Lose Weight The Smart Way With Intermittent Fasting
The Quick Cut
Intermittent fasting for weight loss has been receiving a lot of buzz lately.
It delivers powerful health and fat loss benefits.
We use it successfully in the FastCut30 Fat Loss Challenge.
Fasting helps shed stubborn belly fat, detox the body, enhance brain function, and prevent illnesses.
It's also extremely convenient because you avoid having to think about, cook, eat, and clean up a meal.
The most popular form of fasting is doing Intermittent Fasting according to a 16/8 window.
There are modifications you can make to ease into Intermittent Fasting and make it fit your lifestyle.
Be sure not to over-fast or you'll do more harm than good to your efforts to lose fat.
The Long Slice
When it comes to weight loss, one strategy that’s been getting a lot of hype lately is Intermittent Fasting.
While I’m as averse to hyped-up trends and fad diets (e.g. Keto) as anyone, I believe that the buzz about Intermittent Fasting is justified.
That’s because it’s been scientifically proven to deliver significant health benefits, including helping you lose weight, detox, decreases insulin resistance, improve brain function, keep cancer at bay, and boost your willpower.
Sounds pretty powerful, right?
In fact, fasting is one of the main techniques we use in my FastCut30 Fat Loss Challenge to help participants lose between 10-20 LB in 30 days, in under 3 hours per week, without starving (but by ‘smart fasting’).
Below is a primer on what fasting is, why you want to consider trying it, and the different ways of implementing it into your lifestyle.
WHAT IS FASTING?
According to medical website Healthline, fasting is “…the abstinence from all or some foods or drinks for a set period of time. There are many different ways of fasting.”
While fasting has been getting a lot buzz the last few years, it's nothing new. At least some form of fasting has been practiced for centuries throughout the world (e.g. Lent, Ramadan, etc.).
WHAT ARE THE BENEFITS OF FASTING
By not eating for a period of time - usually between 12 and 72 hours - the body is given a chance to perform numerous health-boosting functions.
One such function is autophagy, or the “body’s way of cleaning out damaged cells, in order to regenerate newer, healthier cells", according to Priya Khorana, PhD.
In addition, fasting has been shown to decrease inflammation, improve insulin sensitivity, enhance brain function, extend longevity, reduce cholesterol, and prevent illnesses such as cancers.
HOW DOES FASTING HELP WITH FITNESS AND FAT LOSS
In addition to the health benefits above, the bottom line with fasting is how it affects your waistline.
Fasting delivers three really powerful benefits when it comes to staying lean and mean:
1. Forces The Body To Tap Into Your Existing Fat Stores
When it comes to losing weight/stored body fat, fasting is super powerful. It’s especially good at dislodging stubborn belly fat.
You see, your body has been storing fat in order to have an energy reserve for future use. But if we all we do is eat all day and keep ingesting energy in the form of calories, the body never has an opportunity to use those stored reserves. This keeps that unwanted fat on your body.
When you avoid eating for 12 hours straight, you force the body to look for another energy source and its first resort is generally tapping into your stored fat.
This, along with certain hormones that are elevated when we fast, helps the body break that stubborn belly fat and use it for energy, causing you to melt fat off your waistline and other stubborn areas.
2. Boosts Your Metabolism
Your metabolism is the rate at which your body consumes energy to perform bodily functions and activities. The higher it is, the more calories you burn and the easier is to lose weight and keep it off.
While the number one way to boost your metabolism is to perform focused resistance training, especially compound movements under load, you can also get a metabolism boost via fasting.
According to Healthline, studies have shown that fasting can reduce body weight and fat mass by up to 8% and 16% respectively.
In fact, fasting is more effective at cutting fat while preserving muscle mass, which is essential for keeping your metabolism high, than simply reducing calories (but still eating throughout the day).
3. Boosts Testosterone and Human Growth Hormone Levels
Fasting boosts two hormones that are critical to keeping fat low, your metabolism high, and your muscles and strength in peak form: Human Growth Hormone (HGH) and Testosterone.
Fasting for 24 - 48 hours has been shown to provide significant increases in HGH - up to 5 fold - for men, per a published study in NCBI.
BUSY LIFE? FASTING DELIVERS CONVENIENCE.
By eliminating a meal (either breakfast or dinner) from your daily routine, it saves you the time and hassle of having to think about, eat, and clean up that meal. One less meal to worry about means you can focus on other, more important things.
Another convenience of fasting is eliminating the need to count calories. Unless you’re a fan of logging every calorie and macronutrient you consume (which I'm pretty sure you're not!) eating one less meal makes it a lot more likely that you will not exceed your daily caloric limit for the day. This eliminates the need to have to log everything you eat. Amen to that. 🙏🏻
HOW TO PERFORM YOUR FAST
While there are many types of fasts, the most popular method is Intermittent Fasting. Other more extreme forms of fasting (water fasting, juice fasting, cleanse fasting, 5/2 fasting, etc.) are harder to sustain and will not be covered here.
How To Do Intermittent Fasting
Intermittent Fasting works like this: You fast during a specified window of time, and eat the rest of the time. The most popular fasting window is 16/8, which means 16 hours of fasting, followed by an 8-hour window of eating (which does NOT mean 8 hours straight of eating).
It would look something as follows…
You eat dinner around 7 PM and stop all eating at 8 PM. You sleep, wake up in the morning and eat nothing, other than calorie-free beverages like water, black coffee, unsweetened green tea, etc. You can also have a no-calorie Pre Workout supplement if you train in the AM.
Then you eat lunch around noon. Notice how you didn’t eat for 16 hours since your last meal? (i.e. 8 PM to noon the next day = 16 hours of fasting)
Not too bad right?
When you join my FastCut30 Fat Loss Challenge you will learn and be supported in adopting Intermittent Fasting into your specific lifestyle so you can receive all of the powerful health and fat loss benefits it provides.
Modified IF For Morning Persons, Beginners, and Muscle Builders
When first starting out with Intermittent Fasting, there are some modifications you can use to make the transition easier.
For example, if you’re concerned about potentially getting very hungry if you skip breakfast, there are other ways to gradually adopt a fasting routine.
1. Start With a Shorter Fasting Window
If fasting for a full 16 hours sounds like it might be too much, you can start with a shorter fasting window. For example, fast for 12 hours and eat for 12 hours (e.g. finish dinner at 8 PM and eat breakfast the next day at 8 AM).
Most people already eat in this fashion, so this is the easiest to start with.
While the benefits from fasting begin after 12 hours of not eating, starting out like this and being aware of the timing of your meals will make it easier to eventually adopt a bigger fasting window. After a week or two of 12/12, you can switch to 14 fasting/10 eating. Then, 15 fasting/9 eating, etc.
2. Swap Dinner For Breakfast
If you’re a morning person and/or love to have breakfast in the mornings, you can still do IF successfully by swapping dinner for breakfast.
With this method, your day would look something like: eat breakfast at 8 AM, have lunch around 1 PM and don’t eat the rest of the day. This would also create a 16 hour fast and all the benefits that come with it.
This method also works well if you hit it hard in the gym first thing in the AM and want to refuel to put back what you lost during your workout.
This way, you have a good breakfast, a good lunch, and never have to think about dinner. (Of course, this wouldn’t work as well if you have dinner plans on a given night but you can play with the breakfast/dinner swapping to fit your needs).
3. Fast Your Carbs Only
In this case, we don’t actually fast (i.e. not eat for an extended period) but we restrict carbs for a predefined period. This would look like not having carbs at breakfast so that you create a 16-hour carb-free environment in your body.
While you do eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner, you skip carbs for at least one or two (but NOT all three) of those meals. This might look like eggs and cheese for breakfast or a carb-free dinner, like chicken with sautéed veggies.
The main benefit of eating this way is to reduce the number of insulin spikes throughout the day. Insulin is a fat-storing hormone. Eating carbs spikes insulin and if we’re doing that all day long, we’re going to ensure that fat stays on our body.
Another benefit of this approach is that it does a great job of preserving muscle. Thus, if you have a goal to add muscle mass, this is a great modified fast to do because it keeps protein, which is muscle sparing, high throughout the day.
While carb fasting does not deliver all of the health benefits of true fasting (i.e. eating nothing), it’s easy to adopt and delivers the aforementioned fat loss benefits.
NOTE: Always have some carbs every day. Otherwise, your hormones may get thrown out of whack, your brain function can be affected, and you'll most likely feel low in energy and depressed. (i.e. just say 'no' to Keto)
A FINAL WORD: DON’T FAST TOO MUCH
Fasting is a bit of a fine line. If we underdo it, we don’t get all of the benefits. If we overdo it, we can actually do more harm than good.
If you fast for too long (i.e. longer than 16 - 20 hours) or eat too few calories during the day, your body may go into ‘starvation mode’.
This becomes a real problem because it signals to the body that there is not enough food, and the body’s response will be to slow down your metabolism, making it harder for you to lose fat.
But if you follow the guidelines above, and ease into fasting with the modifications I suggested, you will be able to adopt and maintain Intermittent Fasting and the powerful health and fat loss benefits that come with it!
So, go ahead and trying fasting for yourself. I invite you to see what all the hype is about.
P.S. 🚀 If you’re looking to lose between 10-20 LB by next month while getting supported in adopting fasting into your lifestyle, check out my FastCut30 Fat Loss Challenge. It will help you get leaner, be stronger, and take a big step toward restoring the confidence you need to win at life, in under 3 hours per week. <COMING SOON>
