Intermittent Fasting For Fat Loss (FULL PLAN)

Check out Penny’s transformation where she lost a whole load of fat!

This is a full intermittent fasting plan for fat loss.

If you’re wondering how to do an intermittent fasting diet plan then this article will help you set one up for FREE. It’s great for both beginners and advanced.

Learn how to free up your schedule while getting all of the benefits of fasting.

As long as you 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.

So without further ado, let’s get started.

Things to Know Before You Get Started

Number 1: It’s Convenient

First, you should know that intermittent fasting isn’t as much of an eating plan as an eating pattern.

This means there’s no approved and unapproved food list, no specific calorie recommendations, and no macronutrient targets.

Instead, you take the intermittent fasting eating pattern and apply it to any kind of diet plan that you like best. This could 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 convenient for you. And don’t worry if you’re a little confused right now.

Number 2: There’s Benefits

So besides convenience, a couple other benefits of intermittent fasting include:

• Improved insulin sensitivity [1]
• Increased levels of the muscle-building human growth hormone [2]
• An enhanced repair process for old and damaged cells through something known as autophagy
• Increased productivity
• More mental clarity, and
• Weight loss [3]

Number 3: Fasting Protocols Have One Thing in Common- “Eating Windows”

Out of all the different intermittent fasting protocols, they all have one thing in common.

There’s a portion of the day spent fasting where you don’t eat anything at all, and there’s another portion of the day where you’re allowed to eat.

This is known as the “eating window.”

Choosing the Right Fasting Plan

When first choosing the right intermittent fasting plan, you want to consider 2 main things:

• Which one will fit your lifestyle and preferences the best?
• Which one are you currently ready for?

You’ll definitely want to ease your way into more challenging fasting protocols with time and practice.

Ease Your Way in Slowly

If you’ve never fasted before, you don’t want to start by planning to fast 3 days in a row because you’ll find it almost impossible to manage hunger.

The hunger that you 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.

Much of the hunger you feel comes from conditioned hunger responses. These come as a result of habitual eating patterns that you’ve created.

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.

For example, your stomach releases a hunger hormone known as ghrelin during the times of the day that you’re typically used to eating.

So 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 repeatedly for the next few days and weeks, you’ll adapt to the new eating pattern. And the hunger will gradually diminish.

Which Intermittent Fasting Plan Is Right For Me?

The most common starting point for beginners is the 16/8 method. I want to start with that before we move on to stricter fasting protocols.

16/8 Intermittent Fasting

With 16/8, you fast for 16 hours of the day and then eat your meals within the other 8 hours.

To accomplish this, most people skip breakfast and 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 2 meals per day. You can technically have as many meals as you want as long as they fall within the 8-hour portion of the day that you’re allowed to eat for.

But to keep things simple, let’s pretend that you decide to start your eating window at 1 o clock and end it at 9 o clock.

This means you wouldn’t be able to eat anything between 9 that night and 1 o clock the next day.

And since you’re restricting the amount of time per day that you’re allowed to eat for, you’ll most likely be eating less automatically.

However, it doesn’t always work out that way.

Even if you do start losing body fat by entirely skipping breakfast, without a systematic step by step process, you’ll be stuck entirely once you stop losing weight. Then you’ll hit your first plateau, and the results start slowing down.

Tips for 16/8 Fasting

Number 1: Track Your Calories & Macros

When first starting out, I highly recommend that you calculate how many calories and macros you’ll need to aim for every day to burn fat.

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 sizeable, satisfying dinner around 8 o clock.

You can also do the reverse, so 70 percent for your first meal and 30 for your last. Or you can do 50 / 50, or you can have 3 meals and do 20/20/60.

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.

For example, you could set it up to start at 4 o clock. This allows you to continue eating all the way until midnight.

With intermittent fasting, you have a lot of options.

Still, you should monitor the number of calories and macros that you’re consuming for the first few days, or at least until you get a general idea of how much food you should be eating per day. This prevents you from overeating.

Number 2: Eat Foods That Fills You For Longer

To prevent overeating, I recommend filling your diet with many green vegetables, high-quality protein sources, 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.

Still, 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 already ate the healthy foods.

Let’s say you’re on your last meal and you already ate a bunch of vegetables and protein, as well as some healthy fats and carbs, but you still have 45 grams of carbs and 10 grams of fat leftover for the day.

Rather than having a serving of brown rice with some butter, you can have 4 or 5 Oreos instead.

Number 3: Junk Food AFTER Healthy Food

Keep in mind that you should only reach for the snacks and sweets after you’ve already filled up on healthy foods. Why? Well, because most junk food is very dense in calories but not very filling.

Again I recommend tracking your macros like this initially, but this is definitely not something you’ll be doing forever.

As soon as you have a good idea of how much real food you’re allowed to eat for the day, you can switch over to a more intuitive approach.

Some Tips on Managing Hunger

To manage hunger during your 16 hour fast, you obviously won’t be able to eat any food. But there are things you can do to really help.

Number 1: Try Drinking Black Coffee

First of all, as long as you’re eating filling natural foods during your last meal before your fast, it’ll be a lot easier to control your appetite once your 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.

Number 2: Drink Plenty of Water

Drinking a lot of water throughout the day will help as well. 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. 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.

The Warrior Fasting Plan

Once you feel like you’ve mastered the 16/8 fasting protocol, you can stick with it or move on to a tougher one like the warrior diet, which is a 20/4 split.

So you fast for 20 hours a day and only allow yourself to eat for 4 hours now.

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 4-hour eating window in the morning, at night, or in the middle of the day.

You can also divide your macros and calories how you want between your meals; having more at the beginning of your eating window or more towards the end, it is entirely up to you.

The Omad Plan

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.

When you finally can eat, it’s crucial to start with a high-quality source of protein, lots of vegetables, and healthy sources of carbs and fats.

This is because after fasting for almost the whole day, you’re going to want to eat anything you can get your hands on.

Like I said, we don’t want to turn this into a hot dog eating contest.

After you eat a genuinely filling healthy meal, you can then move on to eating freely until you’re full.

FAQ: Will I Enter Starvation Mode?

I know a very common question that I’m sure many 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 starvation mode?

Well, I wouldn’t recommend the one meal a day diet or even the warrior diet for those primarily focused on gaining muscle mass.

You’ll find it challenging to consume enough calories in just one meal to stay in a calorie surplus.

Still, 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 puts you into a similar caloric deficit, whether that deficit was spread between 5 meals or 1.

According to studies, protein breakdown rates drop when your fasting and human growth hormone goes up, preventing muscle loss [5].

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 we see any adverse effects on muscles.

And after those 3 days, protein breakdown rates decrease even more.

The bottom line is that you don’t have to worry about muscle loss unless you’re going for a really long fast.

Alternate Day Fasting & The 5:2 Diet

And before you even try something like a 3 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 involve going 24 full hours without food on certain days and then eating freely on other days.

Alternate Day Fasting

With alternate day fasting, you have as close to 0 calories one day, then you would eat the next day freely, and 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’ll 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.

The 5:2 Diet

With the 5:2 diet, you spend 2 days per week fasting and 5 days eating freely.

The 2 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 more than 500 calories, you might be better off sticking with a shorter fasting protocol like 16/8.

Exercising During Fasts & Breaking Your Fast

 

The last two things that I want to talk about is when you should exercise when fasting and how you should break your fast.

Breaking 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’ve mentioned don’t last long enough for you to obsess over precisely what to eat first, second and third when you can start eating again.

You only have to “ease” back into eating food when you complete a fast that lasts longer than 3 days because your digestive system will need some warming up.

If you fast for 3 days or longer, then you can start incorporating the bone broths and the apple cider vinegar and things like that.

Still, like I said for all the fasting plans, 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.

Exercising During Fasting

Regarding fasted training, some studies support the theory that you can burn more fat by exercising in a fasted state, and other studies show that fat loss will level out by the end of the day, whether you trained fasted or not [4].

I really like to train while fasting because I feel less tired without digesting 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 some 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.

That’s it guys, I really hope this has helped you out.

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Before you go…

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References

[1] Fasting improves insulin sensitivity:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20921964/
[2] Growth Hormone peaks at a 1250% increase with prolonged fasting:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/6758355/

[3] Systematic review: Intermittent fasting just as effective as other diets for fat loss:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26384657/
[4] Protein breakdown drops to 70g/24h when fasting and after fasting for 3-4 days drops further to only about 20g/24h:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2279566/
[5] Fed vs Fasted Training:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22248495/

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