5 Of The Biggest Questions You NEED to Know About Before Using Intermittent Fasting To Lose Fat Part 1

Intermittent fasting can be tool in aiding you to lose fat, but how do you perform it? Is it required to lose stubborn belly fat? In this article we will be discussing this and more!

Does anyone else wish they could get paid to sleep? Yeah me too, I’d be such an amazing worker. I could sleep so much. Anyways, losing fat and keeping it off is something everyone is trying to do these days, so a lot of different methods to lose fat are floating around. One of most common is the intermittent fasting weight loss diet.

It’s essentially when you fast for a certain period of hours of your choosing and only drink calorie free drinks such as water. I personally used to also drink black coffee. Then, during your eating hours, you take in all your calories you need to either maintain your body weight, gain weight or lose fat.

Today, we will be taking a deeper dive into intermittent fasting. This article will be a complete guide to intermittent fasting for weight loss for beginners.

Complete Guide To Intermittent Fasting Part 1

1. What Is The Purpose Of Intermittent Fasting?1,2,4,5,6,7

All right my bryani and samosa lovers, let’s jump right into it. What’ the purpose of intermittent fasting? How exactly can it help you lose fat?

First and foremost, you HAVE to be in a caloric deficit to lose weight. If you are eating for only a limited number of hours of the day, you’ll naturally constrain the amount of calories you can eat. It’ll be much tougher to over eat. If you overeat, YOU WILL STILL GAIN WEIGHT.

Then, lets talk about insulin. It’s a regulatory hormone that will cause excess glucose to be stored your liver, muscle and fat in the form of glycogen. Eating causes your insulin level to spike as there is more glucose in your bloodstream that needs to be stored. So when you are fasting, your insulin levels is steady and no additional blood glucose is being stored.

When you fast, your body will deplete it’s blood glucose. Once that is depleted, your body will start using stored glycogen from the liver and muscles after being broken back down into glucose. Through daily activities only, it could take anywhere from 12-22 hours for the glycogen to be used up. If you are performing low to moderate level activity, the glycogen could be all used up in 90 to 120 minutes.

Afterwards, your body will start burning fat once it can’t utilize glycogen from the muscles and liver anymore. That’s what we want, fat to used as an energy source.

2. How Do You Perform Intermittent Fasting?3,8,9

To start off, you set a certain amount of hours that you are going to eat and only eat during those hours. Here are some common forms of intermittent fasting hours/intermittent fasting schedules:

16:8 method. This is when you fast for 16 hours and eat in window of 8 hours.
Alternate day fasting, this is when you fast every other day.
5 and 2 diet. Where you fast 2 days a week and eat regularly the other 5 days
One meal a day (OMAD diet). You only eat one meal a day.

During your fasting hours/days, you can drink only certain things such as:

Water with or without zero calorie flavoring
Black coffee (you can add artificial sweetener such a Stevia or Splenda)
Tea (such as black, green or herbal)
Apple cider vinegar
Diet or zero calorie soda – though some methods don’t recommend this

You can only eat so much in a confined period of time. It’ll almost force you to be in a calorie deficit, thus lose weight.

The best intermittent fasting schedule depends on your personal schedule. Please feel to share an intermittent fasting schedule that has worked for you!

3. How Much Weight Can You Lose?

There is no singular answer to this. This will depend on factors such as, but not limited to, how adherent to it you are, how much of a caloric deficit you are in, how long you perform it for and how much physical activity you are doing at the same time.

Remember, if you are intermittent fasting, but eating above your maintenance calories, you’ll still gain weight. The point of intermittent fasting to help you be in a caloric deficit. It’s harder to eat excess food in a constrained amount of time.

That’s definitely a fact for me. I don’t do intermittent fast for weight loss anymore, but if I wait to eat later in the day and have a shorter window to get all my calories, it’s much tougher.

4. What Are The Best Hours

This is completely dependent on you and your schedule. Pick the hours that work best for you and don’t make you miserable. Maybe start off with 4 hours of fasting when you can and then build up to 8 hours; if you can do more than 8 and you like that life style, then do that. Recent scientific literature that I go through later recommends at least 16 hours of fasting.

Once again, above all else, you need be in a caloric deficit (you’ll get tired of hearing this, but at least it’ll help that point stick ya filthy animal!).

5. What does Scientific Literature Say?8,9

I always like to look at recent studies to see what they have to say as well. This section of the article is going to be more dense as I will be assessing two separate studies.

Just a spoiler alert, they are confusing and don’t really show anything. If you want to read this section, go for it. These were systematic analysis and met-analysis I looked at. There was too much variation in the studies they included. Also, there is no reporting of the patient’s lifestyles; were they weightlifting or exercising in many of the studies. If so, how much? They cannot prove that intermittent fasting is superior to just limiting your calories.

Feel free to read though. They prove nothing, in term of weight loss anyways.

There are other benefits to fasting that I will go into, in a different article I write about.

I. Intermittent fasting and weight loss by the Canadian Family Physicians

This first study was an article from 2020, it was a systematic review of randomized controlled trials and pilot studies that compared intermittent fasting against continuous calorie restriction in overweight and obese individuals.

They assessed a total of 27 studies that were conducted anywhere between January 1st 2000 to January 1st 2019. The 27 studies comprised of 18 small randomized controlled trials and 9 trials that just had an intermittent fasting group with no control group.

These studies comprised of a total of 944 patients in the intermittent fasting group. Not all the studies had a control group or any form of second group, so the study didn’t report a number for them.

Most of the studies ranged from anywhere from 2 to 26 weeks in length. There were two studies that were conducted over a year.

The method of intermittent fasting varied, but the most commonly used intermittent fasting schedule was alternate day fasting. However, calories restrictions differed amongst studies. Some studies allowed a slight 25% of the patient’s total daily calories intake even on their fasting days. Other studies allowed patient’s to eat until desired. Is that even fasting then lol?

As for the results, they reported a range of 0.8%-13% decrease in baseline weight for the intermittent fasting group; that’s a big range. Most studies were around 4 to 6 % decrease in body weight.

16 of the studies that reported BMI, reported a 4.3% decrease in BMI. These studies were 2 weeks to 12 weeks in length. So a great variation.

Waist circumference decreased anywhere from 3 cm (1.18 inches) to 8 cm (3.15 inches) in studies that reported in and were greater than 4 weeks in length.

There were 12 studies that directly compared intermittent fasting against a regular calorie restricted diet. This totaled 1206 patients. 527 in the intermittent fasting group, 572 in the calorie restriction group and 107 in the control group. The intermittent fasting group and calorie restricted group demonstrated a 4.6% to 13% weight loss in both groups, so there was NO difference.

Four studies had a group that were just intermittent fasting and NOT limiting calories and a group that was intermittent fasting and limiting calories. The group that was intermittent fasting on top of limiting calories lost more weight than the intermittent fasting group that didn’t. This makes sense because, as I had said that calories in and calories out. If you are eating more than your body can burn, you’ll gain weight.

One of the studies in this analysis, Harvey et al., concluded that 79% of the weight lost by their participants who were intermittent fasting was fat loss. They had a total of 42 participants in their intermittent fasting group. This is important, because you don’t want to be losing muscle mass. Upon closer examination of this study, participants did not receive any type of counseling about exercising. The intermittent fasting group was required to have only 25% of their calories from brotein. So maybe with weight training, they could have conserved even more muscle or even gained some.

A 12 week study that included 64 obese patient by Bhutani et al. concluded that incorporating exercise along with intermittent fasting allowed for a double in the amount of weight loss by participants (3kg as opposed to 6 kg). The participants were required to perform 3 days of moderate intensity cardiovascular exercise (cardio) per week on either a stationary bike or elliptical. From weeks 1-3 they were required to perform cardio for 25 minutes at a 60% maximal heart rate; this included a 5 minute warm up at the beginning of the workout and a 5 minute cool down at the end. On weeks 4, 7 and 10 they amount of cardio they had to do increase by 5 minutes and their maximal heart rate increased by 5%.

Varady et al. was a study done on 30 participants over 12 weeks and one factor they assessed was hunger. They found that hunger was no different in the intermittent fasting group as compared to the unrestricted group.

For all my Muslim brothers and sister, there were 8 Ramadan studies included in this analysis which included a total of 856 obese participants. Their weight loss ranged anywhere from 0.1 kg to 1.8 kg. Now, even though many people fast in Ramadan, they still gain weight. They can’t gold off on the parathas, pakoray, samosas and all the other good food. It shows you still have to eat healthy.

The overall study concluded that longer-term studies and are needed to appropriately assess intermittent fasting. They also stated studies more similar to one another are needed to make more appropriate conclusions. The study did recommend a fasting period of at least 16 hours to see results.

What’s my take on the studies? They need a large scale study where everyone follows the same form of intermittent fasting. The studies also need to be performed over many years. There was too much variability in these studies to fairly assess them.

II. Intermittent Fasting Versus Continuous Calorie Restriction by Zhang et.al

This article is from 2022. It’s a systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials and pilot studies that compared intermittent fasting against continuous calorie restriction in overweight and obese individuals.

They assessed studies that were published between January 1st 2000 to February 1st 2022. They ended up including 11 studies which totaled 705 patients.

8 of the studies compared intermittent fasting against continuous calorie restriction. I looked further into each article about how many hours they patients were required to fast for, I was not able to find a certain number in any of the articles. Two studies compared alternate day against continuous calorie restriction. One study compared twice weekly non-consecutive day fasting with continuous calorie restriction; on fasting days, females were allowed 500 calories and males were allowed 600 calories. On non-fasting days, they ate regularly, but not in excess.

For their results, they stated that there was a significant different in decrease in body weight between the intermittent fasting groups and continuous calorie restriction groups. The patient in the intermittent fasting group lost more weight overall then patient in the continuous calorie restriction group, on average. By how much you ask? They didn’t report that for some reason.

They also reported that intermittent fasting was more effective in decreasing triglycerides, total cholesterol, waist size and glucose. They didn’t report by how much or mostly by which method of intermittent fasting.

They still concluded that intermittent fasting was more effective for weight loss as opposed to continuous calories restriction. Due to more data points that I would like to have been reported, such as exact amount of average weight loss, I personally don’t feel like this was a reliable study.

Also, which form of intermittent fasting is superior? It’s so tough to assess when you are mixing in different methods.

If I’m interpreting things incorrectly, please share your knowledge.

6. My Personal Take

I believe that intermittent fasting is absolutely necessary for lose weight……NOT (Borat voice). I used to intermittent fast for years and did use it to help me lose some weight. I’ve lost weight many different times in my life.

Intermittent fasting just didn’t work for me as a lifestyle. Sure, it helped me lose some weight, but I was always waiting to eat and thinking about food, most days. It just wasn’t for me.

I still do it unintentionally some days when I eat late. If you wait to eat later in the day, there is only so much you can eat before it’s time to go to bed. I get full so fast and forces me to be in a caloric deficit.

I just lost 15 pounds over the past 4 months by just decreasing my calories slowly and increasing my cardio over time. I didn’t eliminate carbohydrates or any specific food. I didn’t intermittent fast. I don’t by any means think it’s necessary to lose weight.

For those of you wondering which version I used to perform, I used to do the fasting 16 hours a days and eating between the hours of 12 pm to 8 pm daily.

I do partake in Ramadan every year, so I can tell you, that it’s tough to eat the same amount of calories in a shorter period of time. I feel like my appetite just naturally decreases. So there definitely are those benefits.

This post was all about intermittent fasting to fast. In the next intermittent fasting article, I’ll touch on other potential benefits of fasting. So stay tuned!!!

Disclaimer: I’m not your doctor. Please consult your doctor, nutritionist or any health care professional before making any changes in your own lifestyle. These blogs are just me sharing my knowledge for you reading entertainment purpose only. None of this is medical advice.

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