Comprehensive Guide to Intermittent Fasting

You guys are in for a treat today because I have some really great news. This is gonna be the last intermittent fasting video that you have to watch before you have everything that you need to start a customized intermittent fasting diet plan as early as today. As long as you simply follow along, you’ll learn guaranteed methods to start losing weight and burning fat with fasting protocols like 16/8 fasting, alternate day fasting, the 5:2 diet, the warrior diet, and even the one meal a day diet.

The best part is that I’m gonna give you guys this complete step-by-step guide for free and I’m not gonna hold anything back. Because if I can help you start losing weight with intermittent fasting today, you’re probably gonna subscribe to this channel and tell all your friends. So with no further ado, let’s get started.

Understanding Intermittent Fasting

First, you should know that intermittent fasting isn’t as much of an eating plan as it is an eating pattern. This means that there is no approved and unapproved food list, no specific calorie recommendations, and no macronutrient targets. Instead, you would take the intermittent fasting eating pattern and apply it to any kind of diet plan that you like the best, whether that be paleo, keto, Atkins, vegan, vegetarian, carb cycling, or an old-school bodybuilding 40-40-20 split.

The point of intermittent fasting is to make all of these eating plans fit into your life in an eating pattern that happens to be convenient for you. And don’t worry if you’re a little confused right now; by the end of this video, you’ll know exactly which eating plan and which eating pattern is best for you.

Benefits of Intermittent Fasting

Besides convenience, a couple other Benefits of Intermittent Fasting include improved insulin sensitivity, which will help with fat loss, increased levels of muscle-building human growth hormone, and enhanced repair processes for old and damaged cells through something known as autophagy. Increased productivity, more mental clarity, and of course, weight loss.

The Eating Window

Out of all the different intermittent fasting protocols, they all have one thing in common: there’s a portion of the day that’s spent fasting where you don’t eat anything at all, and there’s also another portion of the day where you’re allowed to eat, which is known as The Eating Window.

Choosing the Right Intermittent Fasting Plan

When first Choosing the Right Intermittent Fasting Plan, you want to consider two major things: which one will fit your lifestyle and preferences the best, and which one you’re currently ready for. Because you’ll definitely want to ease your way into tougher fasting protocols with time and practice. That means that if you’ve never fasted before, you don’t want to start by planning a fast for three days in a row because you’ll find it almost impossible to manage hunger.

You see, the hunger that you currently feel at the moments of the day where all you can think about is food isn’t necessarily caused by a physical need to eat. Instead, a lot of the hunger that you feel comes from conditioned hunger responses that are created after years of practicing a certain eating pattern until it becomes a habit. Once established, these eating habits aren’t just reinforced by your mind, but they’re reinforced by your whole body down to a microscopic level.

Starting with the 16-8 Method

For example, your stomach will release a hunger hormone known as ghrelin during the times of the day that you’re normally used to eating. This means that if you eat breakfast every day for a year straight, but then one day you wake up too late and have to skip breakfast, then you’re very likely to feel very hungry. However, if you skip breakfast again and again for the next few days and weeks, you’ll adapt to the new eating pattern and the hunger will gradually diminish.

The most common starting point for beginners is known as the 16-8 method, and I want to start with that before we move on to tougher fasting protocols. With 16-8, you would fast for 16 hours of the day and then you would eat within an eight-hour eating window. To accomplish this, most people will simply skip breakfast and just eat lunch and dinner, but you can choose to break your fast earlier and skip dinner instead of breakfast. You also aren’t limited to just two meals per day; you can technically have as many meals as you want as long as they all fall within that eight-hour portion of the day that you’re allowed to eat.

Tracking Your Calories and Macros

For but to keep things simple, let’s pretend that you decide to start your eating window at one o’clock and end it eight hours later at nine o’clock. This would mean that you wouldn’t be able to eat anything between 9 o’clock at night and one o’clock the next day, and since you’re restricting the amount of time per day that you’re allowed to eat, you’ll most likely be eating less automatically. However, it doesn’t always work out that way and even if you do start losing body fat by simply skipping breakfast, without a systematic step-by-step process, you’ll be completely stuck once you stop losing weight, hit your first plateau, and the results start slowing down.

So when first starting out, I highly recommend that you calculate exactly how many calories and macros you’ll need to aim for every day to burn fat, and the easiest way to do that is by using my free fat loss calculator that I have linked up below in the description. After you input your stats like your height and your weight, your macro results will load. Once they load, you can stick to the recommended plan or you could choose another dieting style. For example, some of you may want more carbs in your diet, so you might go with the higher carb dieting option. Others may want more fat rather than carbs, so they can choose the ketogenic option.

No matter which plan you choose, all of them will work fine with intermittent fasting, and you’ll be able to spread those calories and those macros out between your meals in a way that actually suits your lifestyle and your preferences. So let’s say that you love eating at night. You can have 30 percent of your daily calories and macros for your first meal at 1 o’clock and save the other 70 percent for a large, satisfying dinner around 8 o’clock. You can also do the reverse: 70 percent for your first meal and then 30 percent for your last, or you could do 50/50, where you can have three meals and do 20-20-60.

Flexible Eating Windows

And remember, if you want to eat past 9 o’clock, if you’re a really late-night eater, you can set up your eating window to start later on in the day, let’s say at 4 o’clock, and that would allow you to continue eating all the way until midnight. With intermittent fasting, you really do have a lot of options. But regardless of how you set up your plan, after you’ve picked the plan that you like, you should monitor the amount of calories and macros that you’re eating for the first few days or at least until you get a general idea of exactly how much food you should be eating per day. Because you can still very easily overeat within an eight-hour time limit.

Preventing Overeating

To prevent overeating, I recommend filling your diet with a lot of green vegetables, high-quality sources of protein, healthy sources of fat, and high-fiber carbohydrates. All of these will fill you up and keep you full for longer. In general, you want to be eating whole, natural, single-ingredient foods the majority of the time, but you can also incorporate some junk food into your diet without sacrificing results. And you would do that by filling in the gaps in your macros after you’ve already eaten the healthy foods that you’re supposed to eat.

So let’s say that you’re on your last meal and you already ate a bunch of vegetables and protein as well as some healthy fats and carbohydrates, but you still have 45 grams of carbs and 10 grams of fat left over for the day. Rather than having a serving of brown rice with some butter, you can have 4 or 5 Oreos instead. Just keep in mind that you should only reach for the snacks and sweets after you’ve already filled your stomach up with the healthy food because most junk food is very dense in calories but not very filling.

Tracking Your Macros Initially

Again, I recommend tracking your macros like this in the beginning, but this is definitely not something that you’ll be doing forever. As soon as you have a good idea of how much total food you’re allowed to eat for the day, you can switch over to a more intuitive approach.

Managing Hunger

Now, Managing Hunger during your 16-hour fast is a little trickier because you obviously won’t be able to eat any food, but there are things you can do to really help. First of all, I already said as long as you’re eating filling, natural foods during your last meal before you start your fast, it’ll be a lot easier to control your appetite once you’re fasting. Black coffee can be really effective at helping some people reduce their hunger throughout the day, and it’s really not the end of the world if you add a little bit of cream to your coffee. Drinking a lot of water throughout the day will help as well, and you can also drink things like green tea and lemon water.

If after all of that you still feel like you can’t make it through your fast, you can try having a teaspoon of psyllium husk powder in the middle of your fast because it has almost no calories in it but it’s very high in fiber. This is a useful trick to use until you’re ready to transition to fasting with no calories at all. Taking baby steps like this can help you stick to your fasting plan for the long run.

Advanced Fasting Protocols

Now, once you feel like you’ve mastered the 16-8 fasting protocol, you could stick with it or you can move on to a tougher one like the warrior diet, which is a 20-4 split, meaning you would fast for 20 hours per day and only allow yourself to eat for 4 hours. Within a 4-hour time limit, you’ll probably only be able to get a maximum of 2 meals or just one meal and a snack, but you’ll feel like you’re able to eat a lot more freely because it’s a lot less likely that you’ll overeat within 4 hours as opposed to 8 hours.

It’s still possible; hot dog eating champions eat close to 20,000 calories in 10 minutes, but logically speaking, if you’re cramming your whole day’s worth of calories into just 4 hours, you’ll be a lot more likely to feel way too stuffed before you can overeat. Just like with 16-8, the same rules apply: you can position your four-hour eating window in the morning, at night, or in the middle of the day. You can also once again divide your macros and calories how you want between your meals, having more in the beginning of your eating window or more towards the end. It’s entirely up to you.

The One Meal A Day Diet (OMAD)

But after mastering the warrior diet, you can try to move on to the next protocol, which is OMAD or one meal a day. This is technically supposed to be a 23-1 split where you only have an hour per day to eat your meal, but some people do 22-2 and even 21-3. Again, with this plan, it becomes even easier not to overeat even if you’re eating freely. You have a lot more room for high-calorie foods and for one giant, very filling meal.

With OMAD, when you finally can eat, it’s especially important to start with a high-quality source of protein, a lot of vegetables, and healthy sources of carbs and fats, because after fasting for almost the whole day, you’re gonna want to eat anything you can get your hands on. Like I said, we don’t want this to turn into a hot dog eating contest. After you eat a truly filling, healthy meal, you could then move on to eating freely until you’re full.

Muscle Loss Concerns

Now, I know a very common question that I’m sure a lot of you have right now is about muscle loss. Won’t fasting for 23 hours cause your body to start burning its own muscle and put you into a starvation mode? Well, I wouldn’t recommend the one meal a day diet or even the warrior diet for those of you that are primarily focused on gaining muscle mass since it’s gonna be so hard to take in enough calories in just one meal to stay in a caloric surplus. But it turns out that even though it’ll be very tough to gain muscle, you won’t be losing it, and you also won’t be entering into any more of a starvation mode than you would with any other diet that put you into a similar caloric deficit, whether that deficit was spread out between five meals or just one.

According to studies, protein breakdown rates drop when you’re fasting and human growth hormone goes up, which helps preserve muscle loss. Also, your body evolved long before we had things like agriculture and refrigerators. Your body is fully capable of going without food for at least 3 days before you see any negative effects on muscle, and after those three days, protein breakdown rates decrease even more. The bottom line is that you don’t have to worry about muscle loss unless you’re doing a really long fast.

Alternate Day Fasting and the 5:2 Diet

And before you even try something like a three-day fast, you should try the last two fasting protocols that I want to go over with you right now: alternate day fasting or the 5:2 diet. These are actually very similar fasting plans because they both involve going 24 full hours without food on certain days and then eating freely on other days. With alternate day fasting, you would have as close to zero calories one day, then you would eat freely the next day, and you would just switch back and forth. Since you’re skipping a whole day of eating every other day, you don’t really have to track your calories because it’s unlikely that you’ll eat two days’ worth of food in just one day. However, it’s not impossible, so you do want to keep an eye on your results and make changes to the amount you’re eating if you’re not losing weight or if you’re losing weight too fast.

With the 5:2 diet, you would spend two days per week fasting and five days eating freely. The two days don’t have to be consecutive back-to-back days, but they can be. With both of these fasting protocols, you have some people choose to still eat around 500 calories on their fasting days to help hold them over, but I recommend that if you feel like you need those 500 calories, you might be better off sticking with a shorter fasting protocol like 16-8.

Exercise and Breaking Your Fast

The last two things that I want to talk about today are when you should exercise when fasting and how you should break your fast. Let’s start with breaking the fast because I really think that some people are overcomplicating it. All of the fasting protocols that I mentioned today don’t last long enough for you to obsess over exactly what to eat first, second, and third when you can start eating again. You only have to ease back into eating food when you do a fast that lasts longer than three days because your digestive system will need some warming up. If you fast for three days or longer, then you can start incorporating the bone broths and the apple cider vinegar and things like that. But like I said, for all the fasting plans that I talked about today, your number one priority when ending your fast should be to start with a meal high in protein and vegetables to prevent overeating. Other than that, don’t stress yourself out.

Now, in regard to fasted training, as of right now, there are some studies that support the theory that you could burn more fat by exercising in a fasted state, and there are other studies that show that fat loss will level out by the end of the day whether you train fasted or not. I really like to train while fasted because I feel less tired without having to digest a pre-workout meal, and I tend to get a better workout on an empty stomach. I know that for other people, it’s the exact opposite effect. Regardless, even if you do burn a little more fat by exercising on an empty stomach, I really don’t think it’ll make that much of a huge, huge difference, so position your workout at a time that’s most convenient and works best for you. This may take some time and trial and error.

Conclusion

That’s it, guys. I really hope this video has helped you out. If you enjoyed it, make sure you subscribe to my channel and hit that bell icon so you can be notified whenever I release more future tips and tricks and videos just like this. Also, if you’re looking for a done-for-you fasting plan that’ll help you burn fat fast in an extremely simplified way in which you don’t even have to track your calories, check out my 6-week challenge. The challenge comes with a custom diet plan that includes a ton of intermittent fasting protocols, including a one meal a day option. On average, people that take part in the challenge are losing either 20 pounds or 5% of their body fat in only 42 days. Not only will you get a customized diet plan, but you’ll also get a 42-day workout plan, a full video exercise library, a recipe book, and an accountability coach that will mentor and guide you through the whole process, as well as much, much more. The best part is as long as you don’t cheat and as long as you don’t quit on us for the six weeks, not only will you have a transformed body at the end of it, but you’ll also get the entire challenge for free. To find out more, click the link below or visit the website directly at gravitytransformation.com. I’ll see you guys soon.

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