What is Intermittent Fasting?

One of the most difficult things about going on a diet, whether you are trying to lose weight or gain muscle is all the conflicting advice. It is only when the experts seem to have it all figured out when some maverick comes along and challenges the establishment. Perhaps the most repeated diet advice out there is that you have to eat 5-6 smalls meals a day to lose weight. The rationale is that every time you eat a meal it 'revs' up your metabolism, causing you to burn more fat. Also, for many people they find a willpower or psychological advantage to eating small meals, making them feel more full and less likely to binge on garbage foods.

But now you have a new way of eating called Intermittent Fasting (IF) that throws a monkey wrench into everything. What IFers have discovered is that they can create incredibly lean, muscular and healthy bodies by only once or twice a day. Every IF diet is divided into two phases: feeding and fasting. The former is when you eat, the latter when you don't. The difference between each diet is the specific feeding/fasting windows. One of the most popular IF protocols out there is Leangains. The protocol was created by a Swedish trainer named Martin Berkhan. With Leangains your feeding phase is an 8 hour window while your fasting phase is 16 hours.

 A sample schedule from the website:

11:30 am Pre-workout  drink
12:00-1:00 pm Training
1:00 pm Post-workout meal (largest meal of the day)
4:00 pm Second meal
9:00 pm Last meal before the fast.

In addition to the 8/16 feeding/fasting split there are some people who advocate going 24 hours without eating anything once or twice a week. A popular website for this approach is eatstopeat.com. A third and related approach is called the Warrior Diet where you have a few snacks during the day and eat a large meal at night, mimicking a hunter-gatherer who would spend all day on the hunt and then feast at night.

Don't confuse IF with calorie reduction and it isn't 'starving' yourself necessarily either. Instead of spacing out your calories in 5-6 smaller meals, IF advocates you eat those same amount of calories in a smaller time frame and obviously spread out among fewer meals.

But whether something like fasting is good for you in the long term is still up for grabs. As far as a mainstream nutrition strategy there is not as much research out there as there is on other diets, although this will likely change. There are two things to remember about IF and just fasting in general. First, everybody already fasts, it's just the time period from your last meal of one day to the first meal of the next. Secondly, fasting was and is commonly practiced by different religious traditions for thousands of years. Fasting is an integral part of major holidays for Jews, Christians and Muslims (Yom Kippur, Lent and Ramadan respectively). Just because you decide to try and fast over the course of a month or two you probably will not keel over and die on the spot. Check out the websites mentioned above and give it a shot.