Intermittent fasting is becoming more popular and there is a lot of information out there on the topic but what I intend to do today is really simplify all of this information for you into one easy-to-follow guide. And what I would really like for you to get out of this video would be the principles behind why intermittent fasting works so you can apply it to your diet in a flexible way. So what is intermittent fasting? It’s a way of structuring your eating plan in which you spend a portion of time not eating anything at all and then that’s followed by a portion of time in which you can eat quite a bit more than usual. There are a bunch of popular ways to set up your feeding and fasting Windows. For example, the lean gains otherwise known as the 16/8 method is one of the most popular approaches. Here you would spend 16 hours of the day fasting and then you would use the other eight hours of the day as you’re feeding window. In this method, it’s usually popular to just skip breakfast and curb your appetite with some coffee and sparkling water. Then there’s another one called The Warrior Diet. Here it’s recommended to have an 18 to 20 hour fast and then a four to six hour feeding period. Another method is the alternate day fast. Here you would fast for one day and then eat more of what you wanted the next day. And the last one that I want to mention in this video is the 5-2 diet which is a form of intermittent fasting in which you spend two days at a very low deficit like under 25% of maintenance and then 5 days of eating normally.

Now the crazy thing is, that even though these methods are pretty different from each other they can all work. So what does this tell us about intermittent fasting? Does this tell us that we can eat whatever we want during our feeding windows and still burn fat just because we fasted? Not exactly. The reason why all of these different intermittent fasting plans work is that by having a period of time in which you don’t allow yourself to eat very many calories you are likely creating a calorie deficit. In case you don’t know what that means a calorie deficit is when you take in fewer calories then your body needs to maintain its daily functions. This lack of energy causes your body to pull energy from your fat stores to make up for what it’s not getting from your diet. It’s literally that simple. Combine this with the fact that when you eat all your food in one to two meals you can only eat so much before you start to feel full and that will create even better conditions for an overall caloric deficit. Now the reason why this doesn’t mean that you could eat whatever you want to whatever excess you want is because if you eat so much that you take away that caloric deficit then you won’t lose weight. In fact, if during your feeding period you eat so much that you put yourself into a state of a caloric Surplus then you may even put on fat on an intermittent fasting plan. This is the thing that is often times misunderstood and neglected by many people that start an intermittent fasting protocol. What intermittent fasting does do for you is by limiting your eating only to a smaller period of the day you save calories and have more room 4 more of those calories to be consumed at once. If for example, you’re only eating two meals in the day you’re going to be able to eat a lot more calories during those two meals. Which gives you more room to eat higher calorie foods like junk food for example. Pretty much a good way to sum up most intermittent fasting protocols is to eat larger meals less frequently. Now that’s not taking anything away from the effectiveness of these plans. I just want you guys to understand the bottom line behind why they work. Because if you can understand that then you don’t need to be bound to any kind of one diet, not even intermittent fasting. Your diet can be more adaptive based on your life and it could work for you rather than something that you have to obsess over. The whole point of intermittent fasting is for us to see that obsessing over meal frequency and losing muscle mass and about our diet, in general, is unnecessary to have success. However, you see a lot of people doing intermittent fasting obsessing

Check out my client Bryan’s transformation where he lost a whole bunch of fat.