#i mean you can see how he avoided serious topics with tony and preferred to joke around

[hearts401]

i need ia duo name for ellis and evan bc. i wanna do more with them. they r my favorite boys......

[a-n-conrad]

Painting (Steve Rogers x Reader)

[Summary: You decide to paint your friend, Steve Rogers, realizing that no one had ever painted him without his uniform. However, things start to get heated after you start to daydream during your painting session. (She/Her pronouns)

Warnings: SMUT (18+, but with emotions), Not Canon Compliant (Because fuck you, Marvel.), Swearing, unprotected vaginal sex

Request: From my request survey (https://forms.gle/D9rsJtkERoBPaKvv8)]

You and Steve Rogers were widely considered to be an unlikely pair. There were a lot of things that you didn’t exactly agree on. Steve was a lot more social, being bold and outgoing. You were a bit quieter, preferring to avoid the company of a crowd. Steve was prone to waking up early to exercise. You stayed up into the quiet hours of the night, choosing instead to get a majority of your sleep in the morning. You weren’t exactly fond of Steve’s workout routines either, though you would join him on a short jog on occasion.

While you were technically considered an Avenger, you were really only brought out to fight for emergency circumstances. You had some incredibly powerful, incredibly volatile powers, but you really had no interest in using them unless it was completely needed. So you ended up making a few deals. You’d be treated like an Avenger, but you were basically benched unless some drastic, world-ending issue came up. So until then, you were kept on hold in Avengers Tower, spending most of your time painting in the studio that Tony had gotten set up for you.

Despite this power, and despite your title as an official Avenger, you were still a bit of an outsider among the team. You tended not to talk to them a lot, becoming a bit easily overwhelmed by the chaos that the team seemed to radiate. But surprisingly, you and Steve got along incredibly well.

You had originally bonded over your love of art. You loved Steve’s drawings. You admired the linework and shading in his drawings. He could do so much with just a pen, let alone if you gave him a few colors. He admired the amount of emotion you managed to instill into every single painting that you made. No matter what you painted, whether it was a portrait, a landscape, or something entirely different, it was always filled to the brim with the emotion that you had felt while painting it. It was like looking through a window into your soul. It was so honest and refreshing.

Eventually the two of you started to talk a bit more while you worked. It started pretty tame, just discussions of how your day was or general questions about each other like “What’s your favorite color”. But eventually you moved on to the harsher topics of your lives. Steve would talk about how exhausting it was to be the face of America, to be held on such a pedestal while also being expected to sacrifice everything at the drop of a hat. You talked about how cold and dehumanizing it felt to be seen by the American government as nothing more than a weapon, a walking nuclear bomb.

Your struggles overlapped at certain points. You both spent a lot of your time being used by the government. You were both seen as tools more than you were seen as people by a lot of the general public. You were a weapon and he was an idol, some sort of trophy. So you bonded a lot over your shared struggles as you talked to each other and worked on art side by side. And when the hard stuff got a bit too heavy, you’d sit and talk about art. About subjects that you just loved to add to all of your work. About what each shade of every color meant to you, about the emotions that you saw in every tiny color shift.

It was so nice, for both of you, to have something like that. The studio that you spent time in was so safe and peaceful for both of you, since the other Avengers tended to avoid it. And the two of you had started to see through each other’s masks enough to truly get to know each other. Steve couldn’t remember the last time someone had known him as Steve Rogers more than they had known him as Captain America. He had Bucky, but Bucky was far too busy with his own issues for Steve to even consider burdening him with anything else. But with you he could truly be himself, even if that meant getting angry, sad, or frustrated.

So the two of you had become incredibly close, despite your differences. And every day that you had some free time without any big meeting or mission, you would be in the studio helping each other with art. It was a good way for you to relieve stress, just relaxing with each other. It was one of those days that you came to a realization.

- - - - -

“Has anyone ever painted you?” You asked suddenly one day as the two of you sat side by side in the art studio. He looked a bit surprised, and then he looked confused.

“Of course. There are murals of me up all over the place, (Y/n).”

“No, there are murals of Captain America,” you responded, shaking your head, “They don’t really look that much like you. You really only look like that when you’re working as Captain America. So has anyone ever painted you? As Steve Rogers?”

He looked surprised again. And you could tell as the emotions cycled through his face that he didn’t really know how to respond. You supposed it was a bit of an odd question. And you knew that it was a bit odd to think of someone and their superhero persona as two different people, but Steve couldn’t disagree. He wasn’t Captain America all the time, and he loved that you understood that, “I suppose I’ve never really thought about it, but I guess not.”

You hummed a bit, “That’s a shame. It feels like a waste that everyone paints a costume. You should let me paint you sometime.”

You said it in a way that he wasn’t sure if you were serious. Your face was entirely serious when you said it, but you said it so casually, not even really looking at him, “Really?”

You finally looked up at him, noticing the pure confusion on his face, “Of course. I mean, you’d have to sit still for a while, but honestly, you could probably just sit and sketch for a while. You just seem too good of a subject to not be painted without the costume.”

Steve wasn’t really one to blush, but it was quite the compliment coming from you. He had women trying to hit on him all the time now, being Captain America, but that never really felt heartfelt. It had been a fairly long time since he had actually felt a real connection with someone. But to hear you compliment him, thinking of him as Steve Rogers instead of Captain America, made his heart flutter a bit. And the fact that he knew that you were rather picky about the subject you painted only made it more effective.

“I, uh, think that’d be cool,” He responded as soon as he was sure that he could trust his voice not to crack, though he couldn’t hide the slight stutter. It was honestly endearing how much his personality changed when he wasn’t working. While he was still headstrong and stubborn, he was a bit less confident. He knew he could win a fight. He knew that he looked good on television. But he didn’t really know how to interact with people in the new modern age. He was lucky to have the friends that he did. At least, that’s how he felt about it.

“Wonderful,” You hummed, starting to put away all of your supplies, “Why don’t we pack it up for the day and I can start painting you tomorrow if we aren’t too busy?”

“Yeah, sounds like a plan.”

- - - - -

The next day was surprisingly slow. You had to say that you were thankful. You had been looking forward to getting to paint Steve, even though you knew it was making him a little nervous. You were honestly excited to have a new project, and part of you was excited for the opportunity to stare at Steve for a bit without it being considered weird. He was easy to admire, both physically and on a personal level, so you found yourself staring more often than you’d like to admit. You were pretty sure that you had been lucky enough to avoid being caught though.

He was physically gorgeous. Obviously. But something about the way that he looked when he was drawing was nearly angelic. The way he furrowed his brows just a little and turned his paper at odd angles to make sure that the proportions of his sketches were right was adorable. The look in his eyes when his work started to come together made your heart melt. When he got a bit frustrated and would run a hand through his hair you could feel your heart skip a beat. You felt a bit dumb to be drooling over your friend, but you had to admit you were falling pretty hard for him. So you’d use this painting as an excuse to admire him without any questions.

He was already blushing a bit when he came into the studio, and you had a feeling that part of it was from Tony teasing him. He had a habit of giving the two of you a bit of a hard time about how much time you spent together. But the blush was still adorable. Something about Steve when he was nervous stole your heart. He was surprisingly soft when he had the space to be.

“So, uh, what’s the plan?” He asked as he strode over to your work station that you had already gotten set up.

“Just pull a chair up in front of me. You can get comfortable, start sketching, and I’ll get a base outline and block out as much as I can. Just let me know if you need a break and try not to change your pose too much. At least until I can get all of the base shapes right,” You instructed, trying to keep your voice even. You were surprised at how well you managed to hide the fact that you were completely lovesick.

“Alright, sounds good,” He responded, pulling up a chair and getting himself situated. He crossed one of his legs over the other, resting his ankle on his other thigh to give himself a place to set his sketchbook. You tossed him his pencil once he got himself settled, and then you got to work.

You had to admit you had started to get a bit frustrated with how easily you managed to get distracted by him while you were trying to paint. You had hoped that maybe painting him would help. You had no reason to get distracted from your painting when you were painting him. At least, that’s what you had thought before you started sketching out the form.

You felt yourself losing focus as your brush moved smoothly, the incredibly thin, light paint building a form that you found yourself wanting to know a bit more intimately. You tried your best to stay focused on the canvas in front of you, but you couldn’t stop your mind from drifting. You imagined what his body looked like under his clothes as you blocked out the lights and shadows of the fabric that rested over his abs. And the vivid image in your brain, the detailed picture of his body that you had conjured up in front of you, followed your brush as you worked.

The brush slid smoothly across the canvas, outlining his muscles, almost all of which showed through his thin t-shirt. Your brain almost instantly conjured up a matching image, the fantasy becoming more and more dynamic as you went on. It shifted from regular images of what his abs looked like when he was shirtless to more detailed images. Thoughts of his biceps flexing a bit as he held himself over you, his arms covered in sweat. Thoughts of his hands sliding across your skin. It only got worse as you moved down, eventually reaching the point between his legs.

“(Y/n)? Are you alright?” Steve’s voice finally broke you from your thoughts, his eyes which had been focused intently on his drawing when you had last looked were now trained on your face, scanning for any sign as to what was causing you to space out, “You don’t normally get distracted when you’re painting, is everything alright?”

“Oh,” You tried your best to pull yourself back to reality, though the fantasies seemed to be burned into your brain, “Yeah, sorry. I was, uh, spacing out a bit.”

“Do you want to take a break for a bit? Maybe we should get up and stretch,” He suggested. You nodded in response, hoping it would help you refocus on your painting.

It didn’t help much, though, as Steve stood, stretching his arms above his head. His shirt lifted up just enough to show some skin, and his pants were riding fairly low. Your eyes almost involuntarily moved to look at him, landing right about the button to the jeans that he was wearing. The muscles in his hips and stomach formed an almost perfect V shape leading into his pants.

“(Y/N)?” You had been caught staring. You tried your best to look casual, relaxing your posture. Your mistake was to try to lean on the table, setting your hand directing on your palette, which was covered in paints.

You froze, and Steve’s eyes landed on your hand, the red and blue paint gushing out from the sides. You felt like an awkward teenager, doing stupid ridiculous shit in front of your crush. You watched intently for a reaction from Steve, not really knowing what to do and hoping that the way that he reacted would give you something easy to respond to.

He raised one of his eyebrows at you, a look of confusion, with a small hint of amusement under the surface painted across his face, “You seem to have set your hand in your paint.”

“Uh, yes, it would seem so,” You responded awkwardly, finally lifting your hand out of the paint. You still really weren’t sure what to say, and not knowing where to put your hand so that you wouldn’t smear any paint anywhere wasn’t really making you feel any better. You cleared your throat a bit, trying to think of something smart to say, something that wouldn’t signal exactly how far gone you were into your fantasies, but instead you just signaled to Steve how flustered you were.

You knew that Steve had never been the biggest ladies’ man. From what he had told you, he was actually pretty awkward growing up, but the confidence that washed over him as he finally figured out what was getting you so flustered was visible. He walked closer to you, standing close enough to emphasize how tall he was, “Got something on your mind, sweetheart?”

“Oh, uh,” You stuttered, not sure what to say. You could tell that he knew from the smirk on his face, but you could feel your face heating up as you thought about explaining your fantasizing to Steve. He smirked even more as you got visibly flustered.

“It’s okay, honey, I don’t mind if you stare a little,” He said, standing a bit closer, his hand moving to hold your chin. You swallowed deeply as his fingers brushed against your skin softly. Your eyes locked with his as his hand tilted your chin up just a little.

As much as he was keeping up his confident, masculine persona, you could see the complete warmth in his eyes. He softened completely when you looked at him, pure admiration in your eyes. He had to admit it warmed his heart to see you looking at him like that, like he was your whole world. And maybe it was because he felt the same way. He had been falling in love with you slowly, and as he looked at you, he wanted to find every way possible to express it.

“Can I kiss you?” He whispered, his voice soft.

“Please.”

His lips were much softer than you thought they’d be, but you didn’t think about it too much as his lips moved against your own. It was soft at first, but it began to escalate quickly, getting rough and more passionate. His hands moved to your waist, pulling your body into his own, and your hands moved to his face, too focused on the kiss to notice the fact that you were smearing paint across his cheek.

He pulled back, allowing you to get a breath of air. That was when you noticed the red and blue streaks across his cheek, “Shit, sorry.”

“Don’t worry about,” He brushed it off, before pulling you into another kiss. He truly didn’t seem to care at all about the paint, choosing instead to focus on you.

This kiss started off much more passionate, building even further. Before long he pulled away again, pulling a groan from your mouth as you instinctively wanted more. Your complaints were silenced, though, as he began to kiss down your neck, nipping slighting at a few select spots, leaving marks for you to see later.

“If you want me to stop, just say it,” He said, as his hands started to move towards the hem of your shirt. He was moving slowly, giving you the chance to stop him at any point. You didn’t.

Before long, your clothes were entirely discarded, scattered haphazardly across the floor. Steve’s followed shortly. Neither of you could keep your hands to yourself, feeling the curves of each other's bodies as you continued to kiss. Both of you were desperate, the tension that neither of you even realized had been building finally crashing to the ground around you, any sort of restraint being thrown out the window.

However, you had to take a few moments to admire his body. You knew that it was perfect, he was a super soldier, of course it’s perfect, but you didn’t really know how perfect until it was right in front of you. There was no way you could’ve imagined it in a way that did it true justice. The warmth under his skin, the pace of his breathing, the firm feeling of his grip on your waist. Those were things that you could never have imagined fully.

He lifted you up without any issue, placing his hands under your thighs, carrying you to the work table and setting you on a clear section of the table without breaking the kiss. His hands slid across the tops of your thighs before grabbing your hips. Yours moved from his cheeks to rest on his bare chest, smearing a bit more paint across his scalped chest. You could feel his erection brush against your leg as he leaned over you, the two of you trying to get as close to each other as possible.

You were breathing heavily, your brain clouded with need, both new and left over from your earlier fantasies. Fantasies that were coming true, “Please, Steve.”

“What is it, Sweetheart?” Steve asked, looking down at you, his pupils blown wide with desire, “What do you want?”

You began to grind against his thigh without really thinking about it. He had to admit that something about you needing him this much turned him on, but he wanted to wait until you said it before he did anything, “Please fuck me.”

He would’ve liked to have a bit more foreplay, but both of you were so needy, having built up to this for so long with so little release until now. So he complied with your request. He pulled you quickly to the edge of the table. You were forced to lay your upper body down completely so that he could pull your hips to hang over the edge a bit. He took a few moments to rub himself against the entrance to your pussy, coating the head of his cock with liquid that was practically dripping from your pussy. Finally, he pushed himself into you slowly, making sure to monitor your reaction for any sort of discomfort. You were indulging in the feeling of him slowly stretching you out, completely enjoying the feeling of having him as close to you as possible.

He started moving after he was sure that you were comfortable, his hands beginning to wander your body, squeezing at your hips and breasts, basically any part of you that had a bit of squish, something for him to grab. His mouth latched on to the base of your neck, leaving a deep, dark hickey. You could feel every movement of his hips, his cock brushing against your internal walls again with each thrust.

You couldn’t hold back your moans as he found the perfect spot to hit, one of his hands gripping one of your hips tightly to hold you in place as his thrusts gained momentum. He started picking up speed a bit, taking care to continue to hit the spot that made you moan the loudest. His other hand slid down further, his fingers making their way between your folds. He was surprisingly quick to find your clit, not that you were complaining. Your eyes practically rolled back in your head as he started to rub small circles over it, keeping pace with his thrusts.

You were practically putty in his hands, falling apart as he found every way to make you moan. Touch, squeezing, kissing, and biting exactly where you needed him to. You had no idea how he knew exactly what you wanted, but you didn’t really care as a knot began to build in the pit of your stomach.

You practically screamed his name as the knot finally snapped, Steve continuing his motions, continuing to rub your clit, as you rode out your climax, your whole body feeling as though fireworks were shooting through your veins. Your walls tightened with the waves of your orgasms, the fluttering feeling clear to Steve as he continued to bury himself inside of you. Soon after your climax finished, you could feel his thrust begin to get a bit sloppy, focus clear on his face as he tried his best to hold on longer.

He couldn’t hold on that long, though, soon giving in to the building pleasure. He came hard, his hips snapping into your own and his head being buried in your neck to hide his curses as he came completely undone. You could feel the thick hot ropes of his cum coating your insides as he finished. You both stayed like that for a few moments in order to catch your breath.

As you started to come back to reality, you finally noticed the mess you had made. Steve’s hair was a mess, blue paint sticking some of the tips together. You couldn’t even remember when you had grabbed his hair, but the paint smears left a clear map of where your hand had wandered. The blue and red stripes across his face and chest were clear, too. In fact, you had gotten paint all over his sculpted body, the blue smears outlining his muscles.

“We should probably clean up and get back to work, huh?” He eventually sighed, his eyes never leaving your body.

“I suppose.”

(A/N: Thanks for reading! If you want to send me a tip for my writing feel free to tip me over venmo! My venmo is Al3x13l. Tips aren't required, but as a broke college student, they are appreciated.)

[aelaer]

[1/2] Now this is an actual ask as in asking for help. 👀 I have a problem with Steve and Tony. I spent too much time too early on reading anti/not-friendly post-CW fics about 'Team Cap', and because of that I have been unable to see Tony as a flawed human or Steve as a good person. It's a pattern I've become too familiar with, and even recent stories are often going into that sense. I have been trying for some time now to do something about it, but either the method was bad, or I couldn't

(I tagged a couple people in this post – if you were tagged, the question directed to you is wayyyy at the bottom! Feel free to ignore of course.)

You really hit me with a doozy with this ask. I might offend someone for not thinking the exact same way as them with… everything this topic entails… Steve, Tony, anti-fics. Followers from last year know what happened last time I talked about poor and OOC characterization in fanfic, lmao. Beware The Easily Offended! This Is A Critical Thinking Of Your Hobby Zone! I Am Being Critical Of Specific Types of MCU Fanfic!

Please don’t click the read more button if you can’t handle an opinion that might not match yours. Really. I’m fine with discussing different opinions in a mature manner but if you have issues with people saying they don’t like a specific type of plot, this post is not for you. (The read more button doesn’t appear on the original post for followers using the mobile app, but it works on desktop and in all reblogs. If you don’t see a cut and don’t want to read, just skip it, please).

Yeah. Okay. Moving on. Can’t say folks weren’t warned.

I’ve had this in my drafts for several weeks because of the abuse I got the last time I wrote something critical about certain plot points used in fanfic. I was definitely a bit reluctant to look at this specific topic from an analytical and critical look as I remembered that, but hey, it’s really easy for a coward to use a sockpuppet account and throw abuse. It’s harder to be a minority voice with stark opinions contrasting the popular trend. I’m okay with having a minority opinion amongst the MCU fandom.

(PS - you’re welcome to disagree with my opinions, so long as you’re respectful about it. Remember there are individuals behind the screens!)

Concerning Character Flaws

So the thing about really well-written characters is that they are flawed in some manner. Anyone who thinks Tony or Steve exist without flaws – and I mean real flaws, like arrogance, believing they’re always right, short tempers, and other *real* character flaws that both of these characters have – well, if they don’t think they exist with these flaws, how well do they know the character?

You don’t have to know a character well to be a fan of said character – there’s no rules about that – but if you’re going to write fanfic, and that fanfic entails the character you love against a character you don’t particularly like, I’d say any writer looking to do anything resembling a good job would do their due diligence in figuring out the strengths and weaknesses of both characters before writing the characters themselves. These mental lists of characteristics should be equal for both characters. No, “good abs” is not a character strength if you have no physical aspects in the other character strength column. You don’t have to like a character to still write them well.

Even professionals don’t follow this rule when, say, shows get new writers or comics get different writers, so you might consider me silly expecting those dabbling in fan fiction. But yeah, if an author wants me to take a story seriously as something with quality, I expect the characters to resemble themselves in some manner.

(This level of resemblance varies when you purposefully choose for the protagonist to be evil, be in a completely different time period, etc, but authors who do this *well* still get core personality traits solid, even if morality is out the window or the profession is entirely different. I have a lot of examples from the Sherlock fandom of total AUs that pull this off well – haven’t read nearly enough AUs in the MCU to have a good collection here).

But a resemblance of character, of capturing the three-dimensionality of a character, is what anti-fics simply fail to achieve. The characters they’re anti against usually suffer cases of Flanderization, if they’re not completely out of character altogether in showing traits that were never displayed in the canon, ever. I don’t know why anyone would be interested in such stories, myself, and remain baffled at their popularity. Is there some sort of enjoyment in seeing such a 2D rendition of a character in what is otherwise meant as a serious work and provides absolutely no sense of proper conflict between two characters? Not for me; it immediately takes me out of the story and when it gets too much, I abandon the story. It’s just not enjoyable for me. Turning a canon protagonist into a strawman is just lazy writing and offers nothing to the writer’s favorite, preferred character.

Concerning Steve’s and Tony’s Flaws

Every real human being has some sort of personality flaw that is decidedly unattractive. Some people are really good at showing it very rarely (and are some of the best human beings), but with these two characters we see them at their greatest heights and lowest of lows. Ironically, they actually share a lot of the same flaws, but display them in different manners in canon:

Both men believe they are the best man for the job and will do it without consulting someone who could actually fight against it - or go completely against them. Tony with Ultron is the easy example here. He’s the smartest man in the world and can tackle the issue of protecting it on its own. Steve, same issue, and his job is “helping Bucky”. *He’s* the one who can handle Bucky, the only one who can handle him - big thing in both WS and CW. If both of them had utilized their friends and allies a lot more, a lot of issues could have been avoided.

Both men are sometimes hypocritical. Steve promotes teamwork in all his speeches but again with the Bucky situation. Just… everything Bucky, man. Tony signs the Accords and immediately goes against them with what he gives to Peter, who most assuredly did not sign them (tangent: if he HAD joined the Avengers at the end of Homecoming, I have no idea how that would have gone since Peter would have had to reveal his identity to the UN and then there’s the whole ‘still a minor’ thing, and yeah, Homecoming’s end scene just makes me go nuts). But anyway, their occasional hypocrisy is one of the most realistic aspects of them because most human beings are hypocritical sometimes.

Both men are sometimes arrogant. Tony’s self-explanatory with his genius-playboy-philanthropist-billionaire. One thing he does not suffer from is low self-esteem in regards to his abilities. His arrogance comes from his genius. Steve’s arrogance lies more in his deep-seeded belief that he is on the moral high ground – and one reason I think a lot of people dislike him so much, because moral superiority is very much a faux pas in this day and age for some millennials and many Gen Z folk. He has a very, very solid sense of what is right and what is wrong, and that rubs some folks the wrong way. Tony is more morally fluid – but he is not by any means immoral.

Both of them have a really solid list of strengths as well. As this ask specifically is looking to find the good in Steve, I specifically Googled pro-Steve articles for you to click at your leisure (and one with both). If you need to go back to canon, I highly recommend rewatching The First Avenger and The Winter Soldier, which introduces Steve brilliantly and then lets Steve grow further in the second film.

(Note: I actually prefer Tony to Steve in terms of personal favoritism, but how a very loud segment of Tony fans have treated other characters has led me to be more vocal about the strengths of others, especially Steve and Wanda. So Tony might be in my top 5, but mean-spirited Tony fans have moved me to be a champion of other characters, if only to show other fans that there are indeed Tony fans that do like the other characters and treat them – and their fans – with respect).

Bringing Balance (to the Universe…) Fanfic-Style

This addresses the second part of your ask in regards to the fanfics. And this is where I started running into trouble, too, mostly because, well, just how many Stephen and Steve fics are there? Yeah, exactly. Stephen’s my main guy. So I did some research, outsourcing, and reading.

Here’s two I knew of before cuz Stephen’s in them in some capacity:

Identity Theft by KitKat992 - it stars Peter and both Tony and Steve play integral parts from what I recall. Good story too, very engaging.

A Dysfunctional Senior Year (series) by ApolloLoki97 - this also stars Peter and has a large Team As Family aspect, so it shows the entire Avengers team as just decent people. My favorite part is naturally part 3 because Stephen comes in that one, haha.

And to find other stories, I went into the Anti-Accords tag. It was nice to find fics that didn’t have such a love of hypocritical authoritarianism. Aannyyyyway.

Making Sense of Chaos by SparkedtoLife - mind the tags. Seriously, it’s heavy duty. Yet another Peter fic because he’s way more popular than my favorite character, qq. Lots of Netflix Marvel characters too! Anyway, deals with not only Tony and Steve really well (and has a different dynamic with Tony that isn’t IronDad, so that was a nice change of pace), it also deals with the Accords situation very realistically. And none of those are even main plot points. If you can handle the very serious, sensitive subject that is the main plot point, I highly recommended it. It’s a very masterfully done work.

Atlas by nanasekei - Stony. Treats all characters with respect and both Tony and Steve as three-dimensional, flawed humans with some serious self doubts. Also highly agree with the author that Thaddeus Ross sucks and is basically one of the biggest people to blame for Everything Going To Shit.

Homecoming by an orphaned account - Some Stucky. This is a lovely one-shot of things I basically wanted to happen when the team got together again but didn’t. Sigggghhh. Everyone is definitely in character in this one, traumas and healing and all. And look, another person realizes that trusting Ross is a really horrible idea.

Locks Not Replaced by Riverdaughter - first this writer has a Tolkien-based username so yay. Anyway, the fic starts off by Tony realizing that he almost killed Steve during the fight with his repulsors, and it was only Bucky that stopped him. Do people seriously think he’d survive a shot to the face with that power? This is one reason the ‘Steve tried to kill Tony’ people piss me the fuck off. What do you think those repulsors shoot, fucking rainbows? Honestly, guys. Anyway, mini rant over. This fic is great. Author comes in with a Cap favoritism but treats Tony well, and honestly Tony turning a blind eye to everything and ignoring Ross is what I like to think happened in canon (he clearly dislikes the guy). And also I love the Robin Hood parallels. Love love love. I think this fic is my favorite of the ones listed in this section.

Meeting Your Heroes by Riverdaughter - naturally after reading that fic I went to explore more and found this gem. She’s not incorrect in saying Tony wasn’t a good mentor at the beginning - I think he had his own growth after Peter’s actions in Homecoming especially (though even through Homecoming he was trying, just… not always successfully lmao). Anyway love these two together. It’s great.

Photograph by slytherclaw420 - A scene we deserved in Endgame and didn’t get. Sigh. Definite IronDad feels here. Hopeful Steve, rebuilding of a friendship.

And uh, an honorable mention of sorts:

Balancing the Scales by MoonFire1 - I’m not recommending this fic for good characterization or plot. It really doesn’t have either. The fic was written in retaliation for the nasty Tony fans completely trashing Steve’s character. You should only read this if you want to see the argument from “the other side” and if you want to see an anti-Tony fic like you’ve seen anti-Steve fics. Don’t harass the author though. This is presented as a counterargument to anti-Steve fiction, for those interested to read the other sides arguments. I don’t like the nature of the fic, but I loathe that “not Steve friendly” has 30 fucking pages of works with tens of thousands of kudos, so one anti-Tony fic (with a comparatively small three pages under that tag) really doesn’t compare. Ugh. I hate the anti culture in this fandom so much. Loathe it. It’s such a nasty energy! Why would you indulge in such negativity? But as I’ve mentioned before, I appreciate authors aware enough to tag it so I can avoid it. I wish that part of fandom culture didn’t exist, but well, can’t change it. Just can criticize the fuck out of it on my blog. Maybe encourage people to think less one-sided in the process if I’m lucky.

But there’s probably more good characterization Steve fics to be found, so I am forcefully recruiting two people via tag:

If you’re looking to dabble into Stony fics with good-guy-Steve, if anyone would know of any, I’d imagine it’d be @babywarg.

You don’t know this person, but @cairistiona7 has actually known me the longest of anyone here on tumblr (half my life! HALF! She even knows my real name :P She betaed a LOTR work of mine a decade ago I ended up never fully publishing… thanks again for all your help there…). Anyway, she’s a big Bucky fan, and Bucky friendships is the best thing. So if anyone would know any wholesome Bucky and Steve stories, it’d be her. (Or really I’d take any of your recs, Cair, as I’ll probably enjoy them as well).

I hope this was helpful to you md, and that I didn’t piss off too many of my followers in the process of answering this lol.

[fitnetpro]

The Beginner’s Guide to Intermittent Fasting – 2017 Update

“…But Tony the Tiger tells us that breakfast is the most important meal of the day! Grrrrrreat!”

This rule has become so commonplace throughout the society as a whole – especially in the health and fitness industry – that it’s readily accepted as fact:

“Want to lose weight? Make sure you start off with a healthy breakfast, so you can get that metabolism firing first thing in the morning!  “Eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince, and dinner like a pauper.”

“Want to lose more weight? Make sure you eat six small meals throughout the day so your metabolism stays operating at maximum capacity all day long.”

There are even studies that show those that eat earlier in the day lose more weight than those who ate later in the day or skipped a meal.

So, eat breakfast to lose weight and obtain optimal health.  

Case closed…right?

Maybe Not. Maybe there’s way more to the story. As skeptics, we operate from first principles: what if there’s science and research that shows SKIPPING BREAKFAST (the horror! blasphemy!) for optimum efficiency, maximum muscle retention, and body fat loss?

After firmly being on “Team Breakfast” for 28 years of my life, I’ve skipped breakfast for the past 3.5 years and will most likely never go back!

I want to share with you a concept about skipping breakfast (and other meals), and how your health can benefit as a result.

Tony ain’t gonna be happy, but today we’re talking about intermittent fasting. Even Boy George is getting in on the Intermittent Fasting Action (and has read this article!):

Please look into 'Intermittent Fasting'. https://t.co/C2fCylOaWj https://t.co/060k5Ws0bh

— Boy George (@BoyGeorge) May 8, 2017

This is a topic that is controversial (which is funny – you’re just skipping a meal) as it turns a LOT of conventional wisdom on its head. This is why this article is filled with more sources and citations than the normal Nerd Fitness article. Here we go. 

What is intermittent fasting?

Intermittent fasting is not a diet, but rather a dieting pattern.  

In simpler terms: it’s making a conscious decision to skip certain meals on purpose.

By fasting and then feasting on purpose, intermittent fasting generally means that you consume your calories during a specific window of the day, and choose not to eat food for a larger window of time.

There are a few different ways to take advantage of intermittent fasting:

Regularly eat during a specific time period only.  For example, only eating from noon-8 PM, essentially skipping breakfast.  Some people only eat in a 6-hour window, or even a 4-hour window. AKA “feasting” and “fasting” parts of your days.   

Skip two meals one day, taking a full 24-hours off from eating. For example, eating on a normal schedule (finishing dinner at 8PM) and then not eating again until 8PM the following day. So you would eat your normal 3 meals per day, and then occasionally pick a day to skip breakfast and lunch the next day.

Now, you might be thinking: “okay, so by skipping a meal, I just eat less than normally overall, and thus I will lose weight, right?”  

Well, that’s partly true.  

Yes, by cutting out an entire meal each day, you are on average consuming fewer calories per week – even if your two meals per day are slightly bigger than before (which is crucial for losing weight).  

However, as we already know that not all calories are created equal, the timing of meals can also influence how your body reacts.  

How does intermittent fasting work?

With intermittent fasting, your body operates differently when “feasting” compared to when “fasting”:

When you eat a meal, your body spends a few hours processing that food, burning what it can from what you just consumed.  Because it has all of this readily-available, easy to burn energy (thanks to the food you ate), your body will choose to use that as energy rather than the fat you have stored.  This is especially true if you just consumed carbohydrates/sugar, as your body prefers to burn sugar as energy before any other source.

During the “fasted state,” your body doesn’t have a recently consumed meal to use as energy, so it is more likely to pull from the fat stored in your body as its the only energy source readily available.

Burning fat = win.

The same goes for working out in a “fasted” state.  Without a ready supply of glucose and glycogen to pull from (which has been depleted over the course of your fasted state, and hasn’t yet been replenished with a pre-workout meal), your body is forced to adapt and pull from the only source of energy available to it: the fat stored in your cells.

Why does this work?  Our bodies react to energy consumption (eating food) with insulin production. In addition to this, the more sensitive your body is to insulin, the more likely you’ll be to use the food you consume efficiently, which can help lead to weight loss and muscle creation.

Along with that, your body is most sensitive to insulin following a period of fasting. 

Your glycogen (a starch stored in your muscles and liver that your body can burn as fuel when necessary) is depleted during sleep (and thus during fasting), and will be depleted even further during training, which can further increase insulin sensitivity.

This means that a meal immediately following your workout will be stored most efficiently: mostly as glycogen for muscle stores, burned as energy immediately to help with the recovery process, with minimal amounts stored as fat.

Compare this to a regular day (no intermittent fasting):  With insulin sensitivity at normal levels, the carbs and foods consumed will see full glycogen stores, enough glucose in the blood stream, and thus be more likely to get stored as fat.

Not only that, but growth hormone is increased during fasted states (both during sleep and after a period of fasting). Combine this  increased growth hormone secretion, the decrease in insulin production (and thus increase in insulin sensitivity), and you’re essentially priming your body for muscle growth and fat loss with intermittent fasting.

The less science-y version: Intermittent fasting can help teach your body to use the food it consumes more efficiently, and your body can learn to burn fat as fuel when you deprive it of new calories constantly.  For many different physiological reasons, fasting can help promote weight loss and muscle building when done properly.  

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But why does every health book say “6 small meals?”

There are a few main reasons why diet books recommend six small meals:

1) When you eat a meal, your body does have to burn extra calories just to process that meal.  So, the theory is that if you eat all day long with small meals, your body is constantly burning extra calories and your metabolism is firing at optimal capacity, right? Well, that’s not true.  Whether you eat 2000 calories spread out throughout the day, or 2000 calories in a small window, your body will burn the same number of calories processing the food.  So, the whole “keep your metabolism firing at optimum capacity by always eating” sounds good in principle, but reality tells a different story.

2) When you eat smaller meals, you might be less likely to overeat during your regular meals.  I can definitely see some truth here, especially for people who struggle with portion control or don’t know how much food they should be eating.

However, once you educate yourself and take control of your eating, some might find that eating six times a day is very prohibitive and requires a lot of effort.  Along with that, because you’re eating six small meals, I’d argue that you probably never feel “full,” and you might be MORE likely to eat extra calories during each snack.

Although grounded in seemingly logical principles, the “six meals a day” doesn’t work for the reason you think it would (#1), and really only works for people who struggle with portion control (#2).

If we want to think back to the caveman days, we’d have been in serious trouble as a species if we had to eat every three hours.  Do you think Joe caveman pulled out his pocket sundial six times a day to consume his equally portioned meals in Tupperware containers?  Hell no!  He ate when he could, endured and dealt with long periods of NOT eating (no refrigeration or food storage) and his body adapted to still function optimally enough to still go out and catch new food.

A recent study (highlighted by the New York Times) has done a great job of challenging the “six-meals-a-day” technique for weight loss.  

Martin from LeanGains points out two important quotes from the study:

“…The premise underlying the present study was that increasing meal frequency would lead to better short-term appetite regulation and increased dietary compliance; furthermore, it was hypothesized that these predicted beneficial effects of increased meal frequency could have resulted from more favorable gut peptide profiles, potentially leading to greater weight loss. Under the conditions described in the present study, all three hypotheses were rejected.”

“…We had postulated that increasing meal frequency would enhance the compliance to the energy restricted diet thus leading to greater weight loss, an effect possibly mediated by increased fullness. The present results do not support this hypothesis.”

Remember, the type of food you eat matters. Meal frequency is not nearly as important as the quantity and quality of food consumed.  This study reached similar conclusions.

Why intermittent fasting?

Because it can work for you. Although we know that not all calories are created equal, caloric restriction plays a central role in weight loss. When you fast (either for 16 hours per day, or 24 hours every few days), you are also making it easier to restrict your caloric intake over the course of the week. This will give your body a chance to lose weight as you’re simply just eating less calories than you were consuming before. Do this consistently, and it can lead to consistent weight loss and maintenance.

Because it simplifies your day. Rather than having to prepare, pack, eat, and time your meals every 2-3 hours, you simply skip a meal or two and only worry about eating food in your eating window. It’s one less decision you have to make every day.

It requires less time (and potentially money). Rather than having to prepare or purchase three to six meals a day, you only need to prepare two meals.  Instead of stopping what you’re doing six times a day to eat, you simply only have to stop to eat twice.  Rather than having to do the dishes six times, you only have to do them twice. Rather than having to purchase six meals a day, you only need to purchase two.

It promotes stronger insulin sensitivity and increased growth hormone secretion, two keys for weight loss and muscle gain.  This was already explained in the previous section with relevant sources, but intermittent fasting helps you create a double whammy for weight loss.

It can level up your brain, including positively counteracting conditions like Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, and dementia. As explained here in this TEDx talk by Mark Mattson, Professor at Johns Hopkins University and Chief of the Laboratory of Neurosciences at the National Institute on Aging fasting is grounded in serious research and more studies are coming out showing the benefits:

Dr. Rhonda Patrick discusses intermittent fasting protocols here on Tim Ferriss’s Podcast, and Dom Diagostino discusses the importance of fasting here in potentially preventing/mitigating the onset of neurodegenerative diseases

Plus, Wolverine does it.

What are the drawbacks with intermittent fasting?

In my own experimentation over the past three years, I have found very few negative side effects with Intermittent fasting. 

The biggest concern most people have is that Intermittent Fasting will lead to lower energy, focus, and the “holy crap I am hungry” feeling during the fasting period and ruin them. People are concerned that they will spend all morning being miserable because they haven’t consumed any food, and thus will be miserable at work and ineffective at whatever task it is they are working on.

The following are my thoughts and experiences, and your results may vary:

Yes, the initial transition from EATING ALL THE TIME, to intermittent fasting MIGHT be a bit of a jolt to your system; it was for me. However, once I got through the transition after a few days, my body quickly adapted and learned to function just as well only eating a few times a day.

Although I fast for 16 hours per day, the following might help assuage your fears that skipping breakfast will cause your body to eat itself and your brain to implode:

This study explains that in participants after 48-hours of fasting, “cognitive performance, activity, sleep, and mood are not adversely affected in healthy humans by two days of calorie-deprivation.”

“So why do I feel grouchy when I’m not eating breakfast?” In this nerd’s humble opinion, a good portion of the grumpiness is a result of our eating habits. If you eat every three hours normally, your body will start to get hungry every three hours as it learns and becomes used to expecting (and receiving) food every three hours. If you eat breakfast every morning, your body is expecting to wake up and eat food.

Once you retrain your body to NOT expect food all day every day (or first thing in the morning), these side-effects become less of an issue (thanks to a substance our bodies produce called Ghrelin). However, you can expect a few rough mornings and maybe decreased focus at work because all you can think about is the breakfast you’re depriving yourself of. I found this to go away after a few days.

It’s important to understand that Intermittent Fasting is NOT a panacea. Don’t delude yourself into thinking that if you skip breakfast and then eat 4,000 calories of candybars for lunch and dinner that you will lose weight.

If you have an addictive relationship with food and you struggle with portion control, track your calorie intake in your meals to make sure you’re not overeating. If you skip breakfast, you might be so hungry from this that you OVEREAT for lunch and this can lead to weight gain. Again, the important thing here is that with intermittent fasting you’re eating fewer calories than normal because you’re skipping a meal every day.

Think about it in caveman terms again.  We certainly found ways to survive during periods of feast and famine, and that remains true today. imagine if you needed to eat in order to be active: what would hungry cavemen do? They would go find food, and that probably required a ton of effort. It actually takes our bodies about 84 hours of fasting before our glucose levels are adversely affected.  As we’re talking about small fasts (16-24 hour periods), this doesn’t concern us.

AN IMPORTANT CAVEAT: Intermittent Fasting can be more complex for people who have issues with blood sugar regulation, suffer from hypoglycemia, have diabetes, etc. If you fit into this category, check with your doctor or dietitian before adjusting your eating schedule.

I believe more research needs to be done for these particular cases and thus would recommend you do what works best for YOU.

Can I build muscle and gain weight while intermittent fasting?

Absolutely!

In fact, I have been intermittent fasting for the past three years while building muscle and decreasing my body fat percentage.

I still eat roughly the same number of calories I was consuming before, but instead of eating all damn day long, I condense all of my calorie consumption into an eight hour window.

11 AM Work out with heavy strength training in a fasted state.

12 PM Immediately consume 1/2 of my calories for the day (a regular whole-food meal, followed by a calorie-dense homemade shake.)

7 PM Consume the second portion of my calories for the day in a big dinner.

8 PM – 12 PM the next day: Fast for 16 hours.

In a different method, my friend Nate Green packed on a crazy amount of muscle while fasting for a full 24 hours on Sundays.  

I’m not kidding when I say this has revolutionized how I look at muscle building and fat loss.  Ultimately, this method flies in the face of the typical “bulk and cut” techniques of overeating to build muscle (along with adding a lot of fat) before cutting calories to lose fat (along with some muscle) and settling down at a higher weight.

I prefer this method to the bulk-and-cut technique for a few reasons:

There’s far less of a crazy swing. If you are putting on 30 pounds and then cutting 25 to gain 5 lbs of muscle, your body is going through drastic swings of body mass. Your clothes will fit differently, you’ll have different levels of definition, and your body will wonder what the hell is going on.

You’re consuming less food and thus spending less money. Rather than overeating to put on 1 pound of muscle and 4 pounds of fat in a week or two, you’re aiming to eat exactly enough to put on 1 pound of muscle without adding much fat on top of it.  Yeah, it’s a delicate balance, but there’s far less swing involved. You are just slowly, steadily, and consistently building muscle and strength over many months.

There’s never a need to get “vacation-ready”: we all want to look good naked, right?  When you are just adding muscle, you don’t need to worry about getting your body ready before by drastically altering your diet (going on a miserable crash diet for a month). I like Anthony Mychal’s technique of never being more than two weeks away.  Keep your body fat percentage low, build strength and muscle, and if you happen to notice your body fat creeping up, cut back on the carbs. Within two weeks you should be back at your preferred body fat percentage and can continue the muscle building process.

Does intermittent fasting have different effects on men and women?

Yes, intermittent fasting can affect men and women differently.

This article over on Paleo For Women goes extensively into the potential negative effects of intermittent fasting for women.

This PubMed study digs into women and intermittent fasting as well.

This article on Mark’s Daily Apple does a fantastic job of breaking down the differences between men and women too and how they are affected by intermittent fasting, ultimately explaining:

“One study, which I’ve cited before as evidence of a benefit to fasting, found that while IF improved insulin sensitivity in male subjects, female subjects saw no such improvement. In fact, the glucose tolerance of fasting women actually worsened. Ouch.

Another study examined the effect of alternate day fasting on blood lipids. Women’s HDL improved and their triglycerides remained stable; men’s HDL remained stable and their triglycerides decreased. Favorable, albeit sex-specific results.

Later, both obese men and women dropped body fat, body weight, blood pressure, total cholesterol, LDL cholesterol, and triglyercides on a fasting regimen. These people were obese, however, and perimenopausal women were excluded from the study, so the results may not apply to leaner people or women of reproductive age.”

Long story short: Yes, men and women will have different experiences with intermittent fasting; we’re all unique snowflakes (yep, especially you), and your body will be affected by intermittent fasting differently than the person next to you.

My best advice?  If you’re curious, get blood work done, speak with your doctor and get a check-up. Give intermittent fasting a shot, track your results, and see how your body/blood work changes as a result of Intermittent Fasting and decide if it’s right for you.

I’ve anecdotally heard of hesitant doctors who prescribed to the “6-meals-a-day” philosophy be surprised when a patient returns months later in better shape and with a better blood profile thanks to skipping meals.

Your milage may vary, so speak with a doctor or find a doctor versed in intermittent fasting protocols and treat it like an experiment on yourself!

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Questions about intermittent fasting

“Won’t I get really hungry?”  

As explained above, this can be a result of the habits you have built for your body. If you are constantly eating or always eat the same time of day, your body can actually learn to prepare itself for food by beginning the process of insulin production and preparation for food.

After a brief adjustment period, your body can adapt to the fact that it’s only eating a few times a day. The more overweight you are, and the more often you eat, the more of an initial struggle this might be.

Remember, your body’s physical and cognitive abilities aren’t diminished as a result of fasting.

“Where will I get my energy for my workouts? Won’t I be exhausted and not be able to complete my workouts if fasting?” 

This was a major concern of mine as well.  And for my first workout or two, it was very weird to not eat before training. However, after a few sessions, I learned that my body could certainly function (and even thrive) during my training sessions despite not eating a pre-workout meal. Here I am a while back pulling 385 lbs. at 175 BW after a 16 hour fast:

A post shared by Steve Kamb (@stevekamb) on Nov 26, 2015 at 8:32am PST

As Mark’s Daily Apple states:

Fasted training can actually result in better metabolic adaptations (which mean better performance down the line), improved muscle protein synthesis, and a higher anabolic response to post-workout feeding (you’ll earn your meal and make more muscle out of it if you train on an empty stomach).

“I like the idea of fasted training, but I work a regular 9-5 and can’t train at 11AM. What am I supposed to do?”

Martin from LeanGains lays out a few different options for you, depending on your training schedule.  The best advice is to not freak out and overanalyze unless you are an elite athlete concerned with the absolute optimal performance at all time.

If you’re just a normal guy or gal looking to drop a few pounds and get stronger, do the best you can.

“Won’t fasting cause muscle loss?”  

Another big concern of mine, but it turns out…it was unfounded.  We’ve been told by the supplement industry that we need to consume 30 g of protein every few hours, as that’s the most amount of protein our body can process at a time.  Along with that, we’ve been told that if we don’t eat protein every few hours, our body’s muscle will start to break down to be burned as energy.

Again, NOT TRUE!  This study shows that our bodies are quite adept at preserving muscle even when fasting, and it turns out that protein absorption by our body can take place over many many many hours. Protein consumed in a shorter period of time has no difference on the body compared to protein spread throughout the day.    

“What about my body going into starvation mode from not eating?” 

Now, the thought process here is that when we don’t feed ourselves, our bodies assume calories aren’t available and thus choose to store more calories than burning them, eliminating the benefits of weight loss with fasting. Fortunately, this is NOT true.

As Martin from LeanGains so eloquently explains (as you can tell, he’s good at this stuff):

“The earliest evidence for lowered metabolic rate in response to fasting occurred after 60 hours (-8% in resting metabolic rate). Other studies show metabolic rate is not impacted until 72-96 hours have passed.

Seemingly paradoxical, metabolic rate is actually increased in short-term fasting. For some concrete numbers, studies have shown an increase of 3.6% – 10% after 36-48 hours (Mansell PI, et al, and Zauner C, et al).  Epinephrine and norepinephrine (adrenaline/noradrenaline) sharpens the mind and makes us want to move around. Desirable traits that encouraged us to seek for food, or for the hunter to kill his prey, increasing survival. At some point, after several days of no eating, this benefit would confer no benefit to survival and probably would have done more harm than good; instead, an adaptation that favored conservation of energy turned out to be advantageous.”

“This sounds crazy, I’m not gonna do it.”

That’s cool.  Are you losing body fat, building muscle, and getting a clean bill of health from your doctor?  If you can say yes to those things, AWESOME. Keep doing what you’re doing, because it’s working.   

However, if what you’re doing ISN’T working, or you’re not getting the results you were hoping for, why not give it a chance?  Hopefully the dozens of studies at least peak your curiosity.  Self-experimentation is the best way to determine WHAT methods work for you.

Tips and tricks about Fasting 

Don’t freak out.  Stop wondering: “can I fast 15 hours instead of 16?” or “what if I eat an apple during my fasted period, will that ruin everything?”  Relax. Your body is a complex piece of machinery and learns to adapt. Everything is not as cut and dry as you think.

If you want to eat breakfast one day but not another, that’s okay. If you are going for optimal aesthetic or athletic performance, I can see the need to be more rigid in your discipline, but otherwise…freaking chill out and don’t stress over minutiae! Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.

Expect funny looks if you spend a lot of mornings with breakfast eaters.  A few weeks back I had a number of friends staying with me, and they were all completely dumbfounded when I told them I didn’t eat breakfast anymore.  I tried to explain it to them but received a bunch of blank stares. Breakfast has become so enGRAINed (zing!) in our culture that NOT eating it sounds crazy.  You will get weird looks from those around you…embrace it. I still go to brunch or sit with friends, I just drink black coffee and enjoy conversation.

Stay busy.  If you are just sitting around thinking about how hungry you are, you’ll be more likely to struggle with this. For that reason, I time my fasting periods for maximum efficiency and minimal discomfort:

My first few hours of fasting come after consuming a MONSTER meal, where the last thing I want to think about is eating.

When I’m sleeping: 8 of my 16 hours are occupied by sleeping.  Tough to feel hungry when I’m dreaming about becoming a Jedi.

When I’m busy: After waking up, 12 hours of my fasting is already done.  I spend three hours doing my best work (drinking green tea and listening to PM, which is exactly what I’m doing while writing this article!), and then comes my final hour of fasting: training.

I don’t have time to think about how hungry I am, because I keep my brain constantly occupied!

Zero-calorie beverages are okay.  I drink green tea in the morning for my caffeine kick while writing. If you want to drink water, black coffee, or tea during your fasted period, that’s okay.  Remember, don’t overthink it – keep things simple! Dr. Rhonda Patrick believes that a fast should stop at the first consumption of anything other than water, so experiment yourself and see how your body responds.

Track your results, listen to your body:  

Concerned about losing muscle mass?  Keep track of your strength training routines and see if you are getting stronger.

Buy a cheap set of body fat calipers and keep track of your body fat composition.

Track your calories, and see how your body changes when eating the same amount of food, but condensed into a certain window.

Use a free IF app like Zero, developed by Kevin Rose, to track your fast and feast windows easily.

Everybody will react to intermittent fasting differently; I can’t tell you how your body will react.  It’s up to you to listen to your body and see how making these adjustments change your body.

Don’t expect miracles.  Yes, intermittent fasting can potentially help you lose weight, increase insulin sensitivity and growth hormone secretion (all good things), but it is only ONE factor in hundreds that will determine your body composition and overall health.  Don’t expect to drop to 8% body fat and get ripped just by skipping breakfast. You need to focus on building healthy habits, eating better foods, and getting stronger.

This is just one tool that can contribute to your success…

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To sum it all up

Intermittent fasting can potentially have some very positive benefits for somebody trying to lose weight or gain lean body mass.

Men and women will tend to have different results, just like each individual person will have different results.  The ONLY way to find out is with self-experimentation.

There are multiple ways to “do” intermittent fasting:

Fast and feast regularly: Fast for a certain number of hours, then consume all calories within a certain number of hours.

Eat normally, then fast 1-2x a week: Consume your normal meals every day, then pick one or two days a week where you fast for 24 hours.  Eat your last meal Sunday night, and then don’t eat again until dinner the following day.

Fast occasionally: probably the easiest method for the person who wants to do the least amount of work.  Simply skip a meal whenever it’s convenient. On the road? Skip breakfast.  Busy day at work? Skip lunch.  Eat poorly all day Saturday?  Make your first meal of the day dinner on Sunday.

Remember: One of the Rules of the Rebellion is to QUESTION EVERYTHING.  If this seems like something you’d like to try, give it a shot. If it sounds crazy to you, ask yourself why you think it sounds crazy, and do your own research and experimentation before condoning/condemning it.

I’d love to hear from you:

What are your questions with intermittent fasting?  

What are your concerns?

Have you tried intermittent fasting?

Have you had success with it, either with muscle gain or weight loss?

Thanks for leaving your comment, I’m excited to get the conversation started.

-Steve

PS: We’re fans of Intermittent Fasting, which is why its part of the Nerd Fitness Academy, our online training course that is helping over 40,000 superheroes-in-training get fit, healthy, and happy.  Come on and join us!

PPS: Added an important caveat: If you are somebody who has blood sugar regulation issues (diabetes, hypoglycemia, etc.), discuss with your doctor or medical professional before making changes to your diet, even sharing this article and the cited studies with them. Remember, question everything!

###

Photo Source: seal mouth, tony the tiger, anatomy, cog, small plates, apples, fridge, ant, boy girl, kiwi

The Beginner’s Guide to Intermittent Fasting – 2017 Update published first on http://ift.tt/2kRppy7

[albertcaldwellne]

The Beginner’s Guide to Intermittent Fasting – 2017 Update

“…But Tony the Tiger tells us that breakfast is the most important meal of the day! Grrrrrreat!”

This rule has become so commonplace throughout the society as a whole – especially in the health and fitness industry – that it’s readily accepted as fact:

“Want to lose weight? Make sure you start off with a healthy breakfast, so you can get that metabolism firing first thing in the morning!  “Eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince, and dinner like a pauper.”

“Want to lose more weight? Make sure you eat six small meals throughout the day so your metabolism stays operating at maximum capacity all day long.”

There are even studies that show those that eat earlier in the day lose more weight than those who ate later in the day or skipped a meal.

So, eat breakfast to lose weight and obtain optimal health.  

Case closed…right?

Maybe Not. Maybe there’s way more to the story. As skeptics, we operate from first principles: what if there’s science and research that shows SKIPPING BREAKFAST (the horror! blasphemy!) for optimum efficiency, maximum muscle retention, and body fat loss?

After firmly being on “Team Breakfast” for 28 years of my life, I’ve skipped breakfast for the past 3.5 years and will most likely never go back!

I want to share with you a concept about skipping breakfast (and other meals), and how your health can benefit as a result.

Tony ain’t gonna be happy, but today we’re talking about intermittent fasting. Even Boy George is getting in on the Intermittent Fasting Action (and has read this article!):

Please look into 'Intermittent Fasting'. https://t.co/C2fCylOaWj https://t.co/060k5Ws0bh

— Boy George (@BoyGeorge) May 8, 2017

This is a topic that is controversial (which is funny – you’re just skipping a meal) as it turns a LOT of conventional wisdom on its head. This is why this article is filled with more sources and citations than the normal Nerd Fitness article. Here we go. 

What is intermittent fasting?

Intermittent fasting is not a diet, but rather a dieting pattern.  

In simpler terms: it’s making a conscious decision to skip certain meals on purpose.

By fasting and then feasting on purpose, intermittent fasting generally means that you consume your calories during a specific window of the day, and choose not to eat food for a larger window of time.

There are a few different ways to take advantage of intermittent fasting:

Regularly eat during a specific time period only.  For example, only eating from noon-8 PM, essentially skipping breakfast.  Some people only eat in a 6-hour window, or even a 4-hour window. AKA “feasting” and “fasting” parts of your days.   

Skip two meals one day, taking a full 24-hours off from eating. For example, eating on a normal schedule (finishing dinner at 8PM) and then not eating again until 8PM the following day. So you would eat your normal 3 meals per day, and then occasionally pick a day to skip breakfast and lunch the next day.

Now, you might be thinking: “okay, so by skipping a meal, I just eat less than normally overall, and thus I will lose weight, right?”  

Well, that’s partly true.  

Yes, by cutting out an entire meal each day, you are on average consuming fewer calories per week – even if your two meals per day are slightly bigger than before (which is crucial for losing weight).  

However, as we already know that not all calories are created equal, the timing of meals can also influence how your body reacts.  

How does intermittent fasting work?

With intermittent fasting, your body operates differently when “feasting” compared to when “fasting”:

When you eat a meal, your body spends a few hours processing that food, burning what it can from what you just consumed.  Because it has all of this readily-available, easy to burn energy (thanks to the food you ate), your body will choose to use that as energy rather than the fat you have stored.  This is especially true if you just consumed carbohydrates/sugar, as your body prefers to burn sugar as energy before any other source.

During the “fasted state,” your body doesn’t have a recently consumed meal to use as energy, so it is more likely to pull from the fat stored in your body as its the only energy source readily available.

Burning fat = win.

The same goes for working out in a “fasted” state.  Without a ready supply of glucose and glycogen to pull from (which has been depleted over the course of your fasted state, and hasn’t yet been replenished with a pre-workout meal), your body is forced to adapt and pull from the only source of energy available to it: the fat stored in your cells.

Why does this work?  Our bodies react to energy consumption (eating food) with insulin production. In addition to this, the more sensitive your body is to insulin, the more likely you’ll be to use the food you consume efficiently, which can help lead to weight loss and muscle creation.

Along with that, your body is most sensitive to insulin following a period of fasting. 

Your glycogen (a starch stored in your muscles and liver that your body can burn as fuel when necessary) is depleted during sleep (and thus during fasting), and will be depleted even further during training, which can further increase insulin sensitivity.

This means that a meal immediately following your workout will be stored most efficiently: mostly as glycogen for muscle stores, burned as energy immediately to help with the recovery process, with minimal amounts stored as fat.

Compare this to a regular day (no intermittent fasting):  With insulin sensitivity at normal levels, the carbs and foods consumed will see full glycogen stores, enough glucose in the blood stream, and thus be more likely to get stored as fat.

Not only that, but growth hormone is increased during fasted states (both during sleep and after a period of fasting). Combine this  increased growth hormone secretion, the decrease in insulin production (and thus increase in insulin sensitivity), and you’re essentially priming your body for muscle growth and fat loss with intermittent fasting.

The less science-y version: Intermittent fasting can help teach your body to use the food it consumes more efficiently, and your body can learn to burn fat as fuel when you deprive it of new calories constantly.  For many different physiological reasons, fasting can help promote weight loss and muscle building when done properly.  

Get Your FREE Nerd Fitness Resource Kit

15 Fitness traps you should avoid

Comprehensive beginner's guide to Paleo diet

BONUS: How to level up your life and be the hero of your own story

But why does every health book say “6 small meals?”

There are a few main reasons why diet books recommend six small meals:

1) When you eat a meal, your body does have to burn extra calories just to process that meal.  So, the theory is that if you eat all day long with small meals, your body is constantly burning extra calories and your metabolism is firing at optimal capacity, right? Well, that’s not true.  Whether you eat 2000 calories spread out throughout the day, or 2000 calories in a small window, your body will burn the same number of calories processing the food.  So, the whole “keep your metabolism firing at optimum capacity by always eating” sounds good in principle, but reality tells a different story.

2) When you eat smaller meals, you might be less likely to overeat during your regular meals.  I can definitely see some truth here, especially for people who struggle with portion control or don’t know how much food they should be eating.

However, once you educate yourself and take control of your eating, some might find that eating six times a day is very prohibitive and requires a lot of effort.  Along with that, because you’re eating six small meals, I’d argue that you probably never feel “full,” and you might be MORE likely to eat extra calories during each snack.

Although grounded in seemingly logical principles, the “six meals a day” doesn’t work for the reason you think it would (#1), and really only works for people who struggle with portion control (#2).

If we want to think back to the caveman days, we’d have been in serious trouble as a species if we had to eat every three hours.  Do you think Joe caveman pulled out his pocket sundial six times a day to consume his equally portioned meals in Tupperware containers?  Hell no!  He ate when he could, endured and dealt with long periods of NOT eating (no refrigeration or food storage) and his body adapted to still function optimally enough to still go out and catch new food.

A recent study (highlighted by the New York Times) has done a great job of challenging the “six-meals-a-day” technique for weight loss.  

Martin from LeanGains points out two important quotes from the study:

“…The premise underlying the present study was that increasing meal frequency would lead to better short-term appetite regulation and increased dietary compliance; furthermore, it was hypothesized that these predicted beneficial effects of increased meal frequency could have resulted from more favorable gut peptide profiles, potentially leading to greater weight loss. Under the conditions described in the present study, all three hypotheses were rejected.”

“…We had postulated that increasing meal frequency would enhance the compliance to the energy restricted diet thus leading to greater weight loss, an effect possibly mediated by increased fullness. The present results do not support this hypothesis.”

Remember, the type of food you eat matters. Meal frequency is not nearly as important as the quantity and quality of food consumed.  This study reached similar conclusions.

Why intermittent fasting?

Because it can work for you. Although we know that not all calories are created equal, caloric restriction plays a central role in weight loss. When you fast (either for 16 hours per day, or 24 hours every few days), you are also making it easier to restrict your caloric intake over the course of the week. This will give your body a chance to lose weight as you’re simply just eating less calories than you were consuming before. Do this consistently, and it can lead to consistent weight loss and maintenance.

Because it simplifies your day. Rather than having to prepare, pack, eat, and time your meals every 2-3 hours, you simply skip a meal or two and only worry about eating food in your eating window. It’s one less decision you have to make every day.

It requires less time (and potentially money). Rather than having to prepare or purchase three to six meals a day, you only need to prepare two meals.  Instead of stopping what you’re doing six times a day to eat, you simply only have to stop to eat twice.  Rather than having to do the dishes six times, you only have to do them twice. Rather than having to purchase six meals a day, you only need to purchase two.

It promotes stronger insulin sensitivity and increased growth hormone secretion, two keys for weight loss and muscle gain.  This was already explained in the previous section with relevant sources, but intermittent fasting helps you create a double whammy for weight loss.

It can level up your brain, including positively counteracting conditions like Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, and dementia. As explained here in this TEDx talk by Mark Mattson, Professor at Johns Hopkins University and Chief of the Laboratory of Neurosciences at the National Institute on Aging fasting is grounded in serious research and more studies are coming out showing the benefits:

Dr. Rhonda Patrick discusses intermittent fasting protocols here on Tim Ferriss’s Podcast, and Dom Diagostino discusses the importance of fasting here in potentially preventing/mitigating the onset of neurodegenerative diseases

Plus, Wolverine does it.

What are the drawbacks with intermittent fasting?

In my own experimentation over the past three years, I have found very few negative side effects with Intermittent fasting. 

The biggest concern most people have is that Intermittent Fasting will lead to lower energy, focus, and the “holy crap I am hungry” feeling during the fasting period and ruin them. People are concerned that they will spend all morning being miserable because they haven’t consumed any food, and thus will be miserable at work and ineffective at whatever task it is they are working on.

The following are my thoughts and experiences, and your results may vary:

Yes, the initial transition from EATING ALL THE TIME, to intermittent fasting MIGHT be a bit of a jolt to your system; it was for me. However, once I got through the transition after a few days, my body quickly adapted and learned to function just as well only eating a few times a day.

Although I fast for 16 hours per day, the following might help assuage your fears that skipping breakfast will cause your body to eat itself and your brain to implode:

This study explains that in participants after 48-hours of fasting, “cognitive performance, activity, sleep, and mood are not adversely affected in healthy humans by two days of calorie-deprivation.”

“So why do I feel grouchy when I’m not eating breakfast?” In this nerd’s humble opinion, a good portion of the grumpiness is a result of our eating habits. If you eat every three hours normally, your body will start to get hungry every three hours as it learns and becomes used to expecting (and receiving) food every three hours. If you eat breakfast every morning, your body is expecting to wake up and eat food.

Once you retrain your body to NOT expect food all day every day (or first thing in the morning), these side-effects become less of an issue (thanks to a substance our bodies produce called Ghrelin). However, you can expect a few rough mornings and maybe decreased focus at work because all you can think about is the breakfast you’re depriving yourself of. I found this to go away after a few days.

It’s important to understand that Intermittent Fasting is NOT a panacea. Don’t delude yourself into thinking that if you skip breakfast and then eat 4,000 calories of candybars for lunch and dinner that you will lose weight.

If you have an addictive relationship with food and you struggle with portion control, track your calorie intake in your meals to make sure you’re not overeating. If you skip breakfast, you might be so hungry from this that you OVEREAT for lunch and this can lead to weight gain. Again, the important thing here is that with intermittent fasting you’re eating fewer calories than normal because you’re skipping a meal every day.

Think about it in caveman terms again.  We certainly found ways to survive during periods of feast and famine, and that remains true today. imagine if you needed to eat in order to be active: what would hungry cavemen do? They would go find food, and that probably required a ton of effort. It actually takes our bodies about 84 hours of fasting before our glucose levels are adversely affected.  As we’re talking about small fasts (16-24 hour periods), this doesn’t concern us.

AN IMPORTANT CAVEAT: Intermittent Fasting can be more complex for people who have issues with blood sugar regulation, suffer from hypoglycemia, have diabetes, etc. If you fit into this category, check with your doctor or dietitian before adjusting your eating schedule.

I believe more research needs to be done for these particular cases and thus would recommend you do what works best for YOU.

Can I build muscle and gain weight while intermittent fasting?

Absolutely!

In fact, I have been intermittent fasting for the past three years while building muscle and decreasing my body fat percentage.

I still eat roughly the same number of calories I was consuming before, but instead of eating all damn day long, I condense all of my calorie consumption into an eight hour window.

11 AM Work out with heavy strength training in a fasted state.

12 PM Immediately consume 1/2 of my calories for the day (a regular whole-food meal, followed by a calorie-dense homemade shake.)

7 PM Consume the second portion of my calories for the day in a big dinner.

8 PM – 12 PM the next day: Fast for 16 hours.

In a different method, my friend Nate Green packed on a crazy amount of muscle while fasting for a full 24 hours on Sundays.  

I’m not kidding when I say this has revolutionized how I look at muscle building and fat loss.  Ultimately, this method flies in the face of the typical “bulk and cut” techniques of overeating to build muscle (along with adding a lot of fat) before cutting calories to lose fat (along with some muscle) and settling down at a higher weight.

I prefer this method to the bulk-and-cut technique for a few reasons:

There’s far less of a crazy swing. If you are putting on 30 pounds and then cutting 25 to gain 5 lbs of muscle, your body is going through drastic swings of body mass. Your clothes will fit differently, you’ll have different levels of definition, and your body will wonder what the hell is going on.

You’re consuming less food and thus spending less money. Rather than overeating to put on 1 pound of muscle and 4 pounds of fat in a week or two, you’re aiming to eat exactly enough to put on 1 pound of muscle without adding much fat on top of it.  Yeah, it’s a delicate balance, but there’s far less swing involved. You are just slowly, steadily, and consistently building muscle and strength over many months.

There’s never a need to get “vacation-ready”: we all want to look good naked, right?  When you are just adding muscle, you don’t need to worry about getting your body ready before by drastically altering your diet (going on a..

http://ift.tt/2fpmPxv

[almajonesnjna]

The Beginner’s Guide to Intermittent Fasting – 2017 Update

“…But Tony the Tiger tells us that breakfast is the most important meal of the day! Grrrrrreat!”

This rule has become so commonplace throughout the society as a whole – especially in the health and fitness industry – that it’s readily accepted as fact:

“Want to lose weight? Make sure you start off with a healthy breakfast, so you can get that metabolism firing first thing in the morning!  “Eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince, and dinner like a pauper.”

“Want to lose more weight? Make sure you eat six small meals throughout the day so your metabolism stays operating at maximum capacity all day long.”

There are even studies that show those that eat earlier in the day lose more weight than those who ate later in the day or skipped a meal.

So, eat breakfast to lose weight and obtain optimal health.  

Case closed…right?

Maybe Not. Maybe there’s way more to the story. As skeptics, we operate from first principles: what if there’s science and research that shows SKIPPING BREAKFAST (the horror! blasphemy!) for optimum efficiency, maximum muscle retention, and body fat loss?

After firmly being on “Team Breakfast” for 28 years of my life, I’ve skipped breakfast for the past 3.5 years and will most likely never go back!

I want to share with you a concept about skipping breakfast (and other meals), and how your health can benefit as a result.

Tony ain’t gonna be happy, but today we’re talking about intermittent fasting. Even Boy George is getting in on the Intermittent Fasting Action (and has read this article!):

Please look into 'Intermittent Fasting'. https://t.co/C2fCylOaWj https://t.co/060k5Ws0bh

— Boy George (@BoyGeorge) May 8, 2017

This is a topic that is controversial (which is funny – you’re just skipping a meal) as it turns a LOT of conventional wisdom on its head. This is why this article is filled with more sources and citations than the normal Nerd Fitness article. Here we go. 

What is intermittent fasting?

Intermittent fasting is not a diet, but rather a dieting pattern.  

In simpler terms: it’s making a conscious decision to skip certain meals on purpose.

By fasting and then feasting on purpose, intermittent fasting generally means that you consume your calories during a specific window of the day, and choose not to eat food for a larger window of time.

There are a few different ways to take advantage of intermittent fasting:

Regularly eat during a specific time period only.  For example, only eating from noon-8 PM, essentially skipping breakfast.  Some people only eat in a 6-hour window, or even a 4-hour window. AKA “feasting” and “fasting” parts of your days.   

Skip two meals one day, taking a full 24-hours off from eating. For example, eating on a normal schedule (finishing dinner at 8PM) and then not eating again until 8PM the following day. So you would eat your normal 3 meals per day, and then occasionally pick a day to skip breakfast and lunch the next day.

Now, you might be thinking: “okay, so by skipping a meal, I just eat less than normally overall, and thus I will lose weight, right?”  

Well, that’s partly true.  

Yes, by cutting out an entire meal each day, you are on average consuming fewer calories per week – even if your two meals per day are slightly bigger than before (which is crucial for losing weight).  

However, as we already know that not all calories are created equal, the timing of meals can also influence how your body reacts.  

How does intermittent fasting work?

With intermittent fasting, your body operates differently when “feasting” compared to when “fasting”:

When you eat a meal, your body spends a few hours processing that food, burning what it can from what you just consumed.  Because it has all of this readily-available, easy to burn energy (thanks to the food you ate), your body will choose to use that as energy rather than the fat you have stored.  This is especially true if you just consumed carbohydrates/sugar, as your body prefers to burn sugar as energy before any other source.

During the “fasted state,” your body doesn’t have a recently consumed meal to use as energy, so it is more likely to pull from the fat stored in your body as its the only energy source readily available.

Burning fat = win.

The same goes for working out in a “fasted” state.  Without a ready supply of glucose and glycogen to pull from (which has been depleted over the course of your fasted state, and hasn’t yet been replenished with a pre-workout meal), your body is forced to adapt and pull from the only source of energy available to it: the fat stored in your cells.

Why does this work?  Our bodies react to energy consumption (eating food) with insulin production. In addition to this, the more sensitive your body is to insulin, the more likely you’ll be to use the food you consume efficiently, which can help lead to weight loss and muscle creation.

Along with that, your body is most sensitive to insulin following a period of fasting. 

Your glycogen (a starch stored in your muscles and liver that your body can burn as fuel when necessary) is depleted during sleep (and thus during fasting), and will be depleted even further during training, which can further increase insulin sensitivity.

This means that a meal immediately following your workout will be stored most efficiently: mostly as glycogen for muscle stores, burned as energy immediately to help with the recovery process, with minimal amounts stored as fat.

Compare this to a regular day (no intermittent fasting):  With insulin sensitivity at normal levels, the carbs and foods consumed will see full glycogen stores, enough glucose in the blood stream, and thus be more likely to get stored as fat.

Not only that, but growth hormone is increased during fasted states (both during sleep and after a period of fasting). Combine this  increased growth hormone secretion, the decrease in insulin production (and thus increase in insulin sensitivity), and you’re essentially priming your body for muscle growth and fat loss with intermittent fasting.

The less science-y version: Intermittent fasting can help teach your body to use the food it consumes more efficiently, and your body can learn to burn fat as fuel when you deprive it of new calories constantly.  For many different physiological reasons, fasting can help promote weight loss and muscle building when done properly.  

Get Your FREE Nerd Fitness Resource Kit

15 Fitness traps you should avoid

Comprehensive beginner's guide to Paleo diet

BONUS: How to level up your life and be the hero of your own story

But why does every health book say “6 small meals?”

There are a few main reasons why diet books recommend six small meals:

1) When you eat a meal, your body does have to burn extra calories just to process that meal.  So, the theory is that if you eat all day long with small meals, your body is constantly burning extra calories and your metabolism is firing at optimal capacity, right? Well, that’s not true.  Whether you eat 2000 calories spread out throughout the day, or 2000 calories in a small window, your body will burn the same number of calories processing the food.  So, the whole “keep your metabolism firing at optimum capacity by always eating” sounds good in principle, but reality tells a different story.

2) When you eat smaller meals, you might be less likely to overeat during your regular meals.  I can definitely see some truth here, especially for people who struggle with portion control or don’t know how much food they should be eating.

However, once you educate yourself and take control of your eating, some might find that eating six times a day is very prohibitive and requires a lot of effort.  Along with that, because you’re eating six small meals, I’d argue that you probably never feel “full,” and you might be MORE likely to eat extra calories during each snack.

Although grounded in seemingly logical principles, the “six meals a day” doesn’t work for the reason you think it would (#1), and really only works for people who struggle with portion control (#2).

If we want to think back to the caveman days, we’d have been in serious trouble as a species if we had to eat every three hours.  Do you think Joe caveman pulled out his pocket sundial six times a day to consume his equally portioned meals in Tupperware containers?  Hell no!  He ate when he could, endured and dealt with long periods of NOT eating (no refrigeration or food storage) and his body adapted to still function optimally enough to still go out and catch new food.

A recent study (highlighted by the New York Times) has done a great job of challenging the “six-meals-a-day” technique for weight loss.  

Martin from LeanGains points out two important quotes from the study:

“…The premise underlying the present study was that increasing meal frequency would lead to better short-term appetite regulation and increased dietary compliance; furthermore, it was hypothesized that these predicted beneficial effects of increased meal frequency could have resulted from more favorable gut peptide profiles, potentially leading to greater weight loss. Under the conditions described in the present study, all three hypotheses were rejected.”

“…We had postulated that increasing meal frequency would enhance the compliance to the energy restricted diet thus leading to greater weight loss, an effect possibly mediated by increased fullness. The present results do not support this hypothesis.”

Remember, the type of food you eat matters. Meal frequency is not nearly as important as the quantity and quality of food consumed.  This study reached similar conclusions.

Why intermittent fasting?

Because it can work for you. Although we know that not all calories are created equal, caloric restriction plays a central role in weight loss. When you fast (either for 16 hours per day, or 24 hours every few days), you are also making it easier to restrict your caloric intake over the course of the week. This will give your body a chance to lose weight as you’re simply just eating less calories than you were consuming before. Do this consistently, and it can lead to consistent weight loss and maintenance.

Because it simplifies your day. Rather than having to prepare, pack, eat, and time your meals every 2-3 hours, you simply skip a meal or two and only worry about eating food in your eating window. It’s one less decision you have to make every day.

It requires less time (and potentially money). Rather than having to prepare or purchase three to six meals a day, you only need to prepare two meals.  Instead of stopping what you’re doing six times a day to eat, you simply only have to stop to eat twice.  Rather than having to do the dishes six times, you only have to do them twice. Rather than having to purchase six meals a day, you only need to purchase two.

It promotes stronger insulin sensitivity and increased growth hormone secretion, two keys for weight loss and muscle gain.  This was already explained in the previous section with relevant sources, but intermittent fasting helps you create a double whammy for weight loss.

It can level up your brain, including positively counteracting conditions like Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, and dementia. As explained here in this TEDx talk by Mark Mattson, Professor at Johns Hopkins University and Chief of the Laboratory of Neurosciences at the National Institute on Aging fasting is grounded in serious research and more studies are coming out showing the benefits:

Dr. Rhonda Patrick discusses intermittent fasting protocols here on Tim Ferriss’s Podcast, and Dom Diagostino discusses the importance of fasting here in potentially preventing/mitigating the onset of neurodegenerative diseases

Plus, Wolverine does it.

What are the drawbacks with intermittent fasting?

In my own experimentation over the past three years, I have found very few negative side effects with Intermittent fasting. 

The biggest concern most people have is that Intermittent Fasting will lead to lower energy, focus, and the “holy crap I am hungry” feeling during the fasting period and ruin them. People are concerned that they will spend all morning being miserable because they haven’t consumed any food, and thus will be miserable at work and ineffective at whatever task it is they are working on.

The following are my thoughts and experiences, and your results may vary:

Yes, the initial transition from EATING ALL THE TIME, to intermittent fasting MIGHT be a bit of a jolt to your system; it was for me. However, once I got through the transition after a few days, my body quickly adapted and learned to function just as well only eating a few times a day.

Although I fast for 16 hours per day, the following might help assuage your fears that skipping breakfast will cause your body to eat itself and your brain to implode:

This study explains that in participants after 48-hours of fasting, “cognitive performance, activity, sleep, and mood are not adversely affected in healthy humans by two days of calorie-deprivation.”

“So why do I feel grouchy when I’m not eating breakfast?” In this nerd’s humble opinion, a good portion of the grumpiness is a result of our eating habits. If you eat every three hours normally, your body will start to get hungry every three hours as it learns and becomes used to expecting (and receiving) food every three hours. If you eat breakfast every morning, your body is expecting to wake up and eat food.

Once you retrain your body to NOT expect food all day every day (or first thing in the morning), these side-effects become less of an issue (thanks to a substance our bodies produce called Ghrelin). However, you can expect a few rough mornings and maybe decreased focus at work because all you can think about is the breakfast you’re depriving yourself of. I found this to go away after a few days.

It’s important to understand that Intermittent Fasting is NOT a panacea. Don’t delude yourself into thinking that if you skip breakfast and then eat 4,000 calories of candybars for lunch and dinner that you will lose weight.

If you have an addictive relationship with food and you struggle with portion control, track your calorie intake in your meals to make sure you’re not overeating. If you skip breakfast, you might be so hungry from this that you OVEREAT for lunch and this can lead to weight gain. Again, the important thing here is that with intermittent fasting you’re eating fewer calories than normal because you’re skipping a meal every day.

Think about it in caveman terms again.  We certainly found ways to survive during periods of feast and famine, and that remains true today. imagine if you needed to eat in order to be active: what would hungry cavemen do? They would go find food, and that probably required a ton of effort. It actually takes our bodies about 84 hours of fasting before our glucose levels are adversely affected.  As we’re talking about small fasts (16-24 hour periods), this doesn’t concern us.

AN IMPORTANT CAVEAT: Intermittent Fasting can be more complex for people who have issues with blood sugar regulation, suffer from hypoglycemia, have diabetes, etc. If you fit into this category, check with your doctor or dietitian before adjusting your eating schedule.

I believe more research needs to be done for these particular cases and thus would recommend you do what works best for YOU.

Can I build muscle and gain weight while intermittent fasting?

Absolutely!

In fact, I have been intermittent fasting for the past three years while building muscle and decreasing my body fat percentage.

I still eat roughly the same number of calories I was consuming before, but instead of eating all damn day long, I condense all of my calorie consumption into an eight hour window.

11 AM Work out with heavy strength training in a fasted state.

12 PM Immediately consume 1/2 of my calories for the day (a regular whole-food meal, followed by a calorie-dense homemade shake.)

7 PM Consume the second portion of my calories for the day in a big dinner.

8 PM – 12 PM the next day: Fast for 16 hours.

In a different method, my friend Nate Green packed on a crazy amount of muscle while fasting for a full 24 hours on Sundays.  

I’m not kidding when I say this has revolutionized how I look at muscle building and fat loss.  Ultimately, this method flies in the face of the typical “bulk and cut” techniques of overeating to build muscle (along with adding a lot of fat) before cutting calories to lose fat (along with some muscle) and settling down at a higher weight.

I prefer this method to the bulk-and-cut technique for a few reasons:

There’s far less of a crazy swing. If you are putting on 30 pounds and then cutting 25 to gain 5 lbs of muscle, your body is going through drastic swings of body mass. Your clothes will fit differently, you’ll have different levels of definition, and your body will wonder what the hell is going on.

You’re consuming less food and thus spending less money. Rather than overeating to put on 1 pound of muscle and 4 pounds of fat in a week or two, you’re aiming to eat exactly enough to put on 1 pound of muscle without adding much fat on top of it.  Yeah, it’s a delicate balance, but there’s far less swing involved. You are just slowly, steadily, and consistently building muscle and strength over many months.

There’s never a need to get “vacation-ready”: we all want to look good naked, right?  When you are just adding muscle, you don’t need to worry about getting your body ready before by drastically altering your diet (going on a..

http://ift.tt/2fpmPxv

[neilmillerne]

The Beginner’s Guide to Intermittent Fasting – 2017 Update

“…But Tony the Tiger tells us that breakfast is the most important meal of the day! Grrrrrreat!”

This rule has become so commonplace throughout the society as a whole – especially in the health and fitness industry – that it’s readily accepted as fact:

“Want to lose weight? Make sure you start off with a healthy breakfast, so you can get that metabolism firing first thing in the morning!  “Eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince, and dinner like a pauper.”

“Want to lose more weight? Make sure you eat six small meals throughout the day so your metabolism stays operating at maximum capacity all day long.”

There are even studies that show those that eat earlier in the day lose more weight than those who ate later in the day or skipped a meal.

So, eat breakfast to lose weight and obtain optimal health.  

Case closed…right?

Maybe Not. Maybe there’s way more to the story. As skeptics, we operate from first principles: what if there’s science and research that shows SKIPPING BREAKFAST (the horror! blasphemy!) for optimum efficiency, maximum muscle retention, and body fat loss?

After firmly being on “Team Breakfast” for 28 years of my life, I’ve skipped breakfast for the past 3.5 years and will most likely never go back!

I want to share with you a concept about skipping breakfast (and other meals), and how your health can benefit as a result.

Tony ain’t gonna be happy, but today we’re talking about intermittent fasting. Even Boy George is getting in on the Intermittent Fasting Action (and has read this article!):

Please look into 'Intermittent Fasting'. https://t.co/C2fCylOaWj https://t.co/060k5Ws0bh

— Boy George (@BoyGeorge) May 8, 2017

This is a topic that is controversial (which is funny – you’re just skipping a meal) as it turns a LOT of conventional wisdom on its head. This is why this article is filled with more sources and citations than the normal Nerd Fitness article. Here we go. 

What is intermittent fasting?

Intermittent fasting is not a diet, but rather a dieting pattern.  

In simpler terms: it’s making a conscious decision to skip certain meals on purpose.

By fasting and then feasting on purpose, intermittent fasting generally means that you consume your calories during a specific window of the day, and choose not to eat food for a larger window of time.

There are a few different ways to take advantage of intermittent fasting:

Regularly eat during a specific time period only.  For example, only eating from noon-8 PM, essentially skipping breakfast.  Some people only eat in a 6-hour window, or even a 4-hour window. AKA “feasting” and “fasting” parts of your days.   

Skip two meals one day, taking a full 24-hours off from eating. For example, eating on a normal schedule (finishing dinner at 8PM) and then not eating again until 8PM the following day. So you would eat your normal 3 meals per day, and then occasionally pick a day to skip breakfast and lunch the next day.

Now, you might be thinking: “okay, so by skipping a meal, I just eat less than normally overall, and thus I will lose weight, right?”  

Well, that’s partly true.  

Yes, by cutting out an entire meal each day, you are on average consuming fewer calories per week – even if your two meals per day are slightly bigger than before (which is crucial for losing weight).  

However, as we already know that not all calories are created equal, the timing of meals can also influence how your body reacts.  

How does intermittent fasting work?

With intermittent fasting, your body operates differently when “feasting” compared to when “fasting”:

When you eat a meal, your body spends a few hours processing that food, burning what it can from what you just consumed.  Because it has all of this readily-available, easy to burn energy (thanks to the food you ate), your body will choose to use that as energy rather than the fat you have stored.  This is especially true if you just consumed carbohydrates/sugar, as your body prefers to burn sugar as energy before any other source.

During the “fasted state,” your body doesn’t have a recently consumed meal to use as energy, so it is more likely to pull from the fat stored in your body as its the only energy source readily available.

Burning fat = win.

The same goes for working out in a “fasted” state.  Without a ready supply of glucose and glycogen to pull from (which has been depleted over the course of your fasted state, and hasn’t yet been replenished with a pre-workout meal), your body is forced to adapt and pull from the only source of energy available to it: the fat stored in your cells.

Why does this work?  Our bodies react to energy consumption (eating food) with insulin production. In addition to this, the more sensitive your body is to insulin, the more likely you’ll be to use the food you consume efficiently, which can help lead to weight loss and muscle creation.

Along with that, your body is most sensitive to insulin following a period of fasting. 

Your glycogen (a starch stored in your muscles and liver that your body can burn as fuel when necessary) is depleted during sleep (and thus during fasting), and will be depleted even further during training, which can further increase insulin sensitivity.

This means that a meal immediately following your workout will be stored most efficiently: mostly as glycogen for muscle stores, burned as energy immediately to help with the recovery process, with minimal amounts stored as fat.

Compare this to a regular day (no intermittent fasting):  With insulin sensitivity at normal levels, the carbs and foods consumed will see full glycogen stores, enough glucose in the blood stream, and thus be more likely to get stored as fat.

Not only that, but growth hormone is increased during fasted states (both during sleep and after a period of fasting). Combine this  increased growth hormone secretion, the decrease in insulin production (and thus increase in insulin sensitivity), and you’re essentially priming your body for muscle growth and fat loss with intermittent fasting.

The less science-y version: Intermittent fasting can help teach your body to use the food it consumes more efficiently, and your body can learn to burn fat as fuel when you deprive it of new calories constantly.  For many different physiological reasons, fasting can help promote weight loss and muscle building when done properly.  

Get Your FREE Nerd Fitness Resource Kit

15 Fitness traps you should avoid

Comprehensive beginner's guide to Paleo diet

BONUS: How to level up your life and be the hero of your own story

But why does every health book say “6 small meals?”

There are a few main reasons why diet books recommend six small meals:

1) When you eat a meal, your body does have to burn extra calories just to process that meal.  So, the theory is that if you eat all day long with small meals, your body is constantly burning extra calories and your metabolism is firing at optimal capacity, right? Well, that’s not true.  Whether you eat 2000 calories spread out throughout the day, or 2000 calories in a small window, your body will burn the same number of calories processing the food.  So, the whole “keep your metabolism firing at optimum capacity by always eating” sounds good in principle, but reality tells a different story.

2) When you eat smaller meals, you might be less likely to overeat during your regular meals.  I can definitely see some truth here, especially for people who struggle with portion control or don’t know how much food they should be eating.

However, once you educate yourself and take control of your eating, some might find that eating six times a day is very prohibitive and requires a lot of effort.  Along with that, because you’re eating six small meals, I’d argue that you probably never feel “full,” and you might be MORE likely to eat extra calories during each snack.

Although grounded in seemingly logical principles, the “six meals a day” doesn’t work for the reason you think it would (#1), and really only works for people who struggle with portion control (#2).

If we want to think back to the caveman days, we’d have been in serious trouble as a species if we had to eat every three hours.  Do you think Joe caveman pulled out his pocket sundial six times a day to consume his equally portioned meals in Tupperware containers?  Hell no!  He ate when he could, endured and dealt with long periods of NOT eating (no refrigeration or food storage) and his body adapted to still function optimally enough to still go out and catch new food.

A recent study (highlighted by the New York Times) has done a great job of challenging the “six-meals-a-day” technique for weight loss.  

Martin from LeanGains points out two important quotes from the study:

“…The premise underlying the present study was that increasing meal frequency would lead to better short-term appetite regulation and increased dietary compliance; furthermore, it was hypothesized that these predicted beneficial effects of increased meal frequency could have resulted from more favorable gut peptide profiles, potentially leading to greater weight loss. Under the conditions described in the present study, all three hypotheses were rejected.”

“…We had postulated that increasing meal frequency would enhance the compliance to the energy restricted diet thus leading to greater weight loss, an effect possibly mediated by increased fullness. The present results do not support this hypothesis.”

Remember, the type of food you eat matters. Meal frequency is not nearly as important as the quantity and quality of food consumed.  This study reached similar conclusions.

Why intermittent fasting?

Because it can work for you. Although we know that not all calories are created equal, caloric restriction plays a central role in weight loss. When you fast (either for 16 hours per day, or 24 hours every few days), you are also making it easier to restrict your caloric intake over the course of the week. This will give your body a chance to lose weight as you’re simply just eating less calories than you were consuming before. Do this consistently, and it can lead to consistent weight loss and maintenance.

Because it simplifies your day. Rather than having to prepare, pack, eat, and time your meals every 2-3 hours, you simply skip a meal or two and only worry about eating food in your eating window. It’s one less decision you have to make every day.

It requires less time (and potentially money). Rather than having to prepare or purchase three to six meals a day, you only need to prepare two meals.  Instead of stopping what you’re doing six times a day to eat, you simply only have to stop to eat twice.  Rather than having to do the dishes six times, you only have to do them twice. Rather than having to purchase six meals a day, you only need to purchase two.

It promotes stronger insulin sensitivity and increased growth hormone secretion, two keys for weight loss and muscle gain.  This was already explained in the previous section with relevant sources, but intermittent fasting helps you create a double whammy for weight loss.

It can level up your brain, including positively counteracting conditions like Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, and dementia. As explained here in this TEDx talk by Mark Mattson, Professor at Johns Hopkins University and Chief of the Laboratory of Neurosciences at the National Institute on Aging fasting is grounded in serious research and more studies are coming out showing the benefits:

Dr. Rhonda Patrick discusses intermittent fasting protocols here on Tim Ferriss’s Podcast, and Dom Diagostino discusses the importance of fasting here in potentially preventing/mitigating the onset of neurodegenerative diseases

Plus, Wolverine does it.

What are the drawbacks with intermittent fasting?

In my own experimentation over the past three years, I have found very few negative side effects with Intermittent fasting. 

The biggest concern most people have is that Intermittent Fasting will lead to lower energy, focus, and the “holy crap I am hungry” feeling during the fasting period and ruin them. People are concerned that they will spend all morning being miserable because they haven’t consumed any food, and thus will be miserable at work and ineffective at whatever task it is they are working on.

The following are my thoughts and experiences, and your results may vary:

Yes, the initial transition from EATING ALL THE TIME, to intermittent fasting MIGHT be a bit of a jolt to your system; it was for me. However, once I got through the transition after a few days, my body quickly adapted and learned to function just as well only eating a few times a day.

Although I fast for 16 hours per day, the following might help assuage your fears that skipping breakfast will cause your body to eat itself and your brain to implode:

This study explains that in participants after 48-hours of fasting, “cognitive performance, activity, sleep, and mood are not adversely affected in healthy humans by two days of calorie-deprivation.”

“So why do I feel grouchy when I’m not eating breakfast?” In this nerd’s humble opinion, a good portion of the grumpiness is a result of our eating habits. If you eat every three hours normally, your body will start to get hungry every three hours as it learns and becomes used to expecting (and receiving) food every three hours. If you eat breakfast every morning, your body is expecting to wake up and eat food.

Once you retrain your body to NOT expect food all day every day (or first thing in the morning), these side-effects become less of an issue (thanks to a substance our bodies produce called Ghrelin). However, you can expect a few rough mornings and maybe decreased focus at work because all you can think about is the breakfast you’re depriving yourself of. I found this to go away after a few days.

It’s important to understand that Intermittent Fasting is NOT a panacea. Don’t delude yourself into thinking that if you skip breakfast and then eat 4,000 calories of candybars for lunch and dinner that you will lose weight.

If you have an addictive relationship with food and you struggle with portion control, track your calorie intake in your meals to make sure you’re not overeating. If you skip breakfast, you might be so hungry from this that you OVEREAT for lunch and this can lead to weight gain. Again, the important thing here is that with intermittent fasting you’re eating fewer calories than normal because you’re skipping a meal every day.

Think about it in caveman terms again.  We certainly found ways to survive during periods of feast and famine, and that remains true today. imagine if you needed to eat in order to be active: what would hungry cavemen do? They would go find food, and that probably required a ton of effort. It actually takes our bodies about 84 hours of fasting before our glucose levels are adversely affected.  As we’re talking about small fasts (16-24 hour periods), this doesn’t concern us.

AN IMPORTANT CAVEAT: Intermittent Fasting can be more complex for people who have issues with blood sugar regulation, suffer from hypoglycemia, have diabetes, etc. If you fit into this category, check with your doctor or dietitian before adjusting your eating schedule.

I believe more research needs to be done for these particular cases and thus would recommend you do what works best for YOU.

Can I build muscle and gain weight while intermittent fasting?

Absolutely!

In fact, I have been intermittent fasting for the past three years while building muscle and decreasing my body fat percentage.

I still eat roughly the same number of calories I was consuming before, but instead of eating all damn day long, I condense all of my calorie consumption into an eight hour window.

11 AM Work out with heavy strength training in a fasted state.

12 PM Immediately consume 1/2 of my calories for the day (a regular whole-food meal, followed by a calorie-dense homemade shake.)

7 PM Consume the second portion of my calories for the day in a big dinner.

8 PM – 12 PM the next day: Fast for 16 hours.

In a different method, my friend Nate Green packed on a crazy amount of muscle while fasting for a full 24 hours on Sundays.  

I’m not kidding when I say this has revolutionized how I look at muscle building and fat loss.  Ultimately, this method flies in the face of the typical “bulk and cut” techniques of overeating to build muscle (along with adding a lot of fat) before cutting calories to lose fat (along with some muscle) and settling down at a higher weight.

I prefer this method to the bulk-and-cut technique for a few reasons:

There’s far less of a crazy swing. If you are putting on 30 pounds and then cutting 25 to gain 5 lbs of muscle, your body is going through drastic swings of body mass. Your clothes will fit differently, you’ll have different levels of definition, and your body will wonder what the hell is going on.

You’re consuming less food and thus spending less money. Rather than overeating to put on 1 pound of muscle and 4 pounds of fat in a week or two, you’re aiming to eat exactly enough to put on 1 pound of muscle without adding much fat on top of it.  Yeah, it’s a delicate balance, but there’s far less swing involved. You are just slowly, steadily, and consistently building muscle and strength over many months.

There’s never a need to get “vacation-ready”: we all want to look good naked, right?  When you are just adding muscle, you don’t need to worry about getting your body ready before by drastically altering your diet (going on a..

http://ift.tt/2fpmPxv

[johnclapperne]

The Beginner’s Guide to Intermittent Fasting – 2017 Update

“…But Tony the Tiger tells us that breakfast is the most important meal of the day! Grrrrrreat!”

This rule has become so commonplace throughout the society as a whole – especially in the health and fitness industry – that it’s readily accepted as fact:

“Want to lose weight? Make sure you start off with a healthy breakfast, so you can get that metabolism firing first thing in the morning!  “Eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince, and dinner like a pauper.”

“Want to lose more weight? Make sure you eat six small meals throughout the day so your metabolism stays operating at maximum capacity all day long.”

There are even studies that show those that eat earlier in the day lose more weight than those who ate later in the day or skipped a meal.

So, eat breakfast to lose weight and obtain optimal health.  

Case closed…right?

Maybe Not. Maybe there’s way more to the story. As skeptics, we operate from first principles: what if there’s science and research that shows SKIPPING BREAKFAST (the horror! blasphemy!) for optimum efficiency, maximum muscle retention, and body fat loss?

After firmly being on “Team Breakfast” for 28 years of my life, I’ve skipped breakfast for the past 3.5 years and will most likely never go back!

I want to share with you a concept about skipping breakfast (and other meals), and how your health can benefit as a result.

Tony ain’t gonna be happy, but today we’re talking about intermittent fasting. Even Boy George is getting in on the Intermittent Fasting Action (and has read this article!):

Please look into 'Intermittent Fasting'. https://t.co/C2fCylOaWj https://t.co/060k5Ws0bh

— Boy George (@BoyGeorge) May 8, 2017

This is a topic that is controversial (which is funny – you’re just skipping a meal) as it turns a LOT of conventional wisdom on its head. This is why this article is filled with more sources and citations than the normal Nerd Fitness article. Here we go. 

What is intermittent fasting?

Intermittent fasting is not a diet, but rather a dieting pattern.  

In simpler terms: it’s making a conscious decision to skip certain meals on purpose.

By fasting and then feasting on purpose, intermittent fasting generally means that you consume your calories during a specific window of the day, and choose not to eat food for a larger window of time.

There are a few different ways to take advantage of intermittent fasting:

Regularly eat during a specific time period only.  For example, only eating from noon-8 PM, essentially skipping breakfast.  Some people only eat in a 6-hour window, or even a 4-hour window. AKA “feasting” and “fasting” parts of your days.   

Skip two meals one day, taking a full 24-hours off from eating. For example, eating on a normal schedule (finishing dinner at 8PM) and then not eating again until 8PM the following day. So you would eat your normal 3 meals per day, and then occasionally pick a day to skip breakfast and lunch the next day.

Now, you might be thinking: “okay, so by skipping a meal, I just eat less than normally overall, and thus I will lose weight, right?”  

Well, that’s partly true.  

Yes, by cutting out an entire meal each day, you are on average consuming fewer calories per week – even if your two meals per day are slightly bigger than before (which is crucial for losing weight).  

However, as we already know that not all calories are created equal, the timing of meals can also influence how your body reacts.  

How does intermittent fasting work?

With intermittent fasting, your body operates differently when “feasting” compared to when “fasting”:

When you eat a meal, your body spends a few hours processing that food, burning what it can from what you just consumed.  Because it has all of this readily-available, easy to burn energy (thanks to the food you ate), your body will choose to use that as energy rather than the fat you have stored.  This is especially true if you just consumed carbohydrates/sugar, as your body prefers to burn sugar as energy before any other source.

During the “fasted state,” your body doesn’t have a recently consumed meal to use as energy, so it is more likely to pull from the fat stored in your body as its the only energy source readily available.

Burning fat = win.

The same goes for working out in a “fasted” state.  Without a ready supply of glucose and glycogen to pull from (which has been depleted over the course of your fasted state, and hasn’t yet been replenished with a pre-workout meal), your body is forced to adapt and pull from the only source of energy available to it: the fat stored in your cells.

Why does this work?  Our bodies react to energy consumption (eating food) with insulin production. In addition to this, the more sensitive your body is to insulin, the more likely you’ll be to use the food you consume efficiently, which can help lead to weight loss and muscle creation.

Along with that, your body is most sensitive to insulin following a period of fasting. 

Your glycogen (a starch stored in your muscles and liver that your body can burn as fuel when necessary) is depleted during sleep (and thus during fasting), and will be depleted even further during training, which can further increase insulin sensitivity.

This means that a meal immediately following your workout will be stored most efficiently: mostly as glycogen for muscle stores, burned as energy immediately to help with the recovery process, with minimal amounts stored as fat.

Compare this to a regular day (no intermittent fasting):  With insulin sensitivity at normal levels, the carbs and foods consumed will see full glycogen stores, enough glucose in the blood stream, and thus be more likely to get stored as fat.

Not only that, but growth hormone is increased during fasted states (both during sleep and after a period of fasting). Combine this  increased growth hormone secretion, the decrease in insulin production (and thus increase in insulin sensitivity), and you’re essentially priming your body for muscle growth and fat loss with intermittent fasting.

The less science-y version: Intermittent fasting can help teach your body to use the food it consumes more efficiently, and your body can learn to burn fat as fuel when you deprive it of new calories constantly.  For many different physiological reasons, fasting can help promote weight loss and muscle building when done properly.  

Get Your FREE Nerd Fitness Resource Kit

15 Fitness traps you should avoid

Comprehensive beginner's guide to Paleo diet

BONUS: How to level up your life and be the hero of your own story

But why does every health book say “6 small meals?”

There are a few main reasons why diet books recommend six small meals:

1) When you eat a meal, your body does have to burn extra calories just to process that meal.  So, the theory is that if you eat all day long with small meals, your body is constantly burning extra calories and your metabolism is firing at optimal capacity, right? Well, that’s not true.  Whether you eat 2000 calories spread out throughout the day, or 2000 calories in a small window, your body will burn the same number of calories processing the food.  So, the whole “keep your metabolism firing at optimum capacity by always eating” sounds good in principle, but reality tells a different story.

2) When you eat smaller meals, you might be less likely to overeat during your regular meals.  I can definitely see some truth here, especially for people who struggle with portion control or don’t know how much food they should be eating.

However, once you educate yourself and take control of your eating, some might find that eating six times a day is very prohibitive and requires a lot of effort.  Along with that, because you’re eating six small meals, I’d argue that you probably never feel “full,” and you might be MORE likely to eat extra calories during each snack.

Although grounded in seemingly logical principles, the “six meals a day” doesn’t work for the reason you think it would (#1), and really only works for people who struggle with portion control (#2).

If we want to think back to the caveman days, we’d have been in serious trouble as a species if we had to eat every three hours.  Do you think Joe caveman pulled out his pocket sundial six times a day to consume his equally portioned meals in Tupperware containers?  Hell no!  He ate when he could, endured and dealt with long periods of NOT eating (no refrigeration or food storage) and his body adapted to still function optimally enough to still go out and catch new food.

A recent study (highlighted by the New York Times) has done a great job of challenging the “six-meals-a-day” technique for weight loss.  

Martin from LeanGains points out two important quotes from the study:

“…The premise underlying the present study was that increasing meal frequency would lead to better short-term appetite regulation and increased dietary compliance; furthermore, it was hypothesized that these predicted beneficial effects of increased meal frequency could have resulted from more favorable gut peptide profiles, potentially leading to greater weight loss. Under the conditions described in the present study, all three hypotheses were rejected.”

“…We had postulated that increasing meal frequency would enhance the compliance to the energy restricted diet thus leading to greater weight loss, an effect possibly mediated by increased fullness. The present results do not support this hypothesis.”

Remember, the type of food you eat matters. Meal frequency is not nearly as important as the quantity and quality of food consumed.  This study reached similar conclusions.

Why intermittent fasting?

Because it can work for you. Although we know that not all calories are created equal, caloric restriction plays a central role in weight loss. When you fast (either for 16 hours per day, or 24 hours every few days), you are also making it easier to restrict your caloric intake over the course of the week. This will give your body a chance to lose weight as you’re simply just eating less calories than you were consuming before. Do this consistently, and it can lead to consistent weight loss and maintenance.

Because it simplifies your day. Rather than having to prepare, pack, eat, and time your meals every 2-3 hours, you simply skip a meal or two and only worry about eating food in your eating window. It’s one less decision you have to make every day.

It requires less time (and potentially money). Rather than having to prepare or purchase three to six meals a day, you only need to prepare two meals.  Instead of stopping what you’re doing six times a day to eat, you simply only have to stop to eat twice.  Rather than having to do the dishes six times, you only have to do them twice. Rather than having to purchase six meals a day, you only need to purchase two.

It promotes stronger insulin sensitivity and increased growth hormone secretion, two keys for weight loss and muscle gain.  This was already explained in the previous section with relevant sources, but intermittent fasting helps you create a double whammy for weight loss.

It can level up your brain, including positively counteracting conditions like Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, and dementia. As explained here in this TEDx talk by Mark Mattson, Professor at Johns Hopkins University and Chief of the Laboratory of Neurosciences at the National Institute on Aging fasting is grounded in serious research and more studies are coming out showing the benefits:

Dr. Rhonda Patrick discusses intermittent fasting protocols here on Tim Ferriss’s Podcast, and Dom Diagostino discusses the importance of fasting here in potentially preventing/mitigating the onset of neurodegenerative diseases

Plus, Wolverine does it.

What are the drawbacks with intermittent fasting?

In my own experimentation over the past three years, I have found very few negative side effects with Intermittent fasting. 

The biggest concern most people have is that Intermittent Fasting will lead to lower energy, focus, and the “holy crap I am hungry” feeling during the fasting period and ruin them. People are concerned that they will spend all morning being miserable because they haven’t consumed any food, and thus will be miserable at work and ineffective at whatever task it is they are working on.

The following are my thoughts and experiences, and your results may vary:

Yes, the initial transition from EATING ALL THE TIME, to intermittent fasting MIGHT be a bit of a jolt to your system; it was for me. However, once I got through the transition after a few days, my body quickly adapted and learned to function just as well only eating a few times a day.

Although I fast for 16 hours per day, the following might help assuage your fears that skipping breakfast will cause your body to eat itself and your brain to implode:

This study explains that in participants after 48-hours of fasting, “cognitive performance, activity, sleep, and mood are not adversely affected in healthy humans by two days of calorie-deprivation.”

“So why do I feel grouchy when I’m not eating breakfast?” In this nerd’s humble opinion, a good portion of the grumpiness is a result of our eating habits. If you eat every three hours normally, your body will start to get hungry every three hours as it learns and becomes used to expecting (and receiving) food every three hours. If you eat breakfast every morning, your body is expecting to wake up and eat food.

Once you retrain your body to NOT expect food all day every day (or first thing in the morning), these side-effects become less of an issue (thanks to a substance our bodies produce called Ghrelin). However, you can expect a few rough mornings and maybe decreased focus at work because all you can think about is the breakfast you’re depriving yourself of. I found this to go away after a few days.

It’s important to understand that Intermittent Fasting is NOT a panacea. Don’t delude yourself into thinking that if you skip breakfast and then eat 4,000 calories of candybars for lunch and dinner that you will lose weight.

If you have an addictive relationship with food and you struggle with portion control, track your calorie intake in your meals to make sure you’re not overeating. If you skip breakfast, you might be so hungry from this that you OVEREAT for lunch and this can lead to weight gain. Again, the important thing here is that with intermittent fasting you’re eating fewer calories than normal because you’re skipping a meal every day.

Think about it in caveman terms again.  We certainly found ways to survive during periods of feast and famine, and that remains true today. imagine if you needed to eat in order to be active: what would hungry cavemen do? They would go find food, and that probably required a ton of effort. It actually takes our bodies about 84 hours of fasting before our glucose levels are adversely affected.  As we’re talking about small fasts (16-24 hour periods), this doesn’t concern us.

AN IMPORTANT CAVEAT: Intermittent Fasting can be more complex for people who have issues with blood sugar regulation, suffer from hypoglycemia, have diabetes, etc. If you fit into this category, check with your doctor or dietitian before adjusting your eating schedule.

I believe more research needs to be done for these particular cases and thus would recommend you do what works best for YOU.

Can I build muscle and gain weight while intermittent fasting?

Absolutely!

In fact, I have been intermittent fasting for the past three years while building muscle and decreasing my body fat percentage.

I still eat roughly the same number of calories I was consuming before, but instead of eating all damn day long, I condense all of my calorie consumption into an eight hour window.

11 AM Work out with heavy strength training in a fasted state.

12 PM Immediately consume 1/2 of my calories for the day (a regular whole-food meal, followed by a calorie-dense homemade shake.)

7 PM Consume the second portion of my calories for the day in a big dinner.

8 PM – 12 PM the next day: Fast for 16 hours.

In a different method, my friend Nate Green packed on a crazy amount of muscle while fasting for a full 24 hours on Sundays.  

I’m not kidding when I say this has revolutionized how I look at muscle building and fat loss.  Ultimately, this method flies in the face of the typical “bulk and cut” techniques of overeating to build muscle (along with adding a lot of fat) before cutting calories to lose fat (along with some muscle) and settling down at a higher weight.

I prefer this method to the bulk-and-cut technique for a few reasons:

There’s far less of a crazy swing. If you are putting on 30 pounds and then cutting 25 to gain 5 lbs of muscle, your body is going through drastic swings of body mass. Your clothes will fit differently, you’ll have different levels of definition, and your body will wonder what the hell is going on.

You’re consuming less food and thus spending less money. Rather than overeating to put on 1 pound of muscle and 4 pounds of fat in a week or two, you’re aiming to eat exactly enough to put on 1 pound of muscle without adding much fat on top of it.  Yeah, it’s a delicate balance, but there’s far less swing involved. You are just slowly, steadily, and consistently building muscle and strength over many months.

There’s never a need to get “vacation-ready”: we all want to look good naked, right?  When you are just adding muscle, you don’t need to worry about getting your body ready before by drastically altering your diet (going on a..

http://ift.tt/2fpmPxv

[ruthellisneda]

The Beginner’s Guide to Intermittent Fasting – 2017 Update

“…But Tony the Tiger tells us that breakfast is the most important meal of the day! Grrrrrreat!”

This rule has become so commonplace throughout the society as a whole – especially in the health and fitness industry – that it’s readily accepted as fact:

“Want to lose weight? Make sure you start off with a healthy breakfast, so you can get that metabolism firing first thing in the morning!  “Eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince, and dinner like a pauper.”

“Want to lose more weight? Make sure you eat six small meals throughout the day so your metabolism stays operating at maximum capacity all day long.”

There are even studies that show those that eat earlier in the day lose more weight than those who ate later in the day or skipped a meal.

So, eat breakfast to lose weight and obtain optimal health.  

Case closed…right?

Maybe Not. Maybe there’s way more to the story. As skeptics, we operate from first principles: what if there’s science and research that shows SKIPPING BREAKFAST (the horror! blasphemy!) for optimum efficiency, maximum muscle retention, and body fat loss?

After firmly being on “Team Breakfast” for 28 years of my life, I’ve skipped breakfast for the past 3.5 years and will most likely never go back!

I want to share with you a concept about skipping breakfast (and other meals), and how your health can benefit as a result.

Tony ain’t gonna be happy, but today we’re talking about intermittent fasting. Even Boy George is getting in on the Intermittent Fasting Action (and has read this article!):

Please look into 'Intermittent Fasting'. https://t.co/C2fCylOaWj https://t.co/060k5Ws0bh

— Boy George (@BoyGeorge) May 8, 2017

This is a topic that is controversial (which is funny – you’re just skipping a meal) as it turns a LOT of conventional wisdom on its head. This is why this article is filled with more sources and citations than the normal Nerd Fitness article. Here we go. 

What is intermittent fasting?

Intermittent fasting is not a diet, but rather a dieting pattern.  

In simpler terms: it’s making a conscious decision to skip certain meals on purpose.

By fasting and then feasting on purpose, intermittent fasting generally means that you consume your calories during a specific window of the day, and choose not to eat food for a larger window of time.

There are a few different ways to take advantage of intermittent fasting:

Regularly eat during a specific time period only.  For example, only eating from noon-8 PM, essentially skipping breakfast.  Some people only eat in a 6-hour window, or even a 4-hour window. AKA “feasting” and “fasting” parts of your days.   

Skip two meals one day, taking a full 24-hours off from eating. For example, eating on a normal schedule (finishing dinner at 8PM) and then not eating again until 8PM the following day. So you would eat your normal 3 meals per day, and then occasionally pick a day to skip breakfast and lunch the next day.

Now, you might be thinking: “okay, so by skipping a meal, I just eat less than normally overall, and thus I will lose weight, right?”  

Well, that’s partly true.  

Yes, by cutting out an entire meal each day, you are on average consuming fewer calories per week – even if your two meals per day are slightly bigger than before (which is crucial for losing weight).  

However, as we already know that not all calories are created equal, the timing of meals can also influence how your body reacts.  

How does intermittent fasting work?

With intermittent fasting, your body operates differently when “feasting” compared to when “fasting”:

When you eat a meal, your body spends a few hours processing that food, burning what it can from what you just consumed.  Because it has all of this readily-available, easy to burn energy (thanks to the food you ate), your body will choose to use that as energy rather than the fat you have stored.  This is especially true if you just consumed carbohydrates/sugar, as your body prefers to burn sugar as energy before any other source.

During the “fasted state,” your body doesn’t have a recently consumed meal to use as energy, so it is more likely to pull from the fat stored in your body as its the only energy source readily available.

Burning fat = win.

The same goes for working out in a “fasted” state.  Without a ready supply of glucose and glycogen to pull from (which has been depleted over the course of your fasted state, and hasn’t yet been replenished with a pre-workout meal), your body is forced to adapt and pull from the only source of energy available to it: the fat stored in your cells.

Why does this work?  Our bodies react to energy consumption (eating food) with insulin production. In addition to this, the more sensitive your body is to insulin, the more likely you’ll be to use the food you consume efficiently, which can help lead to weight loss and muscle creation.

Along with that, your body is most sensitive to insulin following a period of fasting. 

Your glycogen (a starch stored in your muscles and liver that your body can burn as fuel when necessary) is depleted during sleep (and thus during fasting), and will be depleted even further during training, which can further increase insulin sensitivity.

This means that a meal immediately following your workout will be stored most efficiently: mostly as glycogen for muscle stores, burned as energy immediately to help with the recovery process, with minimal amounts stored as fat.

Compare this to a regular day (no intermittent fasting):  With insulin sensitivity at normal levels, the carbs and foods consumed will see full glycogen stores, enough glucose in the blood stream, and thus be more likely to get stored as fat.

Not only that, but growth hormone is increased during fasted states (both during sleep and after a period of fasting). Combine this  increased growth hormone secretion, the decrease in insulin production (and thus increase in insulin sensitivity), and you’re essentially priming your body for muscle growth and fat loss with intermittent fasting.

The less science-y version: Intermittent fasting can help teach your body to use the food it consumes more efficiently, and your body can learn to burn fat as fuel when you deprive it of new calories constantly.  For many different physiological reasons, fasting can help promote weight loss and muscle building when done properly.  

Get Your FREE Nerd Fitness Resource Kit

15 Fitness traps you should avoid

Comprehensive beginner's guide to Paleo diet

BONUS: How to level up your life and be the hero of your own story

But why does every health book say “6 small meals?”

There are a few main reasons why diet books recommend six small meals:

1) When you eat a meal, your body does have to burn extra calories just to process that meal.  So, the theory is that if you eat all day long with small meals, your body is constantly burning extra calories and your metabolism is firing at optimal capacity, right? Well, that’s not true.  Whether you eat 2000 calories spread out throughout the day, or 2000 calories in a small window, your body will burn the same number of calories processing the food.  So, the whole “keep your metabolism firing at optimum capacity by always eating” sounds good in principle, but reality tells a different story.

2) When you eat smaller meals, you might be less likely to overeat during your regular meals.  I can definitely see some truth here, especially for people who struggle with portion control or don’t know how much food they should be eating.

However, once you educate yourself and take control of your eating, some might find that eating six times a day is very prohibitive and requires a lot of effort.  Along with that, because you’re eating six small meals, I’d argue that you probably never feel “full,” and you might be MORE likely to eat extra calories during each snack.

Although grounded in seemingly logical principles, the “six meals a day” doesn’t work for the reason you think it would (#1), and really only works for people who struggle with portion control (#2).

If we want to think back to the caveman days, we’d have been in serious trouble as a species if we had to eat every three hours.  Do you think Joe caveman pulled out his pocket sundial six times a day to consume his equally portioned meals in Tupperware containers?  Hell no!  He ate when he could, endured and dealt with long periods of NOT eating (no refrigeration or food storage) and his body adapted to still function optimally enough to still go out and catch new food.

A recent study (highlighted by the New York Times) has done a great job of challenging the “six-meals-a-day” technique for weight loss.  

Martin from LeanGains points out two important quotes from the study:

“…The premise underlying the present study was that increasing meal frequency would lead to better short-term appetite regulation and increased dietary compliance; furthermore, it was hypothesized that these predicted beneficial effects of increased meal frequency could have resulted from more favorable gut peptide profiles, potentially leading to greater weight loss. Under the conditions described in the present study, all three hypotheses were rejected.”

“…We had postulated that increasing meal frequency would enhance the compliance to the energy restricted diet thus leading to greater weight loss, an effect possibly mediated by increased fullness. The present results do not support this hypothesis.”

Remember, the type of food you eat matters. Meal frequency is not nearly as important as the quantity and quality of food consumed.  This study reached similar conclusions.

Why intermittent fasting?

Because it can work for you. Although we know that not all calories are created equal, caloric restriction plays a central role in weight loss. When you fast (either for 16 hours per day, or 24 hours every few days), you are also making it easier to restrict your caloric intake over the course of the week. This will give your body a chance to lose weight as you’re simply just eating less calories than you were consuming before. Do this consistently, and it can lead to consistent weight loss and maintenance.

Because it simplifies your day. Rather than having to prepare, pack, eat, and time your meals every 2-3 hours, you simply skip a meal or two and only worry about eating food in your eating window. It’s one less decision you have to make every day.

It requires less time (and potentially money). Rather than having to prepare or purchase three to six meals a day, you only need to prepare two meals.  Instead of stopping what you’re doing six times a day to eat, you simply only have to stop to eat twice.  Rather than having to do the dishes six times, you only have to do them twice. Rather than having to purchase six meals a day, you only need to purchase two.

It promotes stronger insulin sensitivity and increased growth hormone secretion, two keys for weight loss and muscle gain.  This was already explained in the previous section with relevant sources, but intermittent fasting helps you create a double whammy for weight loss.

It can level up your brain, including positively counteracting conditions like Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, and dementia. As explained here in this TEDx talk by Mark Mattson, Professor at Johns Hopkins University and Chief of the Laboratory of Neurosciences at the National Institute on Aging fasting is grounded in serious research and more studies are coming out showing the benefits:

Dr. Rhonda Patrick discusses intermittent fasting protocols here on Tim Ferriss’s Podcast, and Dom Diagostino discusses the importance of fasting here in potentially preventing/mitigating the onset of neurodegenerative diseases

Plus, Wolverine does it.

What are the drawbacks with intermittent fasting?

In my own experimentation over the past three years, I have found very few negative side effects with Intermittent fasting. 

The biggest concern most people have is that Intermittent Fasting will lead to lower energy, focus, and the “holy crap I am hungry” feeling during the fasting period and ruin them. People are concerned that they will spend all morning being miserable because they haven’t consumed any food, and thus will be miserable at work and ineffective at whatever task it is they are working on.

The following are my thoughts and experiences, and your results may vary:

Yes, the initial transition from EATING ALL THE TIME, to intermittent fasting MIGHT be a bit of a jolt to your system; it was for me. However, once I got through the transition after a few days, my body quickly adapted and learned to function just as well only eating a few times a day.

Although I fast for 16 hours per day, the following might help assuage your fears that skipping breakfast will cause your body to eat itself and your brain to implode:

This study explains that in participants after 48-hours of fasting, “cognitive performance, activity, sleep, and mood are not adversely affected in healthy humans by two days of calorie-deprivation.”

“So why do I feel grouchy when I’m not eating breakfast?” In this nerd’s humble opinion, a good portion of the grumpiness is a result of our eating habits. If you eat every three hours normally, your body will start to get hungry every three hours as it learns and becomes used to expecting (and receiving) food every three hours. If you eat breakfast every morning, your body is expecting to wake up and eat food.

Once you retrain your body to NOT expect food all day every day (or first thing in the morning), these side-effects become less of an issue (thanks to a substance our bodies produce called Ghrelin). However, you can expect a few rough mornings and maybe decreased focus at work because all you can think about is the breakfast you’re depriving yourself of. I found this to go away after a few days.

It’s important to understand that Intermittent Fasting is NOT a panacea. Don’t delude yourself into thinking that if you skip breakfast and then eat 4,000 calories of candybars for lunch and dinner that you will lose weight.

If you have an addictive relationship with food and you struggle with portion control, track your calorie intake in your meals to make sure you’re not overeating. If you skip breakfast, you might be so hungry from this that you OVEREAT for lunch and this can lead to weight gain. Again, the important thing here is that with intermittent fasting you’re eating fewer calories than normal because you’re skipping a meal every day.

Think about it in caveman terms again.  We certainly found ways to survive during periods of feast and famine, and that remains true today. imagine if you needed to eat in order to be active: what would hungry cavemen do? They would go find food, and that probably required a ton of effort. It actually takes our bodies about 84 hours of fasting before our glucose levels are adversely affected.  As we’re talking about small fasts (16-24 hour periods), this doesn’t concern us.

AN IMPORTANT CAVEAT: Intermittent Fasting can be more complex for people who have issues with blood sugar regulation, suffer from hypoglycemia, have diabetes, etc. If you fit into this category, check with your doctor or dietitian before adjusting your eating schedule.

I believe more research needs to be done for these particular cases and thus would recommend you do what works best for YOU.

Can I build muscle and gain weight while intermittent fasting?

Absolutely!

In fact, I have been intermittent fasting for the past three years while building muscle and decreasing my body fat percentage.

I still eat roughly the same number of calories I was consuming before, but instead of eating all damn day long, I condense all of my calorie consumption into an eight hour window.

11 AM Work out with heavy strength training in a fasted state.

12 PM Immediately consume 1/2 of my calories for the day (a regular whole-food meal, followed by a calorie-dense homemade shake.)

7 PM Consume the second portion of my calories for the day in a big dinner.

8 PM – 12 PM the next day: Fast for 16 hours.

In a different method, my friend Nate Green packed on a crazy amount of muscle while fasting for a full 24 hours on Sundays.  

I’m not kidding when I say this has revolutionized how I look at muscle building and fat loss.  Ultimately, this method flies in the face of the typical “bulk and cut” techniques of overeating to build muscle (along with adding a lot of fat) before cutting calories to lose fat (along with some muscle) and settling down at a higher weight.

I prefer this method to the bulk-and-cut technique for a few reasons:

There’s far less of a crazy swing. If you are putting on 30 pounds and then cutting 25 to gain 5 lbs of muscle, your body is going through drastic swings of body mass. Your clothes will fit differently, you’ll have different levels of definition, and your body will wonder what the hell is going on.

You’re consuming less food and thus spending less money. Rather than overeating to put on 1 pound of muscle and 4 pounds of fat in a week or two, you’re aiming to eat exactly enough to put on 1 pound of muscle without adding much fat on top of it.  Yeah, it’s a delicate balance, but there’s far less swing involved. You are just slowly, steadily, and consistently building muscle and strength over many months.

There’s never a need to get “vacation-ready”: we all want to look good naked, right?  When you are just adding muscle, you don’t need to worry about getting your body ready before by drastically altering your diet (going on a..

http://ift.tt/2fpmPxv

[joshuabradleyn]

The Beginner’s Guide to Intermittent Fasting (2017 Update)

“…But Tony the Tiger tells us that breakfast is the most important meal of the day!”

This rule has become so commonplace throughout the health and fitness community that it’s readily accepted as fact:

“Want to lose weight? Make sure you start off with a healthy breakfast, so you can get that metabolism firing first thing in the morning!  Eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince, and dinner like a pauper.”

“Want to lose more weight? Make sure you eat six small meals throughout the day so your metabolism stays operating at maximum capacity all day long”.

There are even studies that show those that eat earlier in the day lose more weight than those who ate later in the day or skipped a meal.

So, eat breakfast to lose weight and obtain optimal health.  Case closed…right?

Maybe you’re not getting the whole story. As skeptics, what we need to ask: what if there’s science and research that promotes SKIPPING BREAKFAST (the horror! blasphemy!) for optimum efficiency, maximum muscle retention, and body fat loss?

After firmly being on “Team Breakfast” for 28 years of my life, I’ve skipped breakfast for the past three years and will most likely not go back.

I want to share with you a concept about skipping breakfast (and other meals), and how your health can benefit as a result.

Tony ain’t gonna be happy, but today we’re talking about intermittent fasting.

This is a topic that is controversial (which is funny – you’re just skippin ga meal) as it turns a LOT of conventional wisdom on its head. This is why this article is filled with more sources and citations than Jim Carrey’s glove compartment.

What is intermittent fasting?

Intermittent fasting is not a diet, but rather a dieting pattern.  

In simpler terms: it’s making a conscious decision to skip certain meals.

By fasting and then feasting on purpose, intermittent fasting means eating your calories during a specific window of the day, and choosing not to eat food during the rest.

Now, there are a few different ways to take advantage of intermittent fasting:

Regularly eat during a specific time period.  For example, only eating from noon-8 PM, essentially skipping breakfast.  Some people only eat in a 6-hour window, or even a 4-hour window. AKA “feasting” and “fasting” parts of your days.   

Skip two meals one day, taking a full 24-hours off from eating. For example, eating on a normal schedule (finishing dinner at 8PM) and then not eating again until 8PM the following day.

Now, you might be thinking: “okay, so by skipping a meal, I just eat less than normally overall, and thus I will lose weight, right?”  

Well, that’s partly true.  

Yes, by cutting out an entire meal, you are able to eat MORE food during your other meals and could still consume a caloric deficit (which is an important for losing weight).  

However, as we already know that not all calories are created equal, the timing of meals can also influence how your body reacts.  

How does intermittent fasting work?

With intermittent fasting, your body operates differently when “feasting” compared to when “fasting”:

When you eat a meal, your body spends a few hours processing that food, burning what it can from what you just consumed.   Because it has all of this readily available, easy to burn energy in its blood stream (thanks to the food you ate), your body will choose to use that as energy rather than the fat you have stored.  This is especially true if you just consumed carbohydrates/sugar, as your body prefers to burn sugar as energy before any other source.

During the “fasted state,” your body doesn’t have a recently consumed meal to use as energy, so it is more likely to pull from the fat stored in your body, rather than the glucose in your blood stream or glycogen in your muscles/liver.

Burning fat = win.

The same goes for working out in a “fasted” state.  Without a ready supply of glucose and glycogen to pull from (which has been depleted over the course of your fasted state, and hasn’t yet been replenished with a pre-workout meal), your body is forced to adapt and pull from the only source of energy available to it: the fat stored in your cells!

Why does this work?  Our bodies react to energy consumption (eating food) with insulin production.  Essentially, the more sensitive your body is to insulin, the more likely you’ll be to use the food you consume efficiently, which can help lead to weight loss and muscle creation.

Along with that, your body is most sensitive to insulin following a period of fasting. 

Your glycogen (a starch stored in your muscles and liver that your body can burn as fuel when necessary) is depleted during sleep (fasting), and will be depleted even further during training, which can further increase insulin sensitivity.

This means that a meal immediately following your workout will be stored most efficiently: mostly as glycogen for muscle stores, burned as energy immediately to help with the recovery process, with minimal amounts stored as fat.

Compare this to a regular day (no intermittent fasting).  With insulin sensitivity at normal levels, the carbs and foods consumed will see full glycogen stores, enough glucose in the blood stream, and thus be more likely to get stored as fat.

Not only that, but growth hormone is increased during fasted states (both during sleep and after a period of fasting).  Combine this  increased growth hormone secretion, the decrease in insulin production (and thus increase in insulin sensitivity), and you’re essentially priming your body for muscle growth and fat loss with intermittent fasting.

The less science-y version: Intermittent fasting can help teach your body to use the food it consumes more efficiently.  For many different physiological reasons, fasting can help promote weight loss and muscle building when done properly.  

Get Your FREE Nerd Fitness Resource Kit

15 Fitness traps you should avoid

Comprehensive beginner's guide to Paleo diet

BONUS: How to level up your life and be the hero of your own story

But why does every health book say “6 small meals?”

There are a few main reasons why diet books recommend six small meals:

1) When you eat a meal, your body does have to burn extra calories just to process that meal.  So, the theory is that if you eat all day long with small meals, your body is constantly burning extra calories and your metabolism is firing at optimal capacity, right? Well, that’s not true.  Whether you eat 2000 calories spread out throughout the day, or 2000 calories in a small window, your body will burn the same number of calories processing the food.  So, the whole “keep your metabolism firing at optimum capacity by always eating” sounds good in principle, but reality tells a different story.

2) When you eat smaller meals, you’re less likely to overeat during your regular meals.  I can definitely see some truth here, especially for people who struggle with portion control or don’t know how much food they should be eating.  However, once you educate yourself and take control of your eating, I would argue most people find that eating six times a day is very prohibitive and requires a lot of effort.  Along with that, because you’re eating six small meals, I’d argue that you probably never feel “full,” and you might be MORE likely to eat extra calories during each snack.

Although grounded in seemingly logical principles, the “six meals a day” doesn’t work for the reason you think it would (#1), and really only works for people who struggle with portion control (#2).

If we want to think back to the caveman days, we’d have been in serious trouble as a species if we had to eat every three hours.  Do you think Joe caveman pulled out his pocket sundial six times a day to consume his equally portioned meals?  Hell no!  He ate when he could, and his body adapted to still function optimally during the rest of the day.

A recent study (highlighted by the New York Times) has done a great job of challenging the “six-meals-a-day” technique for weight loss.  

Martin from LeanGains points out two important quotes from the study:

“…The premise underlying the present study was that increasing meal frequency would lead to better short-term appetite regulation and increased dietary compliance; furthermore, it was hypothesised that these predicted beneficial effects of increased meal frequency could have resulted from more favourable gut peptide profiles, potentially leading to greater weight loss. Under the conditions described in the present study, all three hypotheses were rejected.”

“…We had postulated that increasing meal frequency would enhance the compliance to the energy restricted diet thus leading to greater weight loss, an effect possibly mediated by increased fullness. The present results do not support this hypothesis.”

Remember, the type of food you eat matters. Meal frequency is not nearly as important as the quantity and quality of food consumed.  This study reached similar conclusions.

Why intermittent fasting?

Because it works.  Although we know that not all calories are created equal, caloric restriction plays a central role in weight loss.  When you fast (either for 16 hours per day, or 24 hours every few days), you are also making it easier to restrict your caloric intake over the course of the week.  This will give your body a chance to lose weight as you’re simply just eating less calories than you were consuming before.

Because it simplifies your day. Rather than having to prepare, pack, eat, and time your meals every 2-3 hours, you simply skip a meal or two and only worry about eating food in your eating window.

It requires less time (and potentially money). Rather than having to prepare or purchase three to six meals a day, you only need to prepare two meals.  Instead of stopping what you’re doing six times a day to eat, you simply only have to stop to eat twice.  Rather than having to do the dishes six times, you only have to do them twice. Rather than having to purchase six meals a day, you only need to purchase two.

It promotes stronger insulin sensitivity and increased growth hormone secretion, two keys for weight loss and muscle gain.  This was already explained in the previous section with relevant sources, but intermittent fasting helps you create a double whammy for weight loss.

It can level up your brain, including positively counteracting conditions like Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, and dementia. As explained here in this TEDx talk by Mark Mattson,Professor at Johns Hopkins University and Chief of the Laboratory of Neurosciences at the National Institute on Aging this “fad” of skipping meals is grounded in serious research and studies:

Plus, Wolverine does it.

What are the drawbacks with intermittent fasting?

In my own experimentation over the past three years, I have found very few negative side effects with Intermittent fasting. 

The biggest concern most people have is that intermittent fasting will lead to lower energy, focus, and the “holy crap I am hungry” feeling during the fasting period and ruin them.  People are concerned that they will spend all morning being miserable because they haven’t consumed any food, and thus will be miserable at work and ineffective at whatever task it is they are working on.

Yes, the initial transition from EATING ALL THE TIME, to intermittent fasting MIGHT be a bit of a jolt to your system. However, once you get through the transition, your body can quickly adapt and learn to function just as well only eating a few times a day:

This study explains that in participants after 48-hours of fasting, “cognitive performance, activity, sleep, and mood are not adversely affected in healthy humans by two days of calorie-deprivation.”

“So why do I feel grouchy when I’m not eating breakfast?” In this nerd’s humble opinion, a good portion of the grumpiness is a result of your eating habits. If you eat every three hours, your body will start to get hungry every three hours as it learns and becomes used to expecting (and receiving) food every three hours. If you eat breakfast every morning, your body is expecting to wake up and eat food.

It turns out, quite a bit of it is mental.

Once you retrain your body to NOT expect food all day every day (or first thing in the morning), these side-effects become less of an issue (thanks to a substance our bodies produce called Ghrelin).

Think about it in caveman terms again.  We certainly found ways to survive during periods of feast and famine, and that remains true today.  It actually takes our bodies about 84 hours of fasting before our glucose levels are adversely affected.  As we’re talking about small fasts (16-24 hour periods), this doesn’t concern us.

AN IMPORTANT CAVEAT: Intermittent Fasting can be complex for people who have issues with blood sugar regulation, suffer from hypoglycemia, have diabetes, etc.  If you fit into this category, I highly recommend you check with your doctor or dietitian before adjusting your eating schedule.

I believe more research needs to be done for these particular cases and thus would recommend you do what works best for YOU.

Can I build muscle and gain weight while intermittent fasting?

Absolutely!

In fact, I have been intermittent fasting for the past three years while building muscle, with minimal increase to my body fat percentage.  I still eat the same number of calories I was consuming before, but instead of eating all damn day long, I condense all of my calorie consumption into an eight hour window.

11 AM Work out with heavy strength training in a fasted state.

12 PM Immediately consume 1/2 of my calories for the day (a regular whole-food meal, followed by a massive Calorie Bomb Shake.)

7 PM Consume the second portion of my calories for the day in a big dinner.

8 PM – 12 PM the next day: Fast for 16 hours.

This method has been borrowed from one of the best resources on intermittent fasting and muscle building on the internet: Lean Gains.

In a different method, my friend Nate Green packed on a crazy amount of muscle while fasting for a full 24 hours on Sundays.  

I’m not kidding when I say this has revolutionized how I look at muscle building and fat loss.  Ultimately, this method flies in the face of the typical “bulk and cut” techniques of overeating to build muscle (along with adding a lot of fat) before cutting calories to lose fat (along with some muscle) and settling down at a higher weight.

I prefer this method to the bulk-and-cut technique for a few reasons:

There’s far less of a crazy swing. If you are putting on 30 pounds and then cutting 25 to gain 5 lbs of muscle, your body is going through drastic swings of body mass. Your clothes will fit differently, you’ll have different levels of definition, and your body will wonder what the hell is going on.

You’re consuming less food and thus spending less money. Rather than overeating to put on 1 pound of muscle and 4 pounds of fat in a week or two, you’re aiming to eat exactly enough to put on 1 pound of muscle without adding much fat on top of it.  Yeah, it’s a delicate balance, but there’s far less swing involved. You are just slowly, steadily, and consistently building muscle and strength over many months.

There’s never a need to get “vacation-ready”: we all want to look good naked, right?  When you are just adding muscle, you don’t need to worry about getting your body ready before by drastically altering your diet (going on a miserable crash diet for a month). I like Anthony Mychal’s technique of never being more than two weeks away.  Keep your body fat percentage low, build strength and muscle, and if you happen to notice your body fat creeping up, cut back on the carbs. Within two weeks you should be back at your preferred body fat percentage and can continue the muscle building process.

Does intermittent fasting have different effects on men and women?

Yes, intermittent fasting can affect men and women differently.

This article over on Paleo For Women goes extensively into the potential negative effects of intermittent fasting for women.

This article on Mark’s Daily Apple does a fantastic job of breaking down the differences between men and women and how they are affected by intermittent fasting, ultimately explaining:

“One study, which I’ve cited before as evidence of a benefit to fasting, found that while IF improved insulin sensitivity in male subjects, female subjects saw no such improvement. In fact, the glucose tolerance of fasting women actually worsened. Ouch.

Another study examined the effect of alternate day fasting on blood lipids. Women’s HDL improved and their triglycerides remained stable; men’s HDL remained stable and their triglycerides decreased. Favorable, albeit sex-specific results.

Later, both obese men and women dropped body fat, body weight, blood pressure, total cholesterol, LDL cholesterol, and triglyercides on a fasting regimen. These people were obese, however, and perimenopausal women were excluded from the study, so the results may not apply to leaner people or women of reproductive age.”

Long story short:..

http://ift.tt/2fpmPxv

[denisalvney]

The Beginner’s Guide to Intermittent Fasting – 2017 Update

“…But Tony the Tiger tells us that breakfast is the most important meal of the day! Grrrrrreat!”

This rule has become so commonplace throughout the society as a whole – especially in the health and fitness industry – that it’s readily accepted as fact:

“Want to lose weight? Make sure you start off with a healthy breakfast, so you can get that metabolism firing first thing in the morning!  “Eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince, and dinner like a pauper.”

“Want to lose more weight? Make sure you eat six small meals throughout the day so your metabolism stays operating at maximum capacity all day long.”

There are even studies that show those that eat earlier in the day lose more weight than those who ate later in the day or skipped a meal.

So, eat breakfast to lose weight and obtain optimal health.  

Case closed…right?

Maybe Not. Maybe there’s way more to the story. As skeptics, we operate from first principles: what if there’s science and research that shows SKIPPING BREAKFAST (the horror! blasphemy!) for optimum efficiency, maximum muscle retention, and body fat loss?

After firmly being on “Team Breakfast” for 28 years of my life, I’ve skipped breakfast for the past 3.5 years and will most likely never go back!

I want to share with you a concept about skipping breakfast (and other meals), and how your health can benefit as a result.

Tony ain’t gonna be happy, but today we’re talking about intermittent fasting. Even Boy George is getting in on the Intermittent Fasting Action (and has read this article!):

Please look into 'Intermittent Fasting'. https://t.co/C2fCylOaWj https://t.co/060k5Ws0bh

— Boy George (@BoyGeorge) May 8, 2017

This is a topic that is controversial (which is funny – you’re just skipping a meal) as it turns a LOT of conventional wisdom on its head. This is why this article is filled with more sources and citations than the normal Nerd Fitness article. Here we go. 

What is intermittent fasting?

Intermittent fasting is not a diet, but rather a dieting pattern.  

In simpler terms: it’s making a conscious decision to skip certain meals on purpose.

By fasting and then feasting on purpose, intermittent fasting generally means that you consume your calories during a specific window of the day, and choose not to eat food for a larger window of time.

There are a few different ways to take advantage of intermittent fasting:

Regularly eat during a specific time period only.  For example, only eating from noon-8 PM, essentially skipping breakfast.  Some people only eat in a 6-hour window, or even a 4-hour window. AKA “feasting” and “fasting” parts of your days.   

Skip two meals one day, taking a full 24-hours off from eating. For example, eating on a normal schedule (finishing dinner at 8PM) and then not eating again until 8PM the following day. So you would eat your normal 3 meals per day, and then occasionally pick a day to skip breakfast and lunch the next day.

Now, you might be thinking: “okay, so by skipping a meal, I just eat less than normally overall, and thus I will lose weight, right?”  

Well, that’s partly true.  

Yes, by cutting out an entire meal each day, you are on average consuming fewer calories per week – even if your two meals per day are slightly bigger than before (which is crucial for losing weight).  

However, as we already know that not all calories are created equal, the timing of meals can also influence how your body reacts.  

How does intermittent fasting work?

With intermittent fasting, your body operates differently when “feasting” compared to when “fasting”:

When you eat a meal, your body spends a few hours processing that food, burning what it can from what you just consumed.  Because it has all of this readily-available, easy to burn energy (thanks to the food you ate), your body will choose to use that as energy rather than the fat you have stored.  This is especially true if you just consumed carbohydrates/sugar, as your body prefers to burn sugar as energy before any other source.

During the “fasted state,” your body doesn’t have a recently consumed meal to use as energy, so it is more likely to pull from the fat stored in your body as its the only energy source readily available.

Burning fat = win.

The same goes for working out in a “fasted” state.  Without a ready supply of glucose and glycogen to pull from (which has been depleted over the course of your fasted state, and hasn’t yet been replenished with a pre-workout meal), your body is forced to adapt and pull from the only source of energy available to it: the fat stored in your cells.

Why does this work?  Our bodies react to energy consumption (eating food) with insulin production. In addition to this, the more sensitive your body is to insulin, the more likely you’ll be to use the food you consume efficiently, which can help lead to weight loss and muscle creation.

Along with that, your body is most sensitive to insulin following a period of fasting. 

Your glycogen (a starch stored in your muscles and liver that your body can burn as fuel when necessary) is depleted during sleep (and thus during fasting), and will be depleted even further during training, which can further increase insulin sensitivity.

This means that a meal immediately following your workout will be stored most efficiently: mostly as glycogen for muscle stores, burned as energy immediately to help with the recovery process, with minimal amounts stored as fat.

Compare this to a regular day (no intermittent fasting):  With insulin sensitivity at normal levels, the carbs and foods consumed will see full glycogen stores, enough glucose in the blood stream, and thus be more likely to get stored as fat.

Not only that, but growth hormone is increased during fasted states (both during sleep and after a period of fasting). Combine this  increased growth hormone secretion, the decrease in insulin production (and thus increase in insulin sensitivity), and you’re essentially priming your body for muscle growth and fat loss with intermittent fasting.

The less science-y version: Intermittent fasting can help teach your body to use the food it consumes more efficiently, and your body can learn to burn fat as fuel when you deprive it of new calories constantly.  For many different physiological reasons, fasting can help promote weight loss and muscle building when done properly.  

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But why does every health book say “6 small meals?”

There are a few main reasons why diet books recommend six small meals:

1) When you eat a meal, your body does have to burn extra calories just to process that meal.  So, the theory is that if you eat all day long with small meals, your body is constantly burning extra calories and your metabolism is firing at optimal capacity, right? Well, that’s not true.  Whether you eat 2000 calories spread out throughout the day, or 2000 calories in a small window, your body will burn the same number of calories processing the food.  So, the whole “keep your metabolism firing at optimum capacity by always eating” sounds good in principle, but reality tells a different story.

2) When you eat smaller meals, you might be less likely to overeat during your regular meals.  I can definitely see some truth here, especially for people who struggle with portion control or don’t know how much food they should be eating.

However, once you educate yourself and take control of your eating, some might find that eating six times a day is very prohibitive and requires a lot of effort.  Along with that, because you’re eating six small meals, I’d argue that you probably never feel “full,” and you might be MORE likely to eat extra calories during each snack.

Although grounded in seemingly logical principles, the “six meals a day” doesn’t work for the reason you think it would (#1), and really only works for people who struggle with portion control (#2).

If we want to think back to the caveman days, we’d have been in serious trouble as a species if we had to eat every three hours.  Do you think Joe caveman pulled out his pocket sundial six times a day to consume his equally portioned meals in Tupperware containers?  Hell no!  He ate when he could, endured and dealt with long periods of NOT eating (no refrigeration or food storage) and his body adapted to still function optimally enough to still go out and catch new food.

A recent study (highlighted by the New York Times) has done a great job of challenging the “six-meals-a-day” technique for weight loss.  

Martin from LeanGains points out two important quotes from the study:

“…The premise underlying the present study was that increasing meal frequency would lead to better short-term appetite regulation and increased dietary compliance; furthermore, it was hypothesized that these predicted beneficial effects of increased meal frequency could have resulted from more favorable gut peptide profiles, potentially leading to greater weight loss. Under the conditions described in the present study, all three hypotheses were rejected.”

“…We had postulated that increasing meal frequency would enhance the compliance to the energy restricted diet thus leading to greater weight loss, an effect possibly mediated by increased fullness. The present results do not support this hypothesis.”

Remember, the type of food you eat matters. Meal frequency is not nearly as important as the quantity and quality of food consumed.  This study reached similar conclusions.

Why intermittent fasting?

Because it can work for you. Although we know that not all calories are created equal, caloric restriction plays a central role in weight loss. When you fast (either for 16 hours per day, or 24 hours every few days), you are also making it easier to restrict your caloric intake over the course of the week. This will give your body a chance to lose weight as you’re simply just eating less calories than you were consuming before. Do this consistently, and it can lead to consistent weight loss and maintenance.

Because it simplifies your day. Rather than having to prepare, pack, eat, and time your meals every 2-3 hours, you simply skip a meal or two and only worry about eating food in your eating window. It’s one less decision you have to make every day.

It requires less time (and potentially money). Rather than having to prepare or purchase three to six meals a day, you only need to prepare two meals.  Instead of stopping what you’re doing six times a day to eat, you simply only have to stop to eat twice.  Rather than having to do the dishes six times, you only have to do them twice. Rather than having to purchase six meals a day, you only need to purchase two.

It promotes stronger insulin sensitivity and increased growth hormone secretion, two keys for weight loss and muscle gain.  This was already explained in the previous section with relevant sources, but intermittent fasting helps you create a double whammy for weight loss.

It can level up your brain, including positively counteracting conditions like Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, and dementia. As explained here in this TEDx talk by Mark Mattson, Professor at Johns Hopkins University and Chief of the Laboratory of Neurosciences at the National Institute on Aging fasting is grounded in serious research and more studies are coming out showing the benefits:

Dr. Rhonda Patrick discusses intermittent fasting protocols here on Tim Ferriss’s Podcast, and Dom Diagostino discusses the importance of fasting here in potentially preventing/mitigating the onset of neurodegenerative diseases

Plus, Wolverine does it.

What are the drawbacks with intermittent fasting?

In my own experimentation over the past three years, I have found very few negative side effects with Intermittent fasting. 

The biggest concern most people have is that Intermittent Fasting will lead to lower energy, focus, and the “holy crap I am hungry” feeling during the fasting period and ruin them. People are concerned that they will spend all morning being miserable because they haven’t consumed any food, and thus will be miserable at work and ineffective at whatever task it is they are working on.

The following are my thoughts and experiences, and your results may vary:

Yes, the initial transition from EATING ALL THE TIME, to intermittent fasting MIGHT be a bit of a jolt to your system; it was for me. However, once I got through the transition after a few days, my body quickly adapted and learned to function just as well only eating a few times a day.

Although I fast for 16 hours per day, the following might help assuage your fears that skipping breakfast will cause your body to eat itself and your brain to implode:

This study explains that in participants after 48-hours of fasting, “cognitive performance, activity, sleep, and mood are not adversely affected in healthy humans by two days of calorie-deprivation.”

“So why do I feel grouchy when I’m not eating breakfast?” In this nerd’s humble opinion, a good portion of the grumpiness is a result of our eating habits. If you eat every three hours normally, your body will start to get hungry every three hours as it learns and becomes used to expecting (and receiving) food every three hours. If you eat breakfast every morning, your body is expecting to wake up and eat food.

Once you retrain your body to NOT expect food all day every day (or first thing in the morning), these side-effects become less of an issue (thanks to a substance our bodies produce called Ghrelin). However, you can expect a few rough mornings and maybe decreased focus at work because all you can think about is the breakfast you’re depriving yourself of. I found this to go away after a few days.

It’s important to understand that Intermittent Fasting is NOT a panacea. Don’t delude yourself into thinking that if you skip breakfast and then eat 4,000 calories of candybars for lunch and dinner that you will lose weight.

If you have an addictive relationship with food and you struggle with portion control, track your calorie intake in your meals to make sure you’re not overeating. If you skip breakfast, you might be so hungry from this that you OVEREAT for lunch and this can lead to weight gain. Again, the important thing here is that with intermittent fasting you’re eating fewer calories than normal because you’re skipping a meal every day.

Think about it in caveman terms again.  We certainly found ways to survive during periods of feast and famine, and that remains true today. imagine if you needed to eat in order to be active: what would hungry cavemen do? They would go find food, and that probably required a ton of effort. It actually takes our bodies about 84 hours of fasting before our glucose levels are adversely affected.  As we’re talking about small fasts (16-24 hour periods), this doesn’t concern us.

AN IMPORTANT CAVEAT: Intermittent Fasting can be more complex for people who have issues with blood sugar regulation, suffer from hypoglycemia, have diabetes, etc. If you fit into this category, check with your doctor or dietitian before adjusting your eating schedule.

I believe more research needs to be done for these particular cases and thus would recommend you do what works best for YOU.

Can I build muscle and gain weight while intermittent fasting?

Absolutely!

In fact, I have been intermittent fasting for the past three years while building muscle and decreasing my body fat percentage.

I still eat roughly the same number of calories I was consuming before, but instead of eating all damn day long, I condense all of my calorie consumption into an eight hour window.

11 AM Work out with heavy strength training in a fasted state.

12 PM Immediately consume 1/2 of my calories for the day (a regular whole-food meal, followed by a calorie-dense homemade shake.)

7 PM Consume the second portion of my calories for the day in a big dinner.

8 PM – 12 PM the next day: Fast for 16 hours.

In a different method, my friend Nate Green packed on a crazy amount of muscle while fasting for a full 24 hours on Sundays.  

I’m not kidding when I say this has revolutionized how I look at muscle building and fat loss.  Ultimately, this method flies in the face of the typical “bulk and cut” techniques of overeating to build muscle (along with adding a lot of fat) before cutting calories to lose fat (along with some muscle) and settling down at a higher weight.

I prefer this method to the bulk-and-cut technique for a few reasons:

There’s far less of a crazy swing. If you are putting on 30 pounds and then cutting 25 to gain 5 lbs of muscle, your body is going through drastic swings of body mass. Your clothes will fit differently, you’ll have different levels of definition, and your body will wonder what the hell is going on.

You’re consuming less food and thus spending less money. Rather than overeating to put on 1 pound of muscle and 4 pounds of fat in a week or two, you’re aiming to eat exactly enough to put on 1 pound of muscle without adding much fat on top of it.  Yeah, it’s a delicate balance, but there’s far less swing involved. You are just slowly, steadily, and consistently building muscle and strength over many months.

There’s never a need to get “vacation-ready”: we all want to look good naked, right?  When you are just adding muscle, you don’t need to worry about getting your body ready before by drastically altering your diet (going on a miserable crash diet for a month). I like Anthony Mychal’s technique of never being more than two weeks away.  Keep your body fat percentage low, build strength and muscle, and if you happen to notice your body fat creeping up, cut back on the carbs. Within two weeks you should be back at your preferred body fat percentage and can continue the muscle building process.

Does intermittent fasting have different effects on men and women?

Yes, intermittent fasting can affect men and women differently.

This article over on Paleo For Women goes extensively into the potential negative effects of intermittent fasting for women.

This PubMed study digs into women and intermittent fasting as well.

This article on Mark’s Daily Apple does a fantastic job of breaking down the differences between men and women too and how they are affected by intermittent fasting, ultimately explaining:

“One study, which I’ve cited before as evidence of a benefit to fasting, found that while IF improved insulin sensitivity in male subjects, female subjects saw no such improvement. In fact, the glucose tolerance of fasting women actually worsened. Ouch.

Another study examined the effect of alternate day fasting on blood lipids. Women’s HDL improved and their triglycerides remained stable; men’s HDL remained stable and their triglycerides decreased. Favorable, albeit sex-specific results.

Later, both obese men and women dropped body fat, body weight, blood pressure, total cholesterol, LDL cholesterol, and triglyercides on a fasting regimen. These people were obese, however, and perimenopausal women were excluded from the study, so the results may not apply to leaner people or women of reproductive age.”

Long story short: Yes, men and women will have different experiences with intermittent fasting; we’re all unique snowflakes (yep, especially you), and your body will be affected by intermittent fasting differently than the person next to you.

My best advice?  If you’re curious, get blood work done, speak with your doctor and get a check-up. Give intermittent fasting a shot, track your results, and see how your body/blood work changes as a result of Intermittent Fasting and decide if it’s right for you.

I’ve anecdotally heard of hesitant doctors who prescribed to the “6-meals-a-day” philosophy be surprised when a patient returns months later in better shape and with a better blood profile thanks to skipping meals.

Your milage may vary, so speak with a doctor or find a doctor versed in intermittent fasting protocols and treat it like an experiment on yourself!

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Questions about intermittent fasting

“Won’t I get really hungry?”  

As explained above, this can be a result of the habits you have built for your body. If you are constantly eating or always eat the same time of day, your body can actually learn to prepare itself for food by beginning the process of insulin production and preparation for food.

After a brief adjustment period, your body can adapt to the fact that it’s only eating a few times a day. The more overweight you are, and the more often you eat, the more of an initial struggle this might be.

Remember, your body’s physical and cognitive abilities aren’t diminished as a result of fasting.

“Where will I get my energy for my workouts? Won’t I be exhausted and not be able to complete my workouts if fasting?” 

This was a major concern of mine as well.  And for my first workout or two, it was very weird to not eat before training. However, after a few sessions, I learned that my body could certainly function (and even thrive) during my training sessions despite not eating a pre-workout meal. Here I am a while back pulling 385 lbs. at 175 BW after a 16 hour fast:

A post shared by Steve Kamb (@stevekamb) on Nov 26, 2015 at 8:32am PST

As Mark’s Daily Apple states:

Fasted training can actually result in better metabolic adaptations (which mean better performance down the line), improved muscle protein synthesis, and a higher anabolic response to post-workout feeding (you’ll earn your meal and make more muscle out of it if you train on an empty stomach).

“I like the idea of fasted training, but I work a regular 9-5 and can’t train at 11AM. What am I supposed to do?”

Martin from LeanGains lays out a few different options for you, depending on your training schedule.  The best advice is to not freak out and overanalyze unless you are an elite athlete concerned with the absolute optimal performance at all time.

If you’re just a normal guy or gal looking to drop a few pounds and get stronger, do the best you can.

“Won’t fasting cause muscle loss?”  

Another big concern of mine, but it turns out…it was unfounded.  We’ve been told by the supplement industry that we need to consume 30 g of protein every few hours, as that’s the most amount of protein our body can process at a time.  Along with that, we’ve been told that if we don’t eat protein every few hours, our body’s muscle will start to break down to be burned as energy.

Again, NOT TRUE!  This study shows that our bodies are quite adept at preserving muscle even when fasting, and it turns out that protein absorption by our body can take place over many many many hours. Protein consumed in a shorter period of time has no difference on the body compared to protein spread throughout the day.    

“What about my body going into starvation mode from not eating?” 

Now, the thought process here is that when we don’t feed ourselves, our bodies assume calories aren’t available and thus choose to store more calories than burning them, eliminating the benefits of weight loss with fasting. Fortunately, this is NOT true.

As Martin from LeanGains so eloquently explains (as you can tell, he’s good at this stuff):

“The earliest evidence for lowered metabolic rate in response to fasting occurred after 60 hours (-8% in resting metabolic rate). Other studies show metabolic rate is not impacted until 72-96 hours have passed.

Seemingly paradoxical, metabolic rate is actually increased in short-term fasting. For some concrete numbers, studies have shown an increase of 3.6% – 10% after 36-48 hours (Mansell PI, et al, and Zauner C, et al).  Epinephrine and norepinephrine (adrenaline/noradrenaline) sharpens the mind and makes us want to move around. Desirable traits that encouraged us to seek for food, or for the hunter to kill his prey, increasing survival. At some point, after several days of no eating, this benefit would confer no benefit to survival and probably would have done more harm than good; instead, an adaptation that favored conservation of energy turned out to be advantageous.”

“This sounds crazy, I’m not gonna do it.”

That’s cool.  Are you losing body fat, building muscle, and getting a clean bill of health from your doctor?  If you can say yes to those things, AWESOME. Keep doing what you’re doing, because it’s working.   

However, if what you’re doing ISN’T working, or you’re not getting the results you were hoping for, why not give it a chance?  Hopefully the dozens of studies at least peak your curiosity.  Self-experimentation is the best way to determine WHAT methods work for you.

Tips and tricks about Fasting 

Don’t freak out.  Stop wondering: “can I fast 15 hours instead of 16?” or “what if I eat an apple during my fasted period, will that ruin everything?”  Relax. Your body is a complex piece of machinery and learns to adapt. Everything is not as cut and dry as you think.

If you want to eat breakfast one day but not another, that’s okay. If you are going for optimal aesthetic or athletic performance, I can see the need to be more rigid in your discipline, but otherwise…freaking chill out and don’t stress over minutiae! Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.

Expect funny looks if you spend a lot of mornings with breakfast eaters.  A few weeks back I had a number of friends staying with me, and they were all completely dumbfounded when I told them I didn’t eat breakfast anymore.  I tried to explain it to them but received a bunch of blank stares. Breakfast has become so enGRAINed (zing!) in our culture that NOT eating it sounds crazy.  You will get weird looks from those around you…embrace it. I still go to brunch or sit with friends, I just drink black coffee and enjoy conversation.

Stay busy.  If you are just sitting around thinking about how hungry you are, you’ll be more likely to struggle with this. For that reason, I time my fasting periods for maximum efficiency and minimal discomfort:

My first few hours of fasting come after consuming a MONSTER meal, where the last thing I want to think about is eating.

When I’m sleeping: 8 of my 16 hours are occupied by sleeping.  Tough to feel hungry when I’m dreaming about becoming a Jedi.

When I’m busy: After waking up, 12 hours of my fasting is already done.  I spend three hours doing my best work (drinking green tea and listening to PM, which is exactly what I’m doing while writing this article!), and then comes my final hour of fasting: training.

I don’t have time to think about how hungry I am, because I keep my brain constantly occupied!

Zero-calorie beverages are okay.  I drink green tea in the morning for my caffeine kick while writing. If you want to drink water, black coffee, or tea during your fasted period, that’s okay.  Remember, don’t overthink it – keep things simple! Dr. Rhonda Patrick believes that a fast should stop at the first consumption of anything other than water, so experiment yourself and see how your body responds.

Track your results, listen to your body:  

Concerned about losing muscle mass?  Keep track of your strength training routines and see if you are getting stronger.

Buy a cheap set of body fat calipers and keep track of your body fat composition.

Track your calories, and see how your body changes when eating the same amount of food, but condensed into a certain window.

Use a free IF app like Zero, developed by Kevin Rose, to track your fast and feast windows easily.

Everybody will react to intermittent fasting differently; I can’t tell you how your body will react.  It’s up to you to listen to your body and see how making these adjustments change your body.

Don’t expect miracles.  Yes, intermittent fasting can potentially help you lose weight, increase insulin sensitivity and growth hormone secretion (all good things), but it is only ONE factor in hundreds that will determine your body composition and overall health.  Don’t expect to drop to 8% body fat and get ripped just by skipping breakfast. You need to focus on building healthy habits, eating better foods, and getting stronger.

This is just one tool that can contribute to your success…

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To sum it all up

Intermittent fasting can potentially have some very positive benefits for somebody trying to lose weight or gain lean body mass.

Men and women will tend to have different results, just like each individual person will have different results.  The ONLY way to find out is with self-experimentation.

There are multiple ways to “do” intermittent fasting:

Fast and feast regularly: Fast for a certain number of hours, then consume all calories within a certain number of hours.

Eat normally, then fast 1-2x a week: Consume your normal meals every day, then pick one or two days a week where you fast for 24 hours.  Eat your last meal Sunday night, and then don’t eat again until dinner the following day.

Fast occasionally: probably the easiest method for the person who wants to do the least amount of work.  Simply skip a meal whenever it’s convenient. On the road? Skip breakfast.  Busy day at work? Skip lunch.  Eat poorly all day Saturday?  Make your first meal of the day dinner on Sunday.

Remember: One of the Rules of the Rebellion is to QUESTION EVERYTHING.  If this seems like something you’d like to try, give it a shot. If it sounds crazy to you, ask yourself why you think it sounds crazy, and do your own research and experimentation before condoning/condemning it.

I’d love to hear from you:

What are your questions with intermittent fasting?  

What are your concerns?

Have you tried intermittent fasting?

Have you had success with it, either with muscle gain or weight loss?

Thanks for leaving your comment, I’m excited to get the conversation started.

-Steve

PS: We’re fans of Intermittent Fasting, which is why its part of the Nerd Fitness Academy, our online training course that is helping over 40,000 superheroes-in-training get fit, healthy, and happy.  Come on and join us!

PPS: Added an important caveat: If you are somebody who has blood sugar regulation issues (diabetes, hypoglycemia, etc.), discuss with your doctor or medical professional before making changes to your diet, even sharing this article and the cited studies with them. Remember, question everything!

###

Photo Source: seal mouth, tony the tiger, anatomy, cog, small plates, apples, fridge, ant, boy girl, kiwi

The Beginner’s Guide to Intermittent Fasting – 2017 Update published first on https://www.nerdfitness.com

[albertcaldwellne]

The Beginner’s Guide to Intermittent Fasting (2017 Update)

“…But Tony the Tiger tells us that breakfast is the most important meal of the day!”

This rule has become so commonplace throughout the health and fitness community that it’s readily accepted as fact:

“Want to lose weight? Make sure you start off with a healthy breakfast, so you can get that metabolism firing first thing in the morning!  Eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince, and dinner like a pauper.”

“Want to lose more weight? Make sure you eat six small meals throughout the day so your metabolism stays operating at maximum capacity all day long”.

There are even studies that show those that eat earlier in the day lose more weight than those who ate later in the day or skipped a meal.

So, eat breakfast to lose weight and obtain optimal health.  Case closed…right?

Maybe you’re not getting the whole story. As skeptics, what we need to ask: what if there’s science and research that promotes SKIPPING BREAKFAST (the horror! blasphemy!) for optimum efficiency, maximum muscle retention, and body fat loss?

After firmly being on “Team Breakfast” for 28 years of my life, I’ve skipped breakfast for the past three years and will most likely not go back.

I want to share with you a concept about skipping breakfast (and other meals), and how your health can benefit as a result.

Tony ain’t gonna be happy, but today we’re talking about intermittent fasting.

This is a topic that is controversial (which is funny – you’re just skippin ga meal) as it turns a LOT of conventional wisdom on its head. This is why this article is filled with more sources and citations than Jim Carrey’s glove compartment.

What is intermittent fasting?

Intermittent fasting is not a diet, but rather a dieting pattern.  

In simpler terms: it’s making a conscious decision to skip certain meals.

By fasting and then feasting on purpose, intermittent fasting means eating your calories during a specific window of the day, and choosing not to eat food during the rest.

Now, there are a few different ways to take advantage of intermittent fasting:

Regularly eat during a specific time period.  For example, only eating from noon-8 PM, essentially skipping breakfast.  Some people only eat in a 6-hour window, or even a 4-hour window. AKA “feasting” and “fasting” parts of your days.   

Skip two meals one day, taking a full 24-hours off from eating. For example, eating on a normal schedule (finishing dinner at 8PM) and then not eating again until 8PM the following day.

Now, you might be thinking: “okay, so by skipping a meal, I just eat less than normally overall, and thus I will lose weight, right?”  

Well, that’s partly true.  

Yes, by cutting out an entire meal, you are able to eat MORE food during your other meals and could still consume a caloric deficit (which is an important for losing weight).  

However, as we already know that not all calories are created equal, the timing of meals can also influence how your body reacts.  

How does intermittent fasting work?

With intermittent fasting, your body operates differently when “feasting” compared to when “fasting”:

When you eat a meal, your body spends a few hours processing that food, burning what it can from what you just consumed.   Because it has all of this readily available, easy to burn energy in its blood stream (thanks to the food you ate), your body will choose to use that as energy rather than the fat you have stored.  This is especially true if you just consumed carbohydrates/sugar, as your body prefers to burn sugar as energy before any other source.

During the “fasted state,” your body doesn’t have a recently consumed meal to use as energy, so it is more likely to pull from the fat stored in your body, rather than the glucose in your blood stream or glycogen in your muscles/liver.

Burning fat = win.

The same goes for working out in a “fasted” state.  Without a ready supply of glucose and glycogen to pull from (which has been depleted over the course of your fasted state, and hasn’t yet been replenished with a pre-workout meal), your body is forced to adapt and pull from the only source of energy available to it: the fat stored in your cells!

Why does this work?  Our bodies react to energy consumption (eating food) with insulin production.  Essentially, the more sensitive your body is to insulin, the more likely you’ll be to use the food you consume efficiently, which can help lead to weight loss and muscle creation.

Along with that, your body is most sensitive to insulin following a period of fasting. 

Your glycogen (a starch stored in your muscles and liver that your body can burn as fuel when necessary) is depleted during sleep (fasting), and will be depleted even further during training, which can further increase insulin sensitivity.

This means that a meal immediately following your workout will be stored most efficiently: mostly as glycogen for muscle stores, burned as energy immediately to help with the recovery process, with minimal amounts stored as fat.

Compare this to a regular day (no intermittent fasting).  With insulin sensitivity at normal levels, the carbs and foods consumed will see full glycogen stores, enough glucose in the blood stream, and thus be more likely to get stored as fat.

Not only that, but growth hormone is increased during fasted states (both during sleep and after a period of fasting).  Combine this  increased growth hormone secretion, the decrease in insulin production (and thus increase in insulin sensitivity), and you’re essentially priming your body for muscle growth and fat loss with intermittent fasting.

The less science-y version: Intermittent fasting can help teach your body to use the food it consumes more efficiently.  For many different physiological reasons, fasting can help promote weight loss and muscle building when done properly.  

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But why does every health book say “6 small meals?”

There are a few main reasons why diet books recommend six small meals:

1) When you eat a meal, your body does have to burn extra calories just to process that meal.  So, the theory is that if you eat all day long with small meals, your body is constantly burning extra calories and your metabolism is firing at optimal capacity, right? Well, that’s not true.  Whether you eat 2000 calories spread out throughout the day, or 2000 calories in a small window, your body will burn the same number of calories processing the food.  So, the whole “keep your metabolism firing at optimum capacity by always eating” sounds good in principle, but reality tells a different story.

2) When you eat smaller meals, you’re less likely to overeat during your regular meals.  I can definitely see some truth here, especially for people who struggle with portion control or don’t know how much food they should be eating.  However, once you educate yourself and take control of your eating, I would argue most people find that eating six times a day is very prohibitive and requires a lot of effort.  Along with that, because you’re eating six small meals, I’d argue that you probably never feel “full,” and you might be MORE likely to eat extra calories during each snack.

Although grounded in seemingly logical principles, the “six meals a day” doesn’t work for the reason you think it would (#1), and really only works for people who struggle with portion control (#2).

If we want to think back to the caveman days, we’d have been in serious trouble as a species if we had to eat every three hours.  Do you think Joe caveman pulled out his pocket sundial six times a day to consume his equally portioned meals?  Hell no!  He ate when he could, and his body adapted to still function optimally during the rest of the day.

A recent study (highlighted by the New York Times) has done a great job of challenging the “six-meals-a-day” technique for weight loss.  

Martin from LeanGains points out two important quotes from the study:

“…The premise underlying the present study was that increasing meal frequency would lead to better short-term appetite regulation and increased dietary compliance; furthermore, it was hypothesised that these predicted beneficial effects of increased meal frequency could have resulted from more favourable gut peptide profiles, potentially leading to greater weight loss. Under the conditions described in the present study, all three hypotheses were rejected.”

“…We had postulated that increasing meal frequency would enhance the compliance to the energy restricted diet thus leading to greater weight loss, an effect possibly mediated by increased fullness. The present results do not support this hypothesis.”

Remember, the type of food you eat matters. Meal frequency is not nearly as important as the quantity and quality of food consumed.  This study reached similar conclusions.

Why intermittent fasting?

Because it works.  Although we know that not all calories are created equal, caloric restriction plays a central role in weight loss.  When you fast (either for 16 hours per day, or 24 hours every few days), you are also making it easier to restrict your caloric intake over the course of the week.  This will give your body a chance to lose weight as you’re simply just eating less calories than you were consuming before.

Because it simplifies your day. Rather than having to prepare, pack, eat, and time your meals every 2-3 hours, you simply skip a meal or two and only worry about eating food in your eating window.

It requires less time (and potentially money). Rather than having to prepare or purchase three to six meals a day, you only need to prepare two meals.  Instead of stopping what you’re doing six times a day to eat, you simply only have to stop to eat twice.  Rather than having to do the dishes six times, you only have to do them twice. Rather than having to purchase six meals a day, you only need to purchase two.

It promotes stronger insulin sensitivity and increased growth hormone secretion, two keys for weight loss and muscle gain.  This was already explained in the previous section with relevant sources, but intermittent fasting helps you create a double whammy for weight loss.

It can level up your brain, including positively counteracting conditions like Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, and dementia. As explained here in this TEDx talk by Mark Mattson,Professor at Johns Hopkins University and Chief of the Laboratory of Neurosciences at the National Institute on Aging this “fad” of skipping meals is grounded in serious research and studies:

Plus, Wolverine does it.

What are the drawbacks with intermittent fasting?

In my own experimentation over the past three years, I have found very few negative side effects with Intermittent fasting. 

The biggest concern most people have is that intermittent fasting will lead to lower energy, focus, and the “holy crap I am hungry” feeling during the fasting period and ruin them.  People are concerned that they will spend all morning being miserable because they haven’t consumed any food, and thus will be miserable at work and ineffective at whatever task it is they are working on.

Yes, the initial transition from EATING ALL THE TIME, to intermittent fasting MIGHT be a bit of a jolt to your system. However, once you get through the transition, your body can quickly adapt and learn to function just as well only eating a few times a day:

This study explains that in participants after 48-hours of fasting, “cognitive performance, activity, sleep, and mood are not adversely affected in healthy humans by two days of calorie-deprivation.”

“So why do I feel grouchy when I’m not eating breakfast?” In this nerd’s humble opinion, a good portion of the grumpiness is a result of your eating habits. If you eat every three hours, your body will start to get hungry every three hours as it learns and becomes used to expecting (and receiving) food every three hours. If you eat breakfast every morning, your body is expecting to wake up and eat food.

It turns out, quite a bit of it is mental.

Once you retrain your body to NOT expect food all day every day (or first thing in the morning), these side-effects become less of an issue (thanks to a substance our bodies produce called Ghrelin).

Think about it in caveman terms again.  We certainly found ways to survive during periods of feast and famine, and that remains true today.  It actually takes our bodies about 84 hours of fasting before our glucose levels are adversely affected.  As we’re talking about small fasts (16-24 hour periods), this doesn’t concern us.

AN IMPORTANT CAVEAT: Intermittent Fasting can be complex for people who have issues with blood sugar regulation, suffer from hypoglycemia, have diabetes, etc.  If you fit into this category, I highly recommend you check with your doctor or dietitian before adjusting your eating schedule.

I believe more research needs to be done for these particular cases and thus would recommend you do what works best for YOU.

Can I build muscle and gain weight while intermittent fasting?

Absolutely!

In fact, I have been intermittent fasting for the past three years while building muscle, with minimal increase to my body fat percentage.  I still eat the same number of calories I was consuming before, but instead of eating all damn day long, I condense all of my calorie consumption into an eight hour window.

11 AM Work out with heavy strength training in a fasted state.

12 PM Immediately consume 1/2 of my calories for the day (a regular whole-food meal, followed by a massive Calorie Bomb Shake.)

7 PM Consume the second portion of my calories for the day in a big dinner.

8 PM – 12 PM the next day: Fast for 16 hours.

This method has been borrowed from one of the best resources on intermittent fasting and muscle building on the internet: Lean Gains.

In a different method, my friend Nate Green packed on a crazy amount of muscle while fasting for a full 24 hours on Sundays.  

I’m not kidding when I say this has revolutionized how I look at muscle building and fat loss.  Ultimately, this method flies in the face of the typical “bulk and cut” techniques of overeating to build muscle (along with adding a lot of fat) before cutting calories to lose fat (along with some muscle) and settling down at a higher weight.

I prefer this method to the bulk-and-cut technique for a few reasons:

There’s far less of a crazy swing. If you are putting on 30 pounds and then cutting 25 to gain 5 lbs of muscle, your body is going through drastic swings of body mass. Your clothes will fit differently, you’ll have different levels of definition, and your body will wonder what the hell is going on.

You’re consuming less food and thus spending less money. Rather than overeating to put on 1 pound of muscle and 4 pounds of fat in a week or two, you’re aiming to eat exactly enough to put on 1 pound of muscle without adding much fat on top of it.  Yeah, it’s a delicate balance, but there’s far less swing involved. You are just slowly, steadily, and consistently building muscle and strength over many months.

There’s never a need to get “vacation-ready”: we all want to look good naked, right?  When you are just adding muscle, you don’t need to worry about getting your body ready before by drastically altering your diet (going on a miserable crash diet for a month). I like Anthony Mychal’s technique of never being more than two weeks away.  Keep your body fat percentage low, build strength and muscle, and if you happen to notice your body fat creeping up, cut back on the carbs. Within two weeks you should be back at your preferred body fat percentage and can continue the muscle building process.

Does intermittent fasting have different effects on men and women?

Yes, intermittent fasting can affect men and women differently.

This article over on Paleo For Women goes extensively into the potential negative effects of intermittent fasting for women.

This article on Mark’s Daily Apple does a fantastic job of breaking down the differences between men and women and how they are affected by intermittent fasting, ultimately explaining:

“One study, which I’ve cited before as evidence of a benefit to fasting, found that while IF improved insulin sensitivity in male subjects, female subjects saw no such improvement. In fact, the glucose tolerance of fasting women actually worsened. Ouch.

Another study examined the effect of alternate day fasting on blood lipids. Women’s HDL improved and their triglycerides remained stable; men’s HDL remained stable and their triglycerides decreased. Favorable, albeit sex-specific results.

Later, both obese men and women dropped body fat, body weight, blood pressure, total cholesterol, LDL cholesterol, and triglyercides on a fasting regimen. These people were obese, however, and perimenopausal women were excluded from the study, so the results may not apply to leaner people or women of reproductive age.”

Long story short:..

http://ift.tt/2fpmPxv

[almajonesnjna]

The Beginner’s Guide to Intermittent Fasting (2017 Update)

“…But Tony the Tiger tells us that breakfast is the most important meal of the day!”

This rule has become so commonplace throughout the health and fitness community that it’s readily accepted as fact:

“Want to lose weight? Make sure you start off with a healthy breakfast, so you can get that metabolism firing first thing in the morning!  Eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince, and dinner like a pauper.”

“Want to lose more weight? Make sure you eat six small meals throughout the day so your metabolism stays operating at maximum capacity all day long”.

There are even studies that show those that eat earlier in the day lose more weight than those who ate later in the day or skipped a meal.

So, eat breakfast to lose weight and obtain optimal health.  Case closed…right?

Maybe you’re not getting the whole story. As skeptics, what we need to ask: what if there’s science and research that promotes SKIPPING BREAKFAST (the horror! blasphemy!) for optimum efficiency, maximum muscle retention, and body fat loss?

After firmly being on “Team Breakfast” for 28 years of my life, I’ve skipped breakfast for the past three years and will most likely not go back.

I want to share with you a concept about skipping breakfast (and other meals), and how your health can benefit as a result.

Tony ain’t gonna be happy, but today we’re talking about intermittent fasting.

This is a topic that is controversial (which is funny – you’re just skippin ga meal) as it turns a LOT of conventional wisdom on its head. This is why this article is filled with more sources and citations than Jim Carrey’s glove compartment.

What is intermittent fasting?

Intermittent fasting is not a diet, but rather a dieting pattern.  

In simpler terms: it’s making a conscious decision to skip certain meals.

By fasting and then feasting on purpose, intermittent fasting means eating your calories during a specific window of the day, and choosing not to eat food during the rest.

Now, there are a few different ways to take advantage of intermittent fasting:

Regularly eat during a specific time period.  For example, only eating from noon-8 PM, essentially skipping breakfast.  Some people only eat in a 6-hour window, or even a 4-hour window. AKA “feasting” and “fasting” parts of your days.   

Skip two meals one day, taking a full 24-hours off from eating. For example, eating on a normal schedule (finishing dinner at 8PM) and then not eating again until 8PM the following day.

Now, you might be thinking: “okay, so by skipping a meal, I just eat less than normally overall, and thus I will lose weight, right?”  

Well, that’s partly true.  

Yes, by cutting out an entire meal, you are able to eat MORE food during your other meals and could still consume a caloric deficit (which is an important for losing weight).  

However, as we already know that not all calories are created equal, the timing of meals can also influence how your body reacts.  

How does intermittent fasting work?

With intermittent fasting, your body operates differently when “feasting” compared to when “fasting”:

When you eat a meal, your body spends a few hours processing that food, burning what it can from what you just consumed.   Because it has all of this readily available, easy to burn energy in its blood stream (thanks to the food you ate), your body will choose to use that as energy rather than the fat you have stored.  This is especially true if you just consumed carbohydrates/sugar, as your body prefers to burn sugar as energy before any other source.

During the “fasted state,” your body doesn’t have a recently consumed meal to use as energy, so it is more likely to pull from the fat stored in your body, rather than the glucose in your blood stream or glycogen in your muscles/liver.

Burning fat = win.

The same goes for working out in a “fasted” state.  Without a ready supply of glucose and glycogen to pull from (which has been depleted over the course of your fasted state, and hasn’t yet been replenished with a pre-workout meal), your body is forced to adapt and pull from the only source of energy available to it: the fat stored in your cells!

Why does this work?  Our bodies react to energy consumption (eating food) with insulin production.  Essentially, the more sensitive your body is to insulin, the more likely you’ll be to use the food you consume efficiently, which can help lead to weight loss and muscle creation.

Along with that, your body is most sensitive to insulin following a period of fasting. 

Your glycogen (a starch stored in your muscles and liver that your body can burn as fuel when necessary) is depleted during sleep (fasting), and will be depleted even further during training, which can further increase insulin sensitivity.

This means that a meal immediately following your workout will be stored most efficiently: mostly as glycogen for muscle stores, burned as energy immediately to help with the recovery process, with minimal amounts stored as fat.

Compare this to a regular day (no intermittent fasting).  With insulin sensitivity at normal levels, the carbs and foods consumed will see full glycogen stores, enough glucose in the blood stream, and thus be more likely to get stored as fat.

Not only that, but growth hormone is increased during fasted states (both during sleep and after a period of fasting).  Combine this  increased growth hormone secretion, the decrease in insulin production (and thus increase in insulin sensitivity), and you’re essentially priming your body for muscle growth and fat loss with intermittent fasting.

The less science-y version: Intermittent fasting can help teach your body to use the food it consumes more efficiently.  For many different physiological reasons, fasting can help promote weight loss and muscle building when done properly.  

Get Your FREE Nerd Fitness Resource Kit

15 Fitness traps you should avoid

Comprehensive beginner's guide to Paleo diet

BONUS: How to level up your life and be the hero of your own story

But why does every health book say “6 small meals?”

There are a few main reasons why diet books recommend six small meals:

1) When you eat a meal, your body does have to burn extra calories just to process that meal.  So, the theory is that if you eat all day long with small meals, your body is constantly burning extra calories and your metabolism is firing at optimal capacity, right? Well, that’s not true.  Whether you eat 2000 calories spread out throughout the day, or 2000 calories in a small window, your body will burn the same number of calories processing the food.  So, the whole “keep your metabolism firing at optimum capacity by always eating” sounds good in principle, but reality tells a different story.

2) When you eat smaller meals, you’re less likely to overeat during your regular meals.  I can definitely see some truth here, especially for people who struggle with portion control or don’t know how much food they should be eating.  However, once you educate yourself and take control of your eating, I would argue most people find that eating six times a day is very prohibitive and requires a lot of effort.  Along with that, because you’re eating six small meals, I’d argue that you probably never feel “full,” and you might be MORE likely to eat extra calories during each snack.

Although grounded in seemingly logical principles, the “six meals a day” doesn’t work for the reason you think it would (#1), and really only works for people who struggle with portion control (#2).

If we want to think back to the caveman days, we’d have been in serious trouble as a species if we had to eat every three hours.  Do you think Joe caveman pulled out his pocket sundial six times a day to consume his equally portioned meals?  Hell no!  He ate when he could, and his body adapted to still function optimally during the rest of the day.

A recent study (highlighted by the New York Times) has done a great job of challenging the “six-meals-a-day” technique for weight loss.  

Martin from LeanGains points out two important quotes from the study:

“…The premise underlying the present study was that increasing meal frequency would lead to better short-term appetite regulation and increased dietary compliance; furthermore, it was hypothesised that these predicted beneficial effects of increased meal frequency could have resulted from more favourable gut peptide profiles, potentially leading to greater weight loss. Under the conditions described in the present study, all three hypotheses were rejected.”

“…We had postulated that increasing meal frequency would enhance the compliance to the energy restricted diet thus leading to greater weight loss, an effect possibly mediated by increased fullness. The present results do not support this hypothesis.”

Remember, the type of food you eat matters. Meal frequency is not nearly as important as the quantity and quality of food consumed.  This study reached similar conclusions.

Why intermittent fasting?

Because it works.  Although we know that not all calories are created equal, caloric restriction plays a central role in weight loss.  When you fast (either for 16 hours per day, or 24 hours every few days), you are also making it easier to restrict your caloric intake over the course of the week.  This will give your body a chance to lose weight as you’re simply just eating less calories than you were consuming before.

Because it simplifies your day. Rather than having to prepare, pack, eat, and time your meals every 2-3 hours, you simply skip a meal or two and only worry about eating food in your eating window.

It requires less time (and potentially money). Rather than having to prepare or purchase three to six meals a day, you only need to prepare two meals.  Instead of stopping what you’re doing six times a day to eat, you simply only have to stop to eat twice.  Rather than having to do the dishes six times, you only have to do them twice. Rather than having to purchase six meals a day, you only need to purchase two.

It promotes stronger insulin sensitivity and increased growth hormone secretion, two keys for weight loss and muscle gain.  This was already explained in the previous section with relevant sources, but intermittent fasting helps you create a double whammy for weight loss.

It can level up your brain, including positively counteracting conditions like Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, and dementia. As explained here in this TEDx talk by Mark Mattson,Professor at Johns Hopkins University and Chief of the Laboratory of Neurosciences at the National Institute on Aging this “fad” of skipping meals is grounded in serious research and studies:

Plus, Wolverine does it.

What are the drawbacks with intermittent fasting?

In my own experimentation over the past three years, I have found very few negative side effects with Intermittent fasting. 

The biggest concern most people have is that intermittent fasting will lead to lower energy, focus, and the “holy crap I am hungry” feeling during the fasting period and ruin them.  People are concerned that they will spend all morning being miserable because they haven’t consumed any food, and thus will be miserable at work and ineffective at whatever task it is they are working on.

Yes, the initial transition from EATING ALL THE TIME, to intermittent fasting MIGHT be a bit of a jolt to your system. However, once you get through the transition, your body can quickly adapt and learn to function just as well only eating a few times a day:

This study explains that in participants after 48-hours of fasting, “cognitive performance, activity, sleep, and mood are not adversely affected in healthy humans by two days of calorie-deprivation.”

“So why do I feel grouchy when I’m not eating breakfast?” In this nerd’s humble opinion, a good portion of the grumpiness is a result of your eating habits. If you eat every three hours, your body will start to get hungry every three hours as it learns and becomes used to expecting (and receiving) food every three hours. If you eat breakfast every morning, your body is expecting to wake up and eat food.

It turns out, quite a bit of it is mental.

Once you retrain your body to NOT expect food all day every day (or first thing in the morning), these side-effects become less of an issue (thanks to a substance our bodies produce called Ghrelin).

Think about it in caveman terms again.  We certainly found ways to survive during periods of feast and famine, and that remains true today.  It actually takes our bodies about 84 hours of fasting before our glucose levels are adversely affected.  As we’re talking about small fasts (16-24 hour periods), this doesn’t concern us.

AN IMPORTANT CAVEAT: Intermittent Fasting can be complex for people who have issues with blood sugar regulation, suffer from hypoglycemia, have diabetes, etc.  If you fit into this category, I highly recommend you check with your doctor or dietitian before adjusting your eating schedule.

I believe more research needs to be done for these particular cases and thus would recommend you do what works best for YOU.

Can I build muscle and gain weight while intermittent fasting?

Absolutely!

In fact, I have been intermittent fasting for the past three years while building muscle, with minimal increase to my body fat percentage.  I still eat the same number of calories I was consuming before, but instead of eating all damn day long, I condense all of my calorie consumption into an eight hour window.

11 AM Work out with heavy strength training in a fasted state.

12 PM Immediately consume 1/2 of my calories for the day (a regular whole-food meal, followed by a massive Calorie Bomb Shake.)

7 PM Consume the second portion of my calories for the day in a big dinner.

8 PM – 12 PM the next day: Fast for 16 hours.

This method has been borrowed from one of the best resources on intermittent fasting and muscle building on the internet: Lean Gains.

In a different method, my friend Nate Green packed on a crazy amount of muscle while fasting for a full 24 hours on Sundays.  

I’m not kidding when I say this has revolutionized how I look at muscle building and fat loss.  Ultimately, this method flies in the face of the typical “bulk and cut” techniques of overeating to build muscle (along with adding a lot of fat) before cutting calories to lose fat (along with some muscle) and settling down at a higher weight.

I prefer this method to the bulk-and-cut technique for a few reasons:

There’s far less of a crazy swing. If you are putting on 30 pounds and then cutting 25 to gain 5 lbs of muscle, your body is going through drastic swings of body mass. Your clothes will fit differently, you’ll have different levels of definition, and your body will wonder what the hell is going on.

You’re consuming less food and thus spending less money. Rather than overeating to put on 1 pound of muscle and 4 pounds of fat in a week or two, you’re aiming to eat exactly enough to put on 1 pound of muscle without adding much fat on top of it.  Yeah, it’s a delicate balance, but there’s far less swing involved. You are just slowly, steadily, and consistently building muscle and strength over many months.

There’s never a need to get “vacation-ready”: we all want to look good naked, right?  When you are just adding muscle, you don’t need to worry about getting your body ready before by drastically altering your diet (going on a miserable crash diet for a month). I like Anthony Mychal’s technique of never being more than two weeks away.  Keep your body fat percentage low, build strength and muscle, and if you happen to notice your body fat creeping up, cut back on the carbs. Within two weeks you should be back at your preferred body fat percentage and can continue the muscle building process.

Does intermittent fasting have different effects on men and women?

Yes, intermittent fasting can affect men and women differently.

This article over on Paleo For Women goes extensively into the potential negative effects of intermittent fasting for women.

This article on Mark’s Daily Apple does a fantastic job of breaking down the differences between men and women and how they are affected by intermittent fasting, ultimately explaining:

“One study, which I’ve cited before as evidence of a benefit to fasting, found that while IF improved insulin sensitivity in male subjects, female subjects saw no such improvement. In fact, the glucose tolerance of fasting women actually worsened. Ouch.

Another study examined the effect of alternate day fasting on blood lipids. Women’s HDL improved and their triglycerides remained stable; men’s HDL remained stable and their triglycerides decreased. Favorable, albeit sex-specific results.

Later, both obese men and women dropped body fat, body weight, blood pressure, total cholesterol, LDL cholesterol, and triglyercides on a fasting regimen. These people were obese, however, and perimenopausal women were excluded from the study, so the results may not apply to leaner people or women of reproductive age.”

Long story short:..

http://ift.tt/2fpmPxv

[neilmillerne]

The Beginner’s Guide to Intermittent Fasting (2017 Update)

“…But Tony the Tiger tells us that breakfast is the most important meal of the day!”

This rule has become so commonplace throughout the health and fitness community that it’s readily accepted as fact:

“Want to lose weight? Make sure you start off with a healthy breakfast, so you can get that metabolism firing first thing in the morning!  Eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince, and dinner like a pauper.”

“Want to lose more weight? Make sure you eat six small meals throughout the day so your metabolism stays operating at maximum capacity all day long”.

There are even studies that show those that eat earlier in the day lose more weight than those who ate later in the day or skipped a meal.

So, eat breakfast to lose weight and obtain optimal health.  Case closed…right?

Maybe you’re not getting the whole story. As skeptics, what we need to ask: what if there’s science and research that promotes SKIPPING BREAKFAST (the horror! blasphemy!) for optimum efficiency, maximum muscle retention, and body fat loss?

After firmly being on “Team Breakfast” for 28 years of my life, I’ve skipped breakfast for the past three years and will most likely not go back.

I want to share with you a concept about skipping breakfast (and other meals), and how your health can benefit as a result.

Tony ain’t gonna be happy, but today we’re talking about intermittent fasting.

This is a topic that is controversial (which is funny – you’re just skippin ga meal) as it turns a LOT of conventional wisdom on its head. This is why this article is filled with more sources and citations than Jim Carrey’s glove compartment.

What is intermittent fasting?

Intermittent fasting is not a diet, but rather a dieting pattern.  

In simpler terms: it’s making a conscious decision to skip certain meals.

By fasting and then feasting on purpose, intermittent fasting means eating your calories during a specific window of the day, and choosing not to eat food during the rest.

Now, there are a few different ways to take advantage of intermittent fasting:

Regularly eat during a specific time period.  For example, only eating from noon-8 PM, essentially skipping breakfast.  Some people only eat in a 6-hour window, or even a 4-hour window. AKA “feasting” and “fasting” parts of your days.   

Skip two meals one day, taking a full 24-hours off from eating. For example, eating on a normal schedule (finishing dinner at 8PM) and then not eating again until 8PM the following day.

Now, you might be thinking: “okay, so by skipping a meal, I just eat less than normally overall, and thus I will lose weight, right?”  

Well, that’s partly true.  

Yes, by cutting out an entire meal, you are able to eat MORE food during your other meals and could still consume a caloric deficit (which is an important for losing weight).  

However, as we already know that not all calories are created equal, the timing of meals can also influence how your body reacts.  

How does intermittent fasting work?

With intermittent fasting, your body operates differently when “feasting” compared to when “fasting”:

When you eat a meal, your body spends a few hours processing that food, burning what it can from what you just consumed.   Because it has all of this readily available, easy to burn energy in its blood stream (thanks to the food you ate), your body will choose to use that as energy rather than the fat you have stored.  This is especially true if you just consumed carbohydrates/sugar, as your body prefers to burn sugar as energy before any other source.

During the “fasted state,” your body doesn’t have a recently consumed meal to use as energy, so it is more likely to pull from the fat stored in your body, rather than the glucose in your blood stream or glycogen in your muscles/liver.

Burning fat = win.

The same goes for working out in a “fasted” state.  Without a ready supply of glucose and glycogen to pull from (which has been depleted over the course of your fasted state, and hasn’t yet been replenished with a pre-workout meal), your body is forced to adapt and pull from the only source of energy available to it: the fat stored in your cells!

Why does this work?  Our bodies react to energy consumption (eating food) with insulin production.  Essentially, the more sensitive your body is to insulin, the more likely you’ll be to use the food you consume efficiently, which can help lead to weight loss and muscle creation.

Along with that, your body is most sensitive to insulin following a period of fasting. 

Your glycogen (a starch stored in your muscles and liver that your body can burn as fuel when necessary) is depleted during sleep (fasting), and will be depleted even further during training, which can further increase insulin sensitivity.

This means that a meal immediately following your workout will be stored most efficiently: mostly as glycogen for muscle stores, burned as energy immediately to help with the recovery process, with minimal amounts stored as fat.

Compare this to a regular day (no intermittent fasting).  With insulin sensitivity at normal levels, the carbs and foods consumed will see full glycogen stores, enough glucose in the blood stream, and thus be more likely to get stored as fat.

Not only that, but growth hormone is increased during fasted states (both during sleep and after a period of fasting).  Combine this  increased growth hormone secretion, the decrease in insulin production (and thus increase in insulin sensitivity), and you’re essentially priming your body for muscle growth and fat loss with intermittent fasting.

The less science-y version: Intermittent fasting can help teach your body to use the food it consumes more efficiently.  For many different physiological reasons, fasting can help promote weight loss and muscle building when done properly.  

Get Your FREE Nerd Fitness Resource Kit

15 Fitness traps you should avoid

Comprehensive beginner's guide to Paleo diet

BONUS: How to level up your life and be the hero of your own story

But why does every health book say “6 small meals?”

There are a few main reasons why diet books recommend six small meals:

1) When you eat a meal, your body does have to burn extra calories just to process that meal.  So, the theory is that if you eat all day long with small meals, your body is constantly burning extra calories and your metabolism is firing at optimal capacity, right? Well, that’s not true.  Whether you eat 2000 calories spread out throughout the day, or 2000 calories in a small window, your body will burn the same number of calories processing the food.  So, the whole “keep your metabolism firing at optimum capacity by always eating” sounds good in principle, but reality tells a different story.

2) When you eat smaller meals, you’re less likely to overeat during your regular meals.  I can definitely see some truth here, especially for people who struggle with portion control or don’t know how much food they should be eating.  However, once you educate yourself and take control of your eating, I would argue most people find that eating six times a day is very prohibitive and requires a lot of effort.  Along with that, because you’re eating six small meals, I’d argue that you probably never feel “full,” and you might be MORE likely to eat extra calories during each snack.

Although grounded in seemingly logical principles, the “six meals a day” doesn’t work for the reason you think it would (#1), and really only works for people who struggle with portion control (#2).

If we want to think back to the caveman days, we’d have been in serious trouble as a species if we had to eat every three hours.  Do you think Joe caveman pulled out his pocket sundial six times a day to consume his equally portioned meals?  Hell no!  He ate when he could, and his body adapted to still function optimally during the rest of the day.

A recent study (highlighted by the New York Times) has done a great job of challenging the “six-meals-a-day” technique for weight loss.  

Martin from LeanGains points out two important quotes from the study:

“…The premise underlying the present study was that increasing meal frequency would lead to better short-term appetite regulation and increased dietary compliance; furthermore, it was hypothesised that these predicted beneficial effects of increased meal frequency could have resulted from more favourable gut peptide profiles, potentially leading to greater weight loss. Under the conditions described in the present study, all three hypotheses were rejected.”

“…We had postulated that increasing meal frequency would enhance the compliance to the energy restricted diet thus leading to greater weight loss, an effect possibly mediated by increased fullness. The present results do not support this hypothesis.”

Remember, the type of food you eat matters. Meal frequency is not nearly as important as the quantity and quality of food consumed.  This study reached similar conclusions.

Why intermittent fasting?

Because it works.  Although we know that not all calories are created equal, caloric restriction plays a central role in weight loss.  When you fast (either for 16 hours per day, or 24 hours every few days), you are also making it easier to restrict your caloric intake over the course of the week.  This will give your body a chance to lose weight as you’re simply just eating less calories than you were consuming before.

Because it simplifies your day. Rather than having to prepare, pack, eat, and time your meals every 2-3 hours, you simply skip a meal or two and only worry about eating food in your eating window.

It requires less time (and potentially money). Rather than having to prepare or purchase three to six meals a day, you only need to prepare two meals.  Instead of stopping what you’re doing six times a day to eat, you simply only have to stop to eat twice.  Rather than having to do the dishes six times, you only have to do them twice. Rather than having to purchase six meals a day, you only need to purchase two.

It promotes stronger insulin sensitivity and increased growth hormone secretion, two keys for weight loss and muscle gain.  This was already explained in the previous section with relevant sources, but intermittent fasting helps you create a double whammy for weight loss.

It can level up your brain, including positively counteracting conditions like Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, and dementia. As explained here in this TEDx talk by Mark Mattson,Professor at Johns Hopkins University and Chief of the Laboratory of Neurosciences at the National Institute on Aging this “fad” of skipping meals is grounded in serious research and studies:

Plus, Wolverine does it.

What are the drawbacks with intermittent fasting?

In my own experimentation over the past three years, I have found very few negative side effects with Intermittent fasting. 

The biggest concern most people have is that intermittent fasting will lead to lower energy, focus, and the “holy crap I am hungry” feeling during the fasting period and ruin them.  People are concerned that they will spend all morning being miserable because they haven’t consumed any food, and thus will be miserable at work and ineffective at whatever task it is they are working on.

Yes, the initial transition from EATING ALL THE TIME, to intermittent fasting MIGHT be a bit of a jolt to your system. However, once you get through the transition, your body can quickly adapt and learn to function just as well only eating a few times a day:

This study explains that in participants after 48-hours of fasting, “cognitive performance, activity, sleep, and mood are not adversely affected in healthy humans by two days of calorie-deprivation.”

“So why do I feel grouchy when I’m not eating breakfast?” In this nerd’s humble opinion, a good portion of the grumpiness is a result of your eating habits. If you eat every three hours, your body will start to get hungry every three hours as it learns and becomes used to expecting (and receiving) food every three hours. If you eat breakfast every morning, your body is expecting to wake up and eat food.

It turns out, quite a bit of it is mental.

Once you retrain your body to NOT expect food all day every day (or first thing in the morning), these side-effects become less of an issue (thanks to a substance our bodies produce called Ghrelin).

Think about it in caveman terms again.  We certainly found ways to survive during periods of feast and famine, and that remains true today.  It actually takes our bodies about 84 hours of fasting before our glucose levels are adversely affected.  As we’re talking about small fasts (16-24 hour periods), this doesn’t concern us.

AN IMPORTANT CAVEAT: Intermittent Fasting can be complex for people who have issues with blood sugar regulation, suffer from hypoglycemia, have diabetes, etc.  If you fit into this category, I highly recommend you check with your doctor or dietitian before adjusting your eating schedule.

I believe more research needs to be done for these particular cases and thus would recommend you do what works best for YOU.

Can I build muscle and gain weight while intermittent fasting?

Absolutely!

In fact, I have been intermittent fasting for the past three years while building muscle, with minimal increase to my body fat percentage.  I still eat the same number of calories I was consuming before, but instead of eating all damn day long, I condense all of my calorie consumption into an eight hour window.

11 AM Work out with heavy strength training in a fasted state.

12 PM Immediately consume 1/2 of my calories for the day (a regular whole-food meal, followed by a massive Calorie Bomb Shake.)

7 PM Consume the second portion of my calories for the day in a big dinner.

8 PM – 12 PM the next day: Fast for 16 hours.

This method has been borrowed from one of the best resources on intermittent fasting and muscle building on the internet: Lean Gains.

In a different method, my friend Nate Green packed on a crazy amount of muscle while fasting for a full 24 hours on Sundays.  

I’m not kidding when I say this has revolutionized how I look at muscle building and fat loss.  Ultimately, this method flies in the face of the typical “bulk and cut” techniques of overeating to build muscle (along with adding a lot of fat) before cutting calories to lose fat (along with some muscle) and settling down at a higher weight.

I prefer this method to the bulk-and-cut technique for a few reasons:

There’s far less of a crazy swing. If you are putting on 30 pounds and then cutting 25 to gain 5 lbs of muscle, your body is going through drastic swings of body mass. Your clothes will fit differently, you’ll have different levels of definition, and your body will wonder what the hell is going on.

You’re consuming less food and thus spending less money. Rather than overeating to put on 1 pound of muscle and 4 pounds of fat in a week or two, you’re aiming to eat exactly enough to put on 1 pound of muscle without adding much fat on top of it.  Yeah, it’s a delicate balance, but there’s far less swing involved. You are just slowly, steadily, and consistently building muscle and strength over many months.

There’s never a need to get “vacation-ready”: we all want to look good naked, right?  When you are just adding muscle, you don’t need to worry about getting your body ready before by drastically altering your diet (going on a miserable crash diet for a month). I like Anthony Mychal’s technique of never being more than two weeks away.  Keep your body fat percentage low, build strength and muscle, and if you happen to notice your body fat creeping up, cut back on the carbs. Within two weeks you should be back at your preferred body fat percentage and can continue the muscle building process.

Does intermittent fasting have different effects on men and women?

Yes, intermittent fasting can affect men and women differently.

This article over on Paleo For Women goes extensively into the potential negative effects of intermittent fasting for women.

This article on Mark’s Daily Apple does a fantastic job of breaking down the differences between men and women and how they are affected by intermittent fasting, ultimately explaining:

“One study, which I’ve cited before as evidence of a benefit to fasting, found that while IF improved insulin sensitivity in male subjects, female subjects saw no such improvement. In fact, the glucose tolerance of fasting women actually worsened. Ouch.

Another study examined the effect of alternate day fasting on blood lipids. Women’s HDL improved and their triglycerides remained stable; men’s HDL remained stable and their triglycerides decreased. Favorable, albeit sex-specific results.

Later, both obese men and women dropped body fat, body weight, blood pressure, total cholesterol, LDL cholesterol, and triglyercides on a fasting regimen. These people were obese, however, and perimenopausal women were excluded from the study, so the results may not apply to leaner people or women of reproductive age.”

Long story short:..

http://ift.tt/2fpmPxv

[johnclapperne]

The Beginner’s Guide to Intermittent Fasting (2017 Update)

“…But Tony the Tiger tells us that breakfast is the most important meal of the day!”

This rule has become so commonplace throughout the health and fitness community that it’s readily accepted as fact:

“Want to lose weight? Make sure you start off with a healthy breakfast, so you can get that metabolism firing first thing in the morning!  Eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince, and dinner like a pauper.”

“Want to lose more weight? Make sure you eat six small meals throughout the day so your metabolism stays operating at maximum capacity all day long”.

There are even studies that show those that eat earlier in the day lose more weight than those who ate later in the day or skipped a meal.

So, eat breakfast to lose weight and obtain optimal health.  Case closed…right?

Maybe you’re not getting the whole story. As skeptics, what we need to ask: what if there’s science and research that promotes SKIPPING BREAKFAST (the horror! blasphemy!) for optimum efficiency, maximum muscle retention, and body fat loss?

After firmly being on “Team Breakfast” for 28 years of my life, I’ve skipped breakfast for the past three years and will most likely not go back.

I want to share with you a concept about skipping breakfast (and other meals), and how your health can benefit as a result.

Tony ain’t gonna be happy, but today we’re talking about intermittent fasting.

This is a topic that is controversial (which is funny – you’re just skippin ga meal) as it turns a LOT of conventional wisdom on its head. This is why this article is filled with more sources and citations than Jim Carrey’s glove compartment.

What is intermittent fasting?

Intermittent fasting is not a diet, but rather a dieting pattern.  

In simpler terms: it’s making a conscious decision to skip certain meals.

By fasting and then feasting on purpose, intermittent fasting means eating your calories during a specific window of the day, and choosing not to eat food during the rest.

Now, there are a few different ways to take advantage of intermittent fasting:

Regularly eat during a specific time period.  For example, only eating from noon-8 PM, essentially skipping breakfast.  Some people only eat in a 6-hour window, or even a 4-hour window. AKA “feasting” and “fasting” parts of your days.   

Skip two meals one day, taking a full 24-hours off from eating. For example, eating on a normal schedule (finishing dinner at 8PM) and then not eating again until 8PM the following day.

Now, you might be thinking: “okay, so by skipping a meal, I just eat less than normally overall, and thus I will lose weight, right?”  

Well, that’s partly true.  

Yes, by cutting out an entire meal, you are able to eat MORE food during your other meals and could still consume a caloric deficit (which is an important for losing weight).  

However, as we already know that not all calories are created equal, the timing of meals can also influence how your body reacts.  

How does intermittent fasting work?

With intermittent fasting, your body operates differently when “feasting” compared to when “fasting”:

When you eat a meal, your body spends a few hours processing that food, burning what it can from what you just consumed.   Because it has all of this readily available, easy to burn energy in its blood stream (thanks to the food you ate), your body will choose to use that as energy rather than the fat you have stored.  This is especially true if you just consumed carbohydrates/sugar, as your body prefers to burn sugar as energy before any other source.

During the “fasted state,” your body doesn’t have a recently consumed meal to use as energy, so it is more likely to pull from the fat stored in your body, rather than the glucose in your blood stream or glycogen in your muscles/liver.

Burning fat = win.

The same goes for working out in a “fasted” state.  Without a ready supply of glucose and glycogen to pull from (which has been depleted over the course of your fasted state, and hasn’t yet been replenished with a pre-workout meal), your body is forced to adapt and pull from the only source of energy available to it: the fat stored in your cells!

Why does this work?  Our bodies react to energy consumption (eating food) with insulin production.  Essentially, the more sensitive your body is to insulin, the more likely you’ll be to use the food you consume efficiently, which can help lead to weight loss and muscle creation.

Along with that, your body is most sensitive to insulin following a period of fasting. 

Your glycogen (a starch stored in your muscles and liver that your body can burn as fuel when necessary) is depleted during sleep (fasting), and will be depleted even further during training, which can further increase insulin sensitivity.

This means that a meal immediately following your workout will be stored most efficiently: mostly as glycogen for muscle stores, burned as energy immediately to help with the recovery process, with minimal amounts stored as fat.

Compare this to a regular day (no intermittent fasting).  With insulin sensitivity at normal levels, the carbs and foods consumed will see full glycogen stores, enough glucose in the blood stream, and thus be more likely to get stored as fat.

Not only that, but growth hormone is increased during fasted states (both during sleep and after a period of fasting).  Combine this  increased growth hormone secretion, the decrease in insulin production (and thus increase in insulin sensitivity), and you’re essentially priming your body for muscle growth and fat loss with intermittent fasting.

The less science-y version: Intermittent fasting can help teach your body to use the food it consumes more efficiently.  For many different physiological reasons, fasting can help promote weight loss and muscle building when done properly.  

Get Your FREE Nerd Fitness Resource Kit

15 Fitness traps you should avoid

Comprehensive beginner's guide to Paleo diet

BONUS: How to level up your life and be the hero of your own story

But why does every health book say “6 small meals?”

There are a few main reasons why diet books recommend six small meals:

1) When you eat a meal, your body does have to burn extra calories just to process that meal.  So, the theory is that if you eat all day long with small meals, your body is constantly burning extra calories and your metabolism is firing at optimal capacity, right? Well, that’s not true.  Whether you eat 2000 calories spread out throughout the day, or 2000 calories in a small window, your body will burn the same number of calories processing the food.  So, the whole “keep your metabolism firing at optimum capacity by always eating” sounds good in principle, but reality tells a different story.

2) When you eat smaller meals, you’re less likely to overeat during your regular meals.  I can definitely see some truth here, especially for people who struggle with portion control or don’t know how much food they should be eating.  However, once you educate yourself and take control of your eating, I would argue most people find that eating six times a day is very prohibitive and requires a lot of effort.  Along with that, because you’re eating six small meals, I’d argue that you probably never feel “full,” and you might be MORE likely to eat extra calories during each snack.

Although grounded in seemingly logical principles, the “six meals a day” doesn’t work for the reason you think it would (#1), and really only works for people who struggle with portion control (#2).

If we want to think back to the caveman days, we’d have been in serious trouble as a species if we had to eat every three hours.  Do you think Joe caveman pulled out his pocket sundial six times a day to consume his equally portioned meals?  Hell no!  He ate when he could, and his body adapted to still function optimally during the rest of the day.

A recent study (highlighted by the New York Times) has done a great job of challenging the “six-meals-a-day” technique for weight loss.  

Martin from LeanGains points out two important quotes from the study:

“…The premise underlying the present study was that increasing meal frequency would lead to better short-term appetite regulation and increased dietary compliance; furthermore, it was hypothesised that these predicted beneficial effects of increased meal frequency could have resulted from more favourable gut peptide profiles, potentially leading to greater weight loss. Under the conditions described in the present study, all three hypotheses were rejected.”

“…We had postulated that increasing meal frequency would enhance the compliance to the energy restricted diet thus leading to greater weight loss, an effect possibly mediated by increased fullness. The present results do not support this hypothesis.”

Remember, the type of food you eat matters. Meal frequency is not nearly as important as the quantity and quality of food consumed.  This study reached similar conclusions.

Why intermittent fasting?

Because it works.  Although we know that not all calories are created equal, caloric restriction plays a central role in weight loss.  When you fast (either for 16 hours per day, or 24 hours every few days), you are also making it easier to restrict your caloric intake over the course of the week.  This will give your body a chance to lose weight as you’re simply just eating less calories than you were consuming before.

Because it simplifies your day. Rather than having to prepare, pack, eat, and time your meals every 2-3 hours, you simply skip a meal or two and only worry about eating food in your eating window.

It requires less time (and potentially money). Rather than having to prepare or purchase three to six meals a day, you only need to prepare two meals.  Instead of stopping what you’re doing six times a day to eat, you simply only have to stop to eat twice.  Rather than having to do the dishes six times, you only have to do them twice. Rather than having to purchase six meals a day, you only need to purchase two.

It promotes stronger insulin sensitivity and increased growth hormone secretion, two keys for weight loss and muscle gain.  This was already explained in the previous section with relevant sources, but intermittent fasting helps you create a double whammy for weight loss.

It can level up your brain, including positively counteracting conditions like Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, and dementia. As explained here in this TEDx talk by Mark Mattson,Professor at Johns Hopkins University and Chief of the Laboratory of Neurosciences at the National Institute on Aging this “fad” of skipping meals is grounded in serious research and studies:

Plus, Wolverine does it.

What are the drawbacks with intermittent fasting?

In my own experimentation over the past three years, I have found very few negative side effects with Intermittent fasting. 

The biggest concern most people have is that intermittent fasting will lead to lower energy, focus, and the “holy crap I am hungry” feeling during the fasting period and ruin them.  People are concerned that they will spend all morning being miserable because they haven’t consumed any food, and thus will be miserable at work and ineffective at whatever task it is they are working on.

Yes, the initial transition from EATING ALL THE TIME, to intermittent fasting MIGHT be a bit of a jolt to your system. However, once you get through the transition, your body can quickly adapt and learn to function just as well only eating a few times a day:

This study explains that in participants after 48-hours of fasting, “cognitive performance, activity, sleep, and mood are not adversely affected in healthy humans by two days of calorie-deprivation.”

“So why do I feel grouchy when I’m not eating breakfast?” In this nerd’s humble opinion, a good portion of the grumpiness is a result of your eating habits. If you eat every three hours, your body will start to get hungry every three hours as it learns and becomes used to expecting (and receiving) food every three hours. If you eat breakfast every morning, your body is expecting to wake up and eat food.

It turns out, quite a bit of it is mental.

Once you retrain your body to NOT expect food all day every day (or first thing in the morning), these side-effects become less of an issue (thanks to a substance our bodies produce called Ghrelin).

Think about it in caveman terms again.  We certainly found ways to survive during periods of feast and famine, and that remains true today.  It actually takes our bodies about 84 hours of fasting before our glucose levels are adversely affected.  As we’re talking about small fasts (16-24 hour periods), this doesn’t concern us.

AN IMPORTANT CAVEAT: Intermittent Fasting can be complex for people who have issues with blood sugar regulation, suffer from hypoglycemia, have diabetes, etc.  If you fit into this category, I highly recommend you check with your doctor or dietitian before adjusting your eating schedule.

I believe more research needs to be done for these particular cases and thus would recommend you do what works best for YOU.

Can I build muscle and gain weight while intermittent fasting?

Absolutely!

In fact, I have been intermittent fasting for the past three years while building muscle, with minimal increase to my body fat percentage.  I still eat the same number of calories I was consuming before, but instead of eating all damn day long, I condense all of my calorie consumption into an eight hour window.

11 AM Work out with heavy strength training in a fasted state.

12 PM Immediately consume 1/2 of my calories for the day (a regular whole-food meal, followed by a massive Calorie Bomb Shake.)

7 PM Consume the second portion of my calories for the day in a big dinner.

8 PM – 12 PM the next day: Fast for 16 hours.

This method has been borrowed from one of the best resources on intermittent fasting and muscle building on the internet: Lean Gains.

In a different method, my friend Nate Green packed on a crazy amount of muscle while fasting for a full 24 hours on Sundays.  

I’m not kidding when I say this has revolutionized how I look at muscle building and fat loss.  Ultimately, this method flies in the face of the typical “bulk and cut” techniques of overeating to build muscle (along with adding a lot of fat) before cutting calories to lose fat (along with some muscle) and settling down at a higher weight.

I prefer this method to the bulk-and-cut technique for a few reasons:

There’s far less of a crazy swing. If you are putting on 30 pounds and then cutting 25 to gain 5 lbs of muscle, your body is going through drastic swings of body mass. Your clothes will fit differently, you’ll have different levels of definition, and your body will wonder what the hell is going on.

You’re consuming less food and thus spending less money. Rather than overeating to put on 1 pound of muscle and 4 pounds of fat in a week or two, you’re aiming to eat exactly enough to put on 1 pound of muscle without adding much fat on top of it.  Yeah, it’s a delicate balance, but there’s far less swing involved. You are just slowly, steadily, and consistently building muscle and strength over many months.

There’s never a need to get “vacation-ready”: we all want to look good naked, right?  When you are just adding muscle, you don’t need to worry about getting your body ready before by drastically altering your diet (going on a miserable crash diet for a month). I like Anthony Mychal’s technique of never being more than two weeks away.  Keep your body fat percentage low, build strength and muscle, and if you happen to notice your body fat creeping up, cut back on the carbs. Within two weeks you should be back at your preferred body fat percentage and can continue the muscle building process.

Does intermittent fasting have different effects on men and women?

Yes, intermittent fasting can affect men and women differently.

This article over on Paleo For Women goes extensively into the potential negative effects of intermittent fasting for women.

This article on Mark’s Daily Apple does a fantastic job of breaking down the differences between men and women and how they are affected by intermittent fasting, ultimately explaining:

“One study, which I’ve cited before as evidence of a benefit to fasting, found that while IF improved insulin sensitivity in male subjects, female subjects saw no such improvement. In fact, the glucose tolerance of fasting women actually worsened. Ouch.

Another study examined the effect of alternate day fasting on blood lipids. Women’s HDL improved and their triglycerides remained stable; men’s HDL remained stable and their triglycerides decreased. Favorable, albeit sex-specific results.

Later, both obese men and women dropped body fat, body weight, blood pressure, total cholesterol, LDL cholesterol, and triglyercides on a fasting regimen. These people were obese, however, and perimenopausal women were excluded from the study, so the results may not apply to leaner people or women of reproductive age.”

Long story short:..

http://ift.tt/2fpmPxv

[ruthellisneda]

The Beginner’s Guide to Intermittent Fasting (2017 Update)

“…But Tony the Tiger tells us that breakfast is the most important meal of the day!”

This rule has become so commonplace throughout the health and fitness community that it’s readily accepted as fact:

“Want to lose weight? Make sure you start off with a healthy breakfast, so you can get that metabolism firing first thing in the morning!  Eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince, and dinner like a pauper.”

“Want to lose more weight? Make sure you eat six small meals throughout the day so your metabolism stays operating at maximum capacity all day long”.

There are even studies that show those that eat earlier in the day lose more weight than those who ate later in the day or skipped a meal.

So, eat breakfast to lose weight and obtain optimal health.  Case closed…right?

Maybe you’re not getting the whole story. As skeptics, what we need to ask: what if there’s science and research that promotes SKIPPING BREAKFAST (the horror! blasphemy!) for optimum efficiency, maximum muscle retention, and body fat loss?

After firmly being on “Team Breakfast” for 28 years of my life, I’ve skipped breakfast for the past three years and will most likely not go back.

I want to share with you a concept about skipping breakfast (and other meals), and how your health can benefit as a result.

Tony ain’t gonna be happy, but today we’re talking about intermittent fasting.

This is a topic that is controversial (which is funny – you’re just skippin ga meal) as it turns a LOT of conventional wisdom on its head. This is why this article is filled with more sources and citations than Jim Carrey’s glove compartment.

What is intermittent fasting?

Intermittent fasting is not a diet, but rather a dieting pattern.  

In simpler terms: it’s making a conscious decision to skip certain meals.

By fasting and then feasting on purpose, intermittent fasting means eating your calories during a specific window of the day, and choosing not to eat food during the rest.

Now, there are a few different ways to take advantage of intermittent fasting:

Regularly eat during a specific time period.  For example, only eating from noon-8 PM, essentially skipping breakfast.  Some people only eat in a 6-hour window, or even a 4-hour window. AKA “feasting” and “fasting” parts of your days.   

Skip two meals one day, taking a full 24-hours off from eating. For example, eating on a normal schedule (finishing dinner at 8PM) and then not eating again until 8PM the following day.

Now, you might be thinking: “okay, so by skipping a meal, I just eat less than normally overall, and thus I will lose weight, right?”  

Well, that’s partly true.  

Yes, by cutting out an entire meal, you are able to eat MORE food during your other meals and could still consume a caloric deficit (which is an important for losing weight).  

However, as we already know that not all calories are created equal, the timing of meals can also influence how your body reacts.  

How does intermittent fasting work?

With intermittent fasting, your body operates differently when “feasting” compared to when “fasting”:

When you eat a meal, your body spends a few hours processing that food, burning what it can from what you just consumed.   Because it has all of this readily available, easy to burn energy in its blood stream (thanks to the food you ate), your body will choose to use that as energy rather than the fat you have stored.  This is especially true if you just consumed carbohydrates/sugar, as your body prefers to burn sugar as energy before any other source.

During the “fasted state,” your body doesn’t have a recently consumed meal to use as energy, so it is more likely to pull from the fat stored in your body, rather than the glucose in your blood stream or glycogen in your muscles/liver.

Burning fat = win.

The same goes for working out in a “fasted” state.  Without a ready supply of glucose and glycogen to pull from (which has been depleted over the course of your fasted state, and hasn’t yet been replenished with a pre-workout meal), your body is forced to adapt and pull from the only source of energy available to it: the fat stored in your cells!

Why does this work?  Our bodies react to energy consumption (eating food) with insulin production.  Essentially, the more sensitive your body is to insulin, the more likely you’ll be to use the food you consume efficiently, which can help lead to weight loss and muscle creation.

Along with that, your body is most sensitive to insulin following a period of fasting. 

Your glycogen (a starch stored in your muscles and liver that your body can burn as fuel when necessary) is depleted during sleep (fasting), and will be depleted even further during training, which can further increase insulin sensitivity.

This means that a meal immediately following your workout will be stored most efficiently: mostly as glycogen for muscle stores, burned as energy immediately to help with the recovery process, with minimal amounts stored as fat.

Compare this to a regular day (no intermittent fasting).  With insulin sensitivity at normal levels, the carbs and foods consumed will see full glycogen stores, enough glucose in the blood stream, and thus be more likely to get stored as fat.

Not only that, but growth hormone is increased during fasted states (both during sleep and after a period of fasting).  Combine this  increased growth hormone secretion, the decrease in insulin production (and thus increase in insulin sensitivity), and you’re essentially priming your body for muscle growth and fat loss with intermittent fasting.

The less science-y version: Intermittent fasting can help teach your body to use the food it consumes more efficiently.  For many different physiological reasons, fasting can help promote weight loss and muscle building when done properly.  

Get Your FREE Nerd Fitness Resource Kit

15 Fitness traps you should avoid

Comprehensive beginner's guide to Paleo diet

BONUS: How to level up your life and be the hero of your own story

But why does every health book say “6 small meals?”

There are a few main reasons why diet books recommend six small meals:

1) When you eat a meal, your body does have to burn extra calories just to process that meal.  So, the theory is that if you eat all day long with small meals, your body is constantly burning extra calories and your metabolism is firing at optimal capacity, right? Well, that’s not true.  Whether you eat 2000 calories spread out throughout the day, or 2000 calories in a small window, your body will burn the same number of calories processing the food.  So, the whole “keep your metabolism firing at optimum capacity by always eating” sounds good in principle, but reality tells a different story.

2) When you eat smaller meals, you’re less likely to overeat during your regular meals.  I can definitely see some truth here, especially for people who struggle with portion control or don’t know how much food they should be eating.  However, once you educate yourself and take control of your eating, I would argue most people find that eating six times a day is very prohibitive and requires a lot of effort.  Along with that, because you’re eating six small meals, I’d argue that you probably never feel “full,” and you might be MORE likely to eat extra calories during each snack.

Although grounded in seemingly logical principles, the “six meals a day” doesn’t work for the reason you think it would (#1), and really only works for people who struggle with portion control (#2).

If we want to think back to the caveman days, we’d have been in serious trouble as a species if we had to eat every three hours.  Do you think Joe caveman pulled out his pocket sundial six times a day to consume his equally portioned meals?  Hell no!  He ate when he could, and his body adapted to still function optimally during the rest of the day.

A recent study (highlighted by the New York Times) has done a great job of challenging the “six-meals-a-day” technique for weight loss.  

Martin from LeanGains points out two important quotes from the study:

“…The premise underlying the present study was that increasing meal frequency would lead to better short-term appetite regulation and increased dietary compliance; furthermore, it was hypothesised that these predicted beneficial effects of increased meal frequency could have resulted from more favourable gut peptide profiles, potentially leading to greater weight loss. Under the conditions described in the present study, all three hypotheses were rejected.”

“…We had postulated that increasing meal frequency would enhance the compliance to the energy restricted diet thus leading to greater weight loss, an effect possibly mediated by increased fullness. The present results do not support this hypothesis.”

Remember, the type of food you eat matters. Meal frequency is not nearly as important as the quantity and quality of food consumed.  This study reached similar conclusions.

Why intermittent fasting?

Because it works.  Although we know that not all calories are created equal, caloric restriction plays a central role in weight loss.  When you fast (either for 16 hours per day, or 24 hours every few days), you are also making it easier to restrict your caloric intake over the course of the week.  This will give your body a chance to lose weight as you’re simply just eating less calories than you were consuming before.

Because it simplifies your day. Rather than having to prepare, pack, eat, and time your meals every 2-3 hours, you simply skip a meal or two and only worry about eating food in your eating window.

It requires less time (and potentially money). Rather than having to prepare or purchase three to six meals a day, you only need to prepare two meals.  Instead of stopping what you’re doing six times a day to eat, you simply only have to stop to eat twice.  Rather than having to do the dishes six times, you only have to do them twice. Rather than having to purchase six meals a day, you only need to purchase two.

It promotes stronger insulin sensitivity and increased growth hormone secretion, two keys for weight loss and muscle gain.  This was already explained in the previous section with relevant sources, but intermittent fasting helps you create a double whammy for weight loss.

It can level up your brain, including positively counteracting conditions like Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, and dementia. As explained here in this TEDx talk by Mark Mattson,Professor at Johns Hopkins University and Chief of the Laboratory of Neurosciences at the National Institute on Aging this “fad” of skipping meals is grounded in serious research and studies:

Plus, Wolverine does it.

What are the drawbacks with intermittent fasting?

In my own experimentation over the past three years, I have found very few negative side effects with Intermittent fasting. 

The biggest concern most people have is that intermittent fasting will lead to lower energy, focus, and the “holy crap I am hungry” feeling during the fasting period and ruin them.  People are concerned that they will spend all morning being miserable because they haven’t consumed any food, and thus will be miserable at work and ineffective at whatever task it is they are working on.

Yes, the initial transition from EATING ALL THE TIME, to intermittent fasting MIGHT be a bit of a jolt to your system. However, once you get through the transition, your body can quickly adapt and learn to function just as well only eating a few times a day:

This study explains that in participants after 48-hours of fasting, “cognitive performance, activity, sleep, and mood are not adversely affected in healthy humans by two days of calorie-deprivation.”

“So why do I feel grouchy when I’m not eating breakfast?” In this nerd’s humble opinion, a good portion of the grumpiness is a result of your eating habits. If you eat every three hours, your body will start to get hungry every three hours as it learns and becomes used to expecting (and receiving) food every three hours. If you eat breakfast every morning, your body is expecting to wake up and eat food.

It turns out, quite a bit of it is mental.

Once you retrain your body to NOT expect food all day every day (or first thing in the morning), these side-effects become less of an issue (thanks to a substance our bodies produce called Ghrelin).

Think about it in caveman terms again.  We certainly found ways to survive during periods of feast and famine, and that remains true today.  It actually takes our bodies about 84 hours of fasting before our glucose levels are adversely affected.  As we’re talking about small fasts (16-24 hour periods), this doesn’t concern us.

AN IMPORTANT CAVEAT: Intermittent Fasting can be complex for people who have issues with blood sugar regulation, suffer from hypoglycemia, have diabetes, etc.  If you fit into this category, I highly recommend you check with your doctor or dietitian before adjusting your eating schedule.

I believe more research needs to be done for these particular cases and thus would recommend you do what works best for YOU.

Can I build muscle and gain weight while intermittent fasting?

Absolutely!

In fact, I have been intermittent fasting for the past three years while building muscle, with minimal increase to my body fat percentage.  I still eat the same number of calories I was consuming before, but instead of eating all damn day long, I condense all of my calorie consumption into an eight hour window.

11 AM Work out with heavy strength training in a fasted state.

12 PM Immediately consume 1/2 of my calories for the day (a regular whole-food meal, followed by a massive Calorie Bomb Shake.)

7 PM Consume the second portion of my calories for the day in a big dinner.

8 PM – 12 PM the next day: Fast for 16 hours.

This method has been borrowed from one of the best resources on intermittent fasting and muscle building on the internet: Lean Gains.

In a different method, my friend Nate Green packed on a crazy amount of muscle while fasting for a full 24 hours on Sundays.  

I’m not kidding when I say this has revolutionized how I look at muscle building and fat loss.  Ultimately, this method flies in the face of the typical “bulk and cut” techniques of overeating to build muscle (along with adding a lot of fat) before cutting calories to lose fat (along with some muscle) and settling down at a higher weight.

I prefer this method to the bulk-and-cut technique for a few reasons:

There’s far less of a crazy swing. If you are putting on 30 pounds and then cutting 25 to gain 5 lbs of muscle, your body is going through drastic swings of body mass. Your clothes will fit differently, you’ll have different levels of definition, and your body will wonder what the hell is going on.

You’re consuming less food and thus spending less money. Rather than overeating to put on 1 pound of muscle and 4 pounds of fat in a week or two, you’re aiming to eat exactly enough to put on 1 pound of muscle without adding much fat on top of it.  Yeah, it’s a delicate balance, but there’s far less swing involved. You are just slowly, steadily, and consistently building muscle and strength over many months.

There’s never a need to get “vacation-ready”: we all want to look good naked, right?  When you are just adding muscle, you don’t need to worry about getting your body ready before by drastically altering your diet (going on a miserable crash diet for a month). I like Anthony Mychal’s technique of never being more than two weeks away.  Keep your body fat percentage low, build strength and muscle, and if you happen to notice your body fat creeping up, cut back on the carbs. Within two weeks you should be back at your preferred body fat percentage and can continue the muscle building process.

Does intermittent fasting have different effects on men and women?

Yes, intermittent fasting can affect men and women differently.

This article over on Paleo For Women goes extensively into the potential negative effects of intermittent fasting for women.

This article on Mark’s Daily Apple does a fantastic job of breaking down the differences between men and women and how they are affected by intermittent fasting, ultimately explaining:

“One study, which I’ve cited before as evidence of a benefit to fasting, found that while IF improved insulin sensitivity in male subjects, female subjects saw no such improvement. In fact, the glucose tolerance of fasting women actually worsened. Ouch.

Another study examined the effect of alternate day fasting on blood lipids. Women’s HDL improved and their triglycerides remained stable; men’s HDL remained stable and their triglycerides decreased. Favorable, albeit sex-specific results.

Later, both obese men and women dropped body fat, body weight, blood pressure, total cholesterol, LDL cholesterol, and triglyercides on a fasting regimen. These people were obese, however, and perimenopausal women were excluded from the study, so the results may not apply to leaner people or women of reproductive age.”

Long story short:..

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