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Intermittent fasting

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How about this scenario: I had my last meal at 8pm as I usually do, but I slept in til about 10am the next day..can I still eat at 12 like i normally would (becasue it is still 16 hour fasting) or do I have to be awake and fasting for a certain amount of time?
 
They recommend to keep a majority of the later half of the fast to while your asleep.

Reason being you're often hungrier later, so sleeping through most of it you wont feel any of the hunger pangs.

So that's perfectly fine.
 
evo said:
Everyone would benefit from it - I'm definitely a convert. Just drinking water for 24 hours ( or even 16 hours) every once in while gives your digestive tract, colon and liver a chance to clean itself out; and a well earned break.
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Any scientific evidence to support this claim?
 

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evo said:
you want scientific evidence to demonstrate that when you're not eating your digestinon tract and organs involved in processing food are taking a breaK? It is self evident,surely.
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I assume he was asking if there is any evidence to show that there are any actual benefits from this. I've never heard of needing to give your digestive system a break. With a healthy diet and no other complications I don't see why your digestive system would be in anything other than peak condition regardless of fasting.
 
even with a healthy diet your liver, kidneys, lower intestines etc get over taxed from time to time. Also your colon slowly gets backed up - especially if you are meat eater. That's why people get into enemas, juice and liver cleansing diets.

Fasting is just another way to approach it. i don't think the claim is particularly controversial.

good for the brain too apparently

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2012/feb/18/fasting-protect-brain-diseases-scientists
 
Been really considering giving IF a go, so I thought I'd ask for some advice here as most here seem to know their stuff. If I did the 8/16 method would that be best to begin with? So I would workout in the morning (fasted) from 6-7am and then fast until 12. Have an 8 hour window to eat until 8PM?
 
^ 16/8 is a good way to start. Ideally you want to eat within a few hours after working out, that's when your muscles really need replenishing - you aere also in a higher anabolic state because you are at the end of the fast so that is a great time to get a decent amount of protein in. So perhaps have your first meal at 10AM and last at 6PM if that's possible.
 
one of my workouts during the week i do just before my fast: so train 12-1pm and then eat straight after. usually a meal + shake. have a read of leangains.com if you're wanting more info on it

that site also has a few different meal plans depending on time of day you work out
 
Warning, this post is going to be long.

First let me start with apologies to fairdinkum and the few other people who were following this thread. I promised to update pics a few months back with my progress but unfortunately life got in the way. I also rediscovered my passion for home brewing, so any fat losses i was making on the fasts were undone with the regular drinking sessions, hehe. About a month ago I decided to get serious and even joined the local council pool/ gym so I could do cardio as well.

Anyway, these pics were taken and posted on BF the day I started intermittent fasting after approximately 18 months of training using the standard "dirty bulk" method
evo said:
May as well post a couple of pics to give me incentive to stick to it. I'm pretty much your classic middle aged ecto, all the fat goes on the gut/lower back, the rest is reasonably lean. If anyone is wondering what that weird lump is I dislocated a rib 15 years ago.


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^ It is hard to believe what a fat ferker I was. I didn't really realise it at the time because I've always been an ecto who only started to put on any real fat after the metabolism slowed down at about 40 years old.You really don't realise how overweight you are until you lose 10 kilos or so. Also I now realise that the advice that 95% of body builders and body building books give that says if you aren't putting on much muscle eat more is bullshit. It also a myth that you can't add muscle and strength when you are cutting. Maybe it is true with the traditional method of just eating 4 or 500 calories under maintenance every day, but in my view simultaneously gaining muscle and losing fat is easily doable using intermittent fasting. Increase in growth hormone associated with fasting ensures energy is taken from fat stores first. Further once you do eat and have worked out the body sends nutrients to the muscles first,

In my usual style, whenever I get interested in a topic I end up having to know everything about it; to the point of obsession.. And nutrition and fasting has been no exception. Over the last few months I've read just about every book on weight loss, nutrition and fasting. I've read every damn book from the 'The China Study' '80/10/10, to 'the Zone',' Paleo and the Atkins diet ...and so on. Watched hundreds of hours of youtube on fasting and nutrtion to boot. I've also used myself as guinea pig, trying all weird and wonderous ways to try and put on muscle and lose fat at the same time. High fat, low fat, high carb low carb. 6 meals, 3 meals, 1 meal/day and so forth.

Over the last few months I've refined what I think is the optimal way to achieve the holy grail for most people interested in fitness and nutrition - putting on muscle and cutting fat at the same time. A lot of people wont agree with it it, but that's cool. Bare in mind I'm a pretty old fella as well ( late 40s) and my testosterone is (embarrassingly) low after 25 years of drinking, smoking, party drugs and eating like shit. So any people in their late teens to early 30s reading this who do it seriously are sure to get better results than me.

First, let me say, if you want to buy one book/method that has the most effective no bullshit plan for cutting backed up with quality science you can't go past Brad Pilon's "Eat Stop Eat" package. You can find it as a torrent and it includes some great audio where he goes into all the science of why it works. There is also a another book included "how much protein?" which I think is excellent.

Martin Berkham's Lean Gains website mentioned above is also excellent; also the "Renegade Diet" by Jason Ferrugio is very good and refines some of Martin's techniques for the better. The last really useful book Is Ori Hofmekler's 'The Warrior Diet'. In my view you can achieve success with any one of these 4 plans if you give them a decent effort. Combining all 4 is even better; and that is what I ended up doing.

As I mentioned in a previous post in the thread, in my view Martin Berkhams method while really good, and probably the easiest to stick to, is not so effective for really decent weight loss unless you cut your calories below maintenance as well. Just effectively missing breakfast and squeezing it in in your 8 hour eating window isn't really going to attack the fat substantially. Where it is very useful is to use it for body building after you meet your target weight. It means you can always eat slightly over maintenance and put on muscle without much associated fat.

I found the Warrior Diet a real eye opener. Furthermore his philosophy of trying to emulate the romans/ spartans way of living really appealed to me as I'd recently finished studying the Spartans at uni (they were actually got me interested in weight training to begin with). The Warrior Diet is pretty much the opposite to what has become the recommended way of eating by just about every nutritionist. Rather than making breakfast the biggest meal of the day and dinner the smallest (or st least low carb), as has been the mantra the last few decades for just about anyone who wrote a diet book, Ori recommends you eat extremely light during the day and have a monster meal at night.

I found that following Martin's 16/8 PLUS eating lite after that during the day and then having a big dinner according to the Warrior Diet, combined with an Eat Stop EAT 36 hour fast once a week worked fantastically. Eat Stop Eat recommends you only go 24 hours, but I found if you forgo that meal after 24 hours and instead go to bed that night was when you lost the serious amounts of fat without much more suffering or muscle loss. The only drawback is it a little hard to sleep after already fasting for 24 hours. I've always been a bit of an insomniac anyway, so your mileage may differ.

continued.....
 
Originally I had just used the Eat Stop Eat method and that was really effective for stripping the first12 Kilos. I did that in about 2 months -it is pretty painless I reckon and it means you can weight train effectively throughout the week eating at maintenance or just above.. I expected to lose another 4 or 5 kilos in the following month without a problem but what I didn't really appreciate is that once you get to around 10-12% body fat your body seems to go into a homoeostasis. I think it likes it somewhere around that level; I suspect single digit body fat isn't seen by the body as optimal so it does anything to try and stay above 10ish. Any fat loss after that has to be a bit more aggressive. Hence I started to doing 16/8 as well every day and trained fasted - that's really effective and if you take a pre workout like Jack3d or Craze I don't find lifting performance deteriorates. 16/8 works the best if you have dinner at say 8pm don't eat till 11am, have either 10 g BCAA or a scoop of protein powder an hour oe so before you train then work out at 12 or 1pm. Eat straight after that.


As a side note, cortisol is at it's highest just after waking up between 7-9AM. We get an adrenaline surge when we awake- it has something to do with our evolutionary fight or flight mechanisms. Cortisol is catabolic, so you want it to be kicking in when you are trying to burn fat ie if you are fasting in the mornings, rather than when you are trying to build muscle. Something to think about for you guys who train before work. It might not be optimal.

I started out at 95KG and now am 79kg. I also reckon during the 5 or 6 months I've put on about 4kg of muscle at a guess. So that is a net fat loss of 20kg; or about 22% of total bodyweight. I could probably do to lose another 2 or 3kg, there is still a bit of stomach/back fat but I'm not that fussed. Interestingly, since I started IF 6 months ago i reckon I'm actually putting muscle on faster than I did in my previous 18 months when I was eating well over maintenance.
Fasting increase your growth hormone levels, improves insulin sensitivity, and makes your body more efficient in partitioning nutrients. After your fasts you are very anabolic it seems.

One other thing worthy of mention is that I started putting muscle on faster when I started having raw food juices every day a few months ago.To fit it in my calorie total I actually dropped my protein intake a bit. From what I have read recently, anything above about 0.8 grams/ pound is overkill. Eating over 200g of protein every day is completely unnecessary unless you are Jay Cutlers size and on the gear. It is also pretty harsh on your digestive track in the long term, and if the China Study is to be believed all that extra animal protein has a good chance of giving you cancer. I usually juice apples, celery, carrots, beetroot and pears ( sometimes tomatoes as well if they are cheap). I feel way healthier since I started that and my energy is through the roof. More like when I was a 16 year old. Carrying around 20 kgs less obviously helps too. I severely underestimated the importance of fruit and veggies in the past. For some reason my veins started to really pop as well - like when I was a teen. Must be improved blood flow. Cholesterol has dropped too.

Also worth mentioning is that I never counted calories, so that is a plus of IF as well. I'm too lazy to fill in those nutrition charts so just did it pretty much by feel. I'd keep track of protein in grams, so once that fitted my macros I just let carbs and fats look after themselves. Also from most of my reading I've formed the opinion that healthiest way is to try and have most of your carbs as fruit and veggies. Apart from oats I reckon it pays to ditch the rice, bread and pastas. The Paleo guys reckon most people are gluten intolerant without even knowing it. I imagine most BBs won't want to drop the rice and pasta but I've found a large glass of raw juice and a pre-workout supplement is a pretty powerful combination.

Now that I've got to a healthy body fat percentage I plan on staying here the rest of my life. I'd like to put on some more muscle but I'm not going to get fat again. it's unhealthy, especially at my age and just not necessary unless you are training to be a heavyweight powerlifter. You only have to take fat off later down the track anyway.

Anyway, here are pics taken yesterday. I guess I'm cheating a bit because i have a tan. Balancing that out is that it was new years eve afternoon so i was half drunk when I took them so camera work sucked lol. Hoping the above helps anyone interested in IF. I honestly think it is the golden goose of dieting, fitness and a health. And it's perfect for body building.

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IF is my method now
I started lifting in June last year, didn't weigh my self until around October from pure fear
In sept/oct i was 122kg so i could have been any were around 130+ when i first joined the gym early last year

It wasn't till around September that i started fasting but i found being a lazy uni student i was basically doing it anyway

I don't do the cycle fasts or crap like that and like the poster before im too lazy to actually count calories

But doing a schedule of

3:00/4:00 - SUBWAY (best food out and perfect for a lazy student)
Workout at 7:00/8:00
9:00 - Protein shake, dinner at home/more subway/nandos/fast eddies

Then go home stay up till 1/2/3 in the morning sleep till 11 and do it all again

Working out six times a week, fasting and eating well below my required calories (guessing) I've gone from 130kg to 103kg at 194cm

My goal for the new year is to keep fasting and take my weightloss and gains to a whole new level
 

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You look fantastic evo - and thanks for posting your lessons learned and good info you've picked up.

Here's a link to a doco i recently rewatched (saw it 2 years ago) about nutrition and brain function. It's a lecture but has some interesting information in it - e.g. link between gluten intolerance and schizophrenia - and hypoglycemia and alcoholism.



and if that doesn't bore you too much here is another lecture about sugar - not that you need to learn anything about sugar being bad for you but it's interesting

 
cfol said:
Here are a few links i keep handy:

Gary Taubes: Bad Calories, or Bad Research?
Good Calories, Bad Calories: The Mythology of Obesity, or The Mythology of Gary Taubes?
Bullsh*tter of the Day Oct 7th: Gary Taubes
Dr. Lustig: The bitter truth about fructose alarmism
Dr. Lustig: A retrospective of the fructose alarmism debate
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Thanks for the links but the first 3 you posted don't have anything to do with what Lustig was saying in that talk. He wasn't damning carbohydrates at all - infact, he pretty much begins his lecture with how essential they are for producing glucose for brain function.

The next 2 links you posted are another scientists critique on Lustig's lecture. And the blogger pretty much says that most of what Lustig says in his lecture is spot on; he has a great deal of respect for his research and the work he's done in his field. He queried
  • the stats he used on percentage increase in food consumption and its correlation to obesity.
  • Lustig's assertion that 'fructose' is poison and counters this with fruit! This is blatantly misleading - lustig talks about the importance of fruit and how the combination of fibre found in fruit means healthy metabolisation of the fructose found in it.
Your blogger doesn't provide evidence that fructose isn't a poison, merely claims that the research done on this isn't enough to back Lustig's claim that the amount of fructose found in the current western diet is poisoning us. This could be true but I'm still interested in a well respected professors opinion and research.



The links you posted don't support your claim that he's a fruit loop.
 

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thanks for your encouragement, nicky

that first video was quite interesting, I hadn't seen that before. I have certainly noticed impoved cognitive function since I began daily fruit and veggie juicing. If there is one thing i need to to do it is to get 14 year old son drinking to cut down on drinking so many sodas.

I have seen the Lustig lecture before. Some of the stuff he says is a bit controversial but generally his message is pretty good. Large intakes of high fructose corn syrup is certainly one of the biggest problems with the current 1st world diet. As you note in your response to cfol, fructose is fine if it is taken in the form of fresh fruit. It is when it when highly concentrated in processed foods like sodas, mcdonalds etc is where the problems arise.

You would probably enjoy these 3 documentaries, nicky. (Maybe you have already seen them).

the first two are the actual movies in full.


the third is a trailer, but i'm sure you'll be able to hunt it down. It's basically a doco about 'the China Study'.









cfol said:
Dr. Lustig: The bitter truth about fructose alarmism
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Alan Aragon is great My favourite BB science guy.
 
After discovering i had the discipline to quit smoking last year i also decided to stop being a fat bastard. I was doing this IF albeit unknowingly and not consistantly.

Glad i found this thread this morning as i needed more direction other than the voice in my head saying "you dont need to eat, you feel shit when you do". Ive cut out shit food and organic unprocessed foods make up about 66% of my intake now. I still eat some rubbish but that has become a mental conditioning thing, "see you feel shit for a few hours now".

In the last 4 months ive gone from 104kg to 90 this morning. Ive never read or been interested in fitness since i was a teenager. I have a fairly physical job though so my only non work workout is cardio on a x-trainer (i have horrid shin splints when i try to run).

Will read some of the info suggested in this thread as it seems to match what i am able to do now. I have taught my brain to turn that hunger pain into a positive reinforcement of looking and feeling better. I have photos of before i started, but wont share them until im at my goal weight of 77.

I wish i could lift weights but a shoulder reconstruction says no. Im prepared to lose muscle along with the fat. Im weak as shit now anyway thanks to the shoulder.
 
vealesy said:
After discovering i had the discipline to quit smoking last year i also decided to stop being a fat bastard. I was doing this IF albeit unknowingly and not consistantly.
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:thumbsu:
That was pretty much the same with me. Up until 40 I never exercised, chained smoked, drank heaps and ate like shit. Once I gave up smoking, I thought what the hell, I'll try and get some of my lungs back and started walking. That lead to weight training, then intermittent fasting and finally good nutrition.

Anyway, good luck dude. Even if you can't lift heavy weights, maybe try walking or swimming. If you can do some sort of cardio during the fasted period it can really speed up your fat losses.
 
FlowersByIrene said:
11-7 is when you're eating??

Hmmn yeah give it ago
I personally like to try and keep it to six hours and i like to go later into the day like 2 before i eat
But give it a go at first and see how you go
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Is 6 better? I was thinking 8 as it seemed popular.
I eat dinner at 7/7.30 and finish around 7.30/8

Im keen to go full on from the start, so if 6 is good im keen.
 

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Intermittent fasting

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