is to be below 20% bodyfat.
10% is quite low, it’s hard to maintain especially as you get older. Many people who can stay ripped year round are on steroids and it’s not a sustainable goal weight for the natty among us.
Great observation. I think the problem here is that fasting is often seen as a tool for losing weight rather than a life plan.
For example, instead of fasting until I hit my goal weight and then eating again, I’ve decided that I will, for the rest of my life, eat within a 6-10 hour window every day and do a prolonged fast once every two months.
I kept it off since 2015. I’m back now bc I emotionally ate after the suicide of a family member. It was during lockdown and there could be no funeral, I was isolated thousands of miles away and just did not have the coping skills to manage everything healthily. I didn’t regain all of it, and tbh my doctor was very supportive bc at least I tried to keep it under control and am now reversing it with the help of therapy.
In other words, it had zero to do with how I initially lost weight. I suspect the same thing would’ve happened regardless of my diet.
Sometimes shit happens. I still was healthier all those years even if I have to do it all again!
Been doin OMAD for 4 or 5 years now. Initially lost just over 100 lbs in the first year, been maintaining successfully ever since. Pick a fasting style you can do without struggling, and stick to it. For me, after the first couple weeks, it was easy, and it has remained easy.
I lost 36lbs in 2.5 months doing OMAD with moderate exercise back in 2018 (M,25, 5”9, 200lbs -> 164lbs) I gained it all back and then some within a 2 year period, and I found that the dietary habits and exercise routines that I used to halt weight gain stopped working. I’ve tried to start OMAD/IF again in the years since and I would have success, but fall off.
I started OMAD again, and I am down 7lbs in 3 days. The difference this time around is that I’m doing it as a lifestyle change, so that I can be healthy for the long haul.
Also, OMAD worked/works for me because I don’t have to show restraint as my meal times look similar to mukbang broadcast.
Fasting doesn’t deal with the habits involved or nutrition improvement needed to not fall back into issues. It also doesn’t encourage people to find the actual reason they gained weight in the first place.
I feel like fasting is best used as a supplement to losing weight, not the only part of the plan. You want to also change your food habits and make sure you’ve test to find the broken parts of your body to fully heal.