What I Learned from 20 Years of Intermittent Fasting

My experience with intermittent fasting started in the late 1990’s, when I got into the habit of going to the gym first thing in the morning before eating anything.

I’d been reading Body-for-LIFE by Bill Phillips, and fasted cardio was one of the things he recommended.

The idea was to skip breakfast, train in a fasted state, then leave an hour after your workout before eating anything. So I’d go to the gym on the way to work, train and then eat something when I got to the office.

But then I quit my job and started my own business working from home. I’d fire up the computer as soon as I got out of bed, work for an hour or two and then go to the gym.

The main reason I did this was to avoid the rush hour traffic. But there was another benefit I wasn’t expecting.

The morning hours were highly productive for me. I found it so much easier to get into that “flow state” where you’re lost in what you’re doing and time seems to pass a lot faster than normal. As a result, I was able to get a lot more work done.

And this doesn’t seem to be all that uncommon. Plenty of people report feeling more focused and getting more work done during the first few hours of the morning, when they’re deep into a fast.

It seemed like a waste to spend my most productive hours of the day in the gym, or even to sit down and eat breakfast.

Gradually, the amount of time I spent working got longer and longer. I ended up going to the gym at around 11am, which would push my “breakfast” back to between 12 and 1pm.

Having used intermittent fasting for the best part of 20 years, here’s what I think about it.

Intermittent Fasting: A Simple Way to Create a Calorie Deficit

Intermittent fasting is a very simple way to create the calorie deficit you need to lose fat.

You just don’t eat breakfast, and then go about the rest of your day. That simplicity gives it a big advantage over most other diets.

The calories that you normally have in the morning are eliminated from the diet. This means that your calorie budget is distributed across fewer meals. As a result, those meals can be larger and more “normal” than your typical diet fare.

Most people are busy during the day, and tend to eat more in the evening. Almost every social event happens in the evening. That’s why it’s a good idea to allocate a significant portion of your daily calorie budget to the evening.

It’s also why diets that tell you not to eat anything after a certain time of day, be it 6pm, 7pm or whenever, don’t tend to work very well – they just don’t fit the lifestyle that most people have.

Because your feeding window is smaller than it otherwise would be, you also end up eating less often.

Back in the day when I worked at a gym, the early shift used to start at 6.30am. If I’d done the late shift the night before, this often meant getting by on just 4-5 hours of sleep, which isn’t enough for me.

But I still used to sacrifice 30-45 minutes of precious sleep time and get up earlier than I needed to. That was so I had time to make food to eat during the day. At the time, I believed (wrongly as it turns out) that I wouldn’t be able to build muscle if I went more than a few hours without eating anything.

The fact that IF lends itself to a lower meal frequency has a big advantage in the “time spent preparing and eating food” department. And I certainly don’t miss the smell of tinned tuna at five in the morning.

IF sits well with the current body of evidence on diet and weight loss.

We’ve known for a while that eating six versus three meals a day has no benefits as far as fat loss is concerned. We also know that IF performs just as well as continuous calorie restriction when it comes to preserving muscle while dropping fat. And that breakfast doesn’t affect your ability to lose weight whether you eat it or skip it.

You’d think that 16 hour fasts would give you less energy. For me, the opposite is true.

As I mentioned earlier, my most productive time of day is the first few hours in the morning, especially with some caffeine inside me. Skipping breakfast doesn’t hinder my ability to get stuff done. In fact, I usually get a lot more done in the morning than I do in the afternoon after I’ve had something to eat.

When I started training first thing in the morning on an empty stomach I was worried that my performance in the gym would take a hit. Which it did at first. But after a few weeks of getting used to it, things got back to normal.

I’m not saying that intermittent fasting improved my strength. But it certainly didn’t make it worse.

SEE ALSO: Fasted Weight Training: The 6 Questions Everyone’s Asking Google

Intermittent Fasting: What I Don’t Like

Those are the things about intermittent fasting that I like. There are also some things I don’t like.

IF started out as an effective way to free yourself from the various “rules” associated with dieting – eating six small meals a day, avoiding large meals at night, not skipping breakfast – most of which were largely pointless as far as weight loss is concerned.

However, the same thing is now happening in reverse, with some IF proponents preaching an equally pointless set of rules about what and when you’re supposed to eat.

Google around for information about intermittent fasting results, and you’ll also see a lot of nonsense from “biohackers” getting excited about how fasting raises growth hormone levels by 2000%, as if this is somehow of critical importance when it comes to improving your body composition (it isn’t).

Like any diet, intermittent fasting has the potential to go wrong. Some people eat so much during the “feeding window” that they end up in a calorie surplus rather than the deficit required to lose weight.

I’ve also heard of guys cramming the vast majority of their food intake for the day – sometimes in excess of 6000 calories – into a single evening meal.

IF normally goes hand in hand with a more “flexible” approach to dieting. But that doesn’t change the fact that a calorie deficit is still required if you want to lose fat.

Nor does it mean that you can ignore the macronutrient composition of your diet and expect your results to be all that they could be, and you’ll still need to pay attention to the quality of your diet.

Intermittent Fasting and Muscle Growth

One of the other potential downsides with the 16:8 method is the low protein frequency.

There’s a growing body of research to suggest that distributing protein intake evenly throughout the day does a better job at increasing muscle protein synthesis – a key driving force behind muscle growth – compared to the same amount of protein squeezed into a smaller number of larger meals.

In other words, meal frequency might not have much of an impact on your rate of weight loss. But protein frequency may very well affect your ability to gain (or retain) muscle while you drop fat (a subject I cover in some depth in this ebook).

That’s why I use a slightly “tweaked” version of the 16:8 diet, which involves additional protein-only feedings in the fasted window.

That said, the optimal protein feeding frequency for you will depend on your daily protein requirements, which in turn is affected by how much muscle you have, how much training you’re doing, how long you’ve been training with weights and how close you are to your maximum muscular potential.

There is no “one size fits all” prescription that will apply to all people, all the time, and the optimal protein frequency for a male bodybuilder training 4-5 days a week will differ from that of an inactive female half his size.

There may be some health benefits associated with intermittent fasting, which Bojan Kostevski has summarized here. But any superior metabolic effects compared to conventional meal patterns are based more on speculation than any hard evidence.

Many proponents of intermittent fasting claim that it “switches on” a process known as autophagy, one of the hot buzzwords of the day.

The basic idea is that cells clear out and recycle their damaged bits, in order to build new and healthy versions. This regular cellular “housekeeping” is thought to be essential for keeping you healthy.

However, autophagy occurs with any kind of calorie restriction, not just intermittent fasting.

Final Thoughts

Overall, my results with intermittent fasting have been extremely positive. That said, I don’t think there’s any magic about it. It’s just a simple way to stay within your calorie budget for the day.

The research out there shows that intermittent fasting doesn’t perform any better (or any worse) than continuous calorie restriction when it comes to weight loss.

The main benefit is convenience and simplicity, rather than any massive difference in terms of results.