Intermittent Fasting | 5:2 Diet | Warrior Diet | Leangains 16:8 Diet

Intermittent fasting is a diet that many people claim can become a sustainable way of eating to stay in shape for life.

Check out my client Jason’s transformation where he put on a whole bunch of muscle.

Intermittent fasting is a diet that many people claim can become a sustainable way of eating to stay in shape for life.

So let’s start by taking a closer look. It’s a diet that cycles between a period of fasting and feeding.

These cycles will vary depending on what type of intermittent fasting you choose to go with.

There are so many options for fasting, so I’m just going to go over the popular ones. 

Alternate Day Fasting or ADF is the first type of fasting that we will talk about. ADF involves a 24-hour fast followed by a 24-hour non-fasting period.

Another type of fasting is called the lean gains method. The lean gains method also known as the 16/8 method

as implied by the name involves a 16 hour period of fasting and an 8 hour period of not fasting.

Many people that follow the diet recommend that you skip breakfast and then eat your first meal sometime around 1 pm and you’re second within the 8-hour window.

However, this diet is claims to be just as effective no matter how you set up your 16/8 split.

So you can start eating at 6 am or 10 pm, it doesn’t matter as long as you’re done fasting 8 hours later.

Another type of diet within intermittent fasting is known as the 5:2 diet. It requires that you only eat 500-600 calories on two non-consecutive days of the week and then eat normally the other 5 days.

The warrior’s diet is another variation in which you do a 20 hour fast and 4-hour feeding. This basically works out to a long fast and one giant meal at the end of the day.

Out of these variations, the 16/8 or lean gains method is regarded as the most sustainable, easiest to stick to,

and by far the most popular. It is recommended that you pick whatever time feeding and fasting times you want,

but you should also stick to them consistently. This way your hormones can adjust to your new pattern of eating.

Intermittent fasting clearly expresses that fasting is very important, but you may be wondering why? What exactly does fasting do for our bodies?

Well, certain studies suggest when you fast, human growth hormone levels go up and insulin levels go down.

When insulin levels are down your body has direct access to fat stores so it will burn significantly more fat.

Also when growth hormone is up you will also burn more fat and build more muscle.

Okay so now that I’ve given you all the nuts, bolts, and benefits of intermittent fasting let me tell you all of my thoughts on this diet.

When diet’s suck I’m the first to say they suck, but to be honest intermittent fasting follows many principles that I agree with.

First of all, It’s simple, which I love. If you watch my videos you know that I like simple.

One of the major reasons people don’t change their bodies is because they get stuck in analysis paralysis.

It’s also known as information overload, or just thinking that you don’t have enough information to get started right now.

And the only time you can really change your body is right now. The 16-8 method makes it easy to start the plan.

It also doesn’t require a lot of meal prep and it can fit into anyone’s schedule because you can pick which hours you eat.

You don’t have to eat 6 meals a day so you don’t have to sneak food in your mouth while your boss isn’t looking. Convenience is another big plus in my book.

Fasting has proven again and again to have amazing benefits for your digestive health, recovery, and body composition.

Working out in a fasted state as I suggest in many of my videos helps you burn way more fat than working out after being fed.

Personally, whether I’m doing weight training or cardio I’m almost always working out on an empty stomach.

This diet also advocates these empty stomach workouts. 

Problems:

My biggest problem with this diet is that there are people saying stupid things like calories in/ calories out don’t matter on this diet.

This is an incredibly stupid and naive statement to make. When the only reason why this plan generally works is because of calories in and calories out.

On this plan, you can only eat during certain times of the day which makes it harder to get more calories in.

Even though fasting has many hormonal benefits that allow you to burn fat and many other benefits all these benefits just supplement the likely calorie deficit.

Intermittent Fasting works mostly attributed to the fact that it’s tough to get as many calories in an 8-hour window. 

Another problem is that when you first start you may be extremely hungry during your fast.

However, if you brave through it your body should be able to adapt and it will become easier.

Women have reported to not have the same benefits from intermittent fasting as men,

and also there have been studies in rats that have shown that intermittent fasting can make female rats emaciated, masculinized, infertile and cause them to miss menstrual cycles

I haven’t found anything in regard to what kind of food you should eat while on this plan. In fact, a couple of leaders that push intermittent fasting suggest that

you can eat anything you want and you’ll get results as long as you stick to your fast/feed schedule.

This is true to a degree. Yes, you can lose weight from eating junk food as long as the calories are lower than what you need to sustain your weight.

However eating this kind of food leads to nutrient deficiencies, poor health, messed up hormones, clogged arteries, and damage to your body over the long haul.

Having a good recommendation for healthy options to eat during your feeding would really improve this diet’s effectiveness.

A huge negative to this plan is that if you have a small feeding window like the 16-8 method or anything less it makes it almost impossible to get enough calories for a bulk.

With the number of calories that I would eat bulking if I tried to do that in 8 hours I would have food coming out of my ears.

This is a much better plan for weight loss than weight gain.

So with all of that said I think that this is one of the better diets that I have researched.

If you’re the type of person that doesn’t mind skipping breakfast and would like to be focused on other things than grazing on snacks all day,

then you may want to give this plan a shot. As with many other diets, it is possible to lose weight on this plan.