Hi everyone. I’m almost a week into my first 16:8 IF and about 1lb, close to 2 down. SW 182, GW, 160. Quick question, how important is strict adherence to the fast vs just keeping an eye on calories? I’ve been wondering if it’s less the actual fasting part and more cutting out 500-800 calories I’d otherwise be eating in that meal I’m skipping, but I have read a bit about insulin response so maybe it’s a combination of both.
My two cents, calories are always the primary driver of weight loss - obviously folks still lose weight through traditional restriction even without fasting. I certainly feel there’s benefits to IF as a method for adhering to my goals though.
So it’s the combination of the two that helps me be consistent. If one or the other slips a little that’s fine, but it’s about making progress not being perfect.
Early on, definitely the calories. But the calorie cutting only works because you can eat a regular meal to end the day.
You get to be full and then think back on those regular meals while you are forcing yourself not to eat cookies/chips/beer while you watch TV.
When I started, cutting down to two meals was probably saving me 2000 calories from the pig I was. So I started skyrocketing downward.
As you progress, you can begin to reap some of the other rewards by limiting sugar and eating more whole foods and all that. Or longer fasting, or fasting + exercise, or fasting + heavy weight lifting to force your body to work harder with less.
Don’t eat, so that you don’t eat. That’s the main thing. Use the fasting time to force yourself not to snack. Let your body learn that TV can be watched without food and that you don’t need eat donuts just because you see donuts.
Read Dr. Jason Fungs’s, The Obesity Code. He explains insulin as a main contractor to weight problems and how fasting is the best therapy for it. Saved my like… 1.5 month in I’m down 16 lbs and can fast for 26 hrs now.
I like how u/phriot puts it here. It’s calories, hormones and probably a million other factors at “lower” biochemical levels.
Eat zero calories and with exactly 100% probability you will lose fat and glycogen. Eat some calories and uncertainty starts creeping in, especially as you are approaching what you (or your calculator) thinks is your TDEE. Some of them go to waste. Some of them cover your immediate needs. Some of them get stored as glycogen and/or fat to cover future demand. Hormones have a significant say on that input - output - storage partitioning. And fasting – eating the day’s calories in a relatively concentrated fashion – may furthermore implicitly affect (positively, if you seek to lose fat) that chunk that goes to waste. What neither can do is create energy from scratch, everything else, within reason (e.g., saying that fasting will cause someone to burn twice the fat per day already starts feeling exaggerated), is up for debate.
Personally I’ve been lucky in that I haven’t been forced to count calories to attain negative energy balance capable of driving sustained, though not excessive, fat loss. Most of what I eat has undergone relatively little processing and is therefore “compatible” with my bodily satiety cues and comparatively hard for me to overeat. IF additionally does a fine job at fine-tuning my hunger signals to match the hours of the day at which I routinely have my meal. These perks make the process feel subjectively less restrictive to me but nonetheless do not invalidate the underlying notion of energy balance.
fasting is just easier for me. i don’t have to worry about food, worry about ordering that burger with no bun but getting the fries because i can’t help the temptation, worrying about my next meal in general. I do 20:4 and i’m usually full after my first meal.. i love it
Fasting is just a way to skip on those extra meals and snacks with the hope that it would reduce your daily calorie intake. Doesn’t work if you fast strictly and then eat like s maniac though, so you still have to watch what you’re eating. As for effectiveness, Fasting, if properly done can reduce your appetite and thus reduce temptation to load up on food. If done incorrectly, Fasting would only lead to binging on food in non-Fasting period because you would only think about food the whole time your Fasting.And yes, Insulin response is how Fasting can suppress appetite. As long as you don’t trigger insulin during your fasting period, your appetite is going to be low and you can pass those hours much easier.
I’ve also slipped here and there and actually had a couple of false starts with intermittent fasting. In my case cutting about 500 calories a day was really the key to see some changes. After a week or two of my body getting used to the change in calories doing 16:8 was no biggie.
My personal experience has been that I lost a few (about 5) pounds while fasting 16:8 over about 5.When I added tracking calories in calories out while continuing to fast 16:8, I lost about 10 pounds over 2-3 months.
There are health benefits to fasting beyond weight loss.
It’s pretty easy to be in a calorie surplus even with fasting, including OMAD.