Intermittent fasting is one of the best strategies for fast weight loss. What makes it special is that once you lose the weight, you can keep it off with minimal pain and effort.
You can retrain your ‘hunger mechanism’ with intermittent fasting and it fills a need that other calorie reduction strategies lack. Some people just need to feel more satiety with their meals. Hunger and cravings will chip away at your willpower making a lower calorie level harder and harder to sustain.
Searching For The Actual Benefits of Intermittent Fasting
I got very annoyed when I first tried to learn about intermittent fasting. I’m only interested in things that create a noticeable difference in real life. Unfortunately, all of the articles I came across initially were filled with useless fluff. I had to do some ‘digging’ to get to the good stuff.
I wasn’t interested in a HGH boost if it’s so tiny that it doesn’t cause any kind of change. I also don’t care that intermittent fasting extends the lifespan of mice.
While there are some legitimate health benefits to intermittent fasting (such as reducing inflammation, improved insulin sensitivity, improved cholesterol + triglyceride levels, etc…), I just wanted to know how it’s better for losing body fat.
After all, even if you’re fasting, you still need to be in a calorie deficit to lose weight. So what are the real advantages over regular calories reduction? I’m talking about advantages that makes a big enough difference to jump on the bandwagon.
Before we get to that, let’s quickly go over:
What Is Intermittent Fasting Exactly?
Intermittent fasting is not a diet. It’s just a pattern of eating. By reducing the time you can eat during the day or week, you can retrain your hunger anticipation response and enjoy more satiety.
For example, fasting for 16 hours (including sleep) and eating during an 8 hour window (leangains style fast).
Or you can reduce your weekly calorie intake by fasting for 24 hours once or twice a week (Eat Stop Eat). Being able to change your daily and weekly pattern makes dieting real flexible.
Meal Frequency and Metabolism
Just in case you didn’t know about the ‘5-6 meals a day to raise your metabolism’ myth, I’ll go over it quickly. In 1997, researchers conducted this study and proved that meal frequency had no effect on your metabolism. Makes no difference whether you eat 2 or 6 meals a day.
Now, let’s get on with the biggest advantage of intermittent fasting for weight loss (in my opinion).
Your Hunger Mechanism Can Be Trained
Two hormones are largely responsible for your experience of hunger. One of the hormones is called ghrelin and it is released in anticipation of a meal. We can train this hormone-response in our favour for easy weight loss. Here is how it works:
Training The Meal Anticipation Hunger
If you’re used to eating at around the same time everyday, your body will anticipate the upcoming meal and make you feel hungry right before the event. This is controlled by your circadian clock (your body’s natural internal clock).
So if you’re eating 6 small meals a day and feeling hungry all the time, it’s because your ghrelin response is out of control. Your body is constantly anticipating another meal and making you feel hunger all the time.
Higher meal frequency is helpful if you’re trying to eat more food, but it can sabotage your attempt to eat less. While some people can keep it up, it ruins the people that enjoy bigger satisfying meals.
Eating 2-3 meals a day is nothing new, but combine it with intermittent fasting and it works amazingly well. To take full advantage of this ghrelin response and feel more satiety, all you have to do is condense your daily window of feeding.
For example:
The average person that works 9-5 could have their first meal be around 7 am and last meal around 6-7 pm. This creates a 11-12 hour window of feeding.
By condensing this window to an 8 hour period, you will be able to experience more satiety. This can be achieved by simply skipping breakfast, eat your first meal at noon and last meal at 8 pm (leangains)
At first, you may feel hungry from having skipped breakfast. The key is keeping the routine consistent for a couple of weeks. This will retrain your ghrelin response to anticipate the new meal schedule.
In the meantime, you can use appetite suppressants like coffee and avoiding pictures of food until the new meal time (looking at pictures of food will make you hungry).
#1 Reason for Failed Diets
Diets fail most of the time because they make you miserable. Hunger and cravings will chip away at your willpower. If you can’t see yourself maintaining a diet for for the foreseeable future, there is a fundamental flaw in its design. Most ‘trendy’ diets are completely ridiculous for this reason.
Willpower is valuable and we don’t have a lot of it. While it can work in the short term, it’s not meant for long term sustenance. This willpower needs be used to form a new habit. Once the habit is formed, maintaining it has to take minimal willpower…meaning it can’t make your miserable.
So in the case of intermittent fasting, that willpower should be used to form the new habit of condensing your window of feeding. It’ll take a couple of weeks to train the new ghrelin response and then it will be a walk in the park.
In this process, you will also gain superior hunger control. Hunger will no longer affect you as strongly in general.
So What About Calorie Reductions?
Even if you’re fasting, you still need to be in a calorie deficit to lose weight. With a condensed window of feeding, you’ll be eating that same amount of food in a shorter window of time. This creates more satiety and makes it easier to eat less naturally.
Intermittent Fasting To Lose Weight ‘Fast’
Now lets talk about the lose weight ‘fast’ part.
A shorter window of feeding + improved hunger control = more satiety and it also gives you room to create a bigger calorie deficit.
I recommend starting off the first two weeks slow. Just eat the usual meals and get used to the new eating pattern. The key is sticking with it everyday until the new pattern is established. You’ll know when this happens because the pre-breakfast hunger no longer affects you as noticeably.
A lot of people naturally start eating less as they get used to the new eating pattern and start getting results. I like to have my last meal as my biggest meal to prevent hunger at night. This meal has to be rich in protein as it provides longer lasting satiety.
Once the new pattern becomes natural, you can add in a 24 hour fast once or twice per week (Eat Stop Eat). This will really accelerate your weight loss by dropping your weekly calorie intake by 15-25%.
