IF page

[JamieBelle]

If anyone engages in intermittent fasting, would you please share your schedule and how you do it? It's something I'd like to incorporate.


I had my normal protein/fruit shake after my morning strength training workout for breakfast, and it's going to be a busy day for me, so I'm not going to eat anything again until dinner. I will drink about 90 oz of water during this time (I try to drink a gallon a day). So, this is my first trial run with it. Eventually I'd like to fast for a whole day, but....baby steps.

[ahhgrr]

I've been IF'ing regularly for just shy of a year now -- my normal, workweek approach is to simply skip breakfast and push lunch until after my midday workout, say 2 or 3 in the afternoon. Then I eat dinner around 8 or so. I do tend to have a large handful of nuts when I get home from work, around 5:30/6.


So roughly a 15-18-hour fast around 5 days a week. Weekends I tend to eat three meals, but one is quite small. Every few weeks I'll also throw in a fast of 24+ hours, up to 40-48 if I feel like it.


I'll also have days where I just eat dinner plus the get-home-from-work snack, so more like a 20-hour fast.


But I worked up by skipping breakfasts, and pushing my first meal slowly forward to around 1:00 after an 8:00PM dinner. Took about a month to get used to it. Now I just mix it up however, based on how my body feels, which is a seriously nice feeling. Busy? No time to eat? No problem! Feel hungry? Good food around? Chow down! No problem!


It's *awesome* once it's dialed in.

[Grumpycakes]

Once or twice a week I don't put anything in my mouth but water for 24 hours.

[Geoff]

I was IF'ing long before I found out about The Primal Blueprint. There are a lot of different resources available. The "Fast 5" e-book is available online free and a reasonably good introduction.


Like ahhgrr, I usually don't eat before noon (though I do have a small splash of cream in my morning coffee). I also don't generally eat after 8 p.m. So I go about 16 hours of fasting, much of it sleeping.


One great thing about IF is that you actually learn what it is to really be hungry (what Dr. Herring calls "somatic" hunger) instead of simply craving food for reasons of emotion, custom, or habit ("limbic" hunger). Once you know when you are really hungry instead of simply craving food it's easy to know when and what your body wants to eat. So, if I'm really hungry when I wake up, then I will have breakfast. Likewise, if I'm not feeling hungry in the evening I'll skip dinner. Over the long haul it's tended to even out.


Also, like ahhgrr I have found that the best thing about IF is how easy it is once you adapt. The hardest part about IF, for me, is working around the expectations of family members who stick to standard mealtimes.

[Travis G]

I do a couple of 24 fasts a week. I try to keep these as random as possible, seeing how back in the day grok didn't know when he wasn't going to eat. This also helps ensure that I don't stuff my face before hand to try to "make sure I make it"

[PrimalGoddess]

I want to do an IF but I worry cause I do my workouts in the morning ..I have gotten shakey in the past if I haven't ate and felt like I was going to pass out. so a little worried about trying it xoxo Darlene

[Grumpycakes]

Take it easy on your fasting days. Just go for a walk or something.

[Travis G]

I've always thought that you should lift on your fasting days. That way you're saving the muscle, and getting a little bit of a boost in HGH. Brad Pilon has a great book called Eat Stop Eat that is very well researched and written.

[ahhgrr]

Every single workout of mine since last November has been a fasted workout -- it is *great*.


There were some cruddy days early one, but once you're in the groove with your "standard" fasts, working out fasted is the way to go. I try not to eat for about an hour after a workout on normal 2-meal days, and will go far longer on the sporadic longer-term fasts (two workouts in a 40-hour period, with about 6 hours between the last workout and the break-fast meal).

[Travis G]

ahhgrr, you do two a days on your fasting days? what types of workouts are you doing? is it something similar to crossfit?