Intermittent fasting has become pretty popular when it comes to dieting.

Why?

It’s pretty simple. Intermittent fasting has proven to be a very effective tool at limiting calories and helping encourage weight loss.

In this week’s article, we’re going to define what intermittent fasting is and provide context as to how you can use this tool in your daily life.

Intermittent Fasting

For starters, let’s go over exactly why intermittent fasting works. Luckily, this is not an in-depth discussion on human physiology and meal timing.

Nope. Much simpler.

Intermittent fasting is a tool. It’s a framework — or schedule — that helps you outline when to eat and when not to eat. This framework is designed to help you cut calories out of your diet.

Once you set up your intermittent fasting plan, it becomes pretty easy to remove calories from your diet without feeling super hungry or deprived on a daily basis.

Some fitness gurus will claim that intermittent fasting is a superior way to eat. A popular claim is that the fasting portion of this dieting tool puts you in a “fat burning zone,” but there’s no conclusive evidence to suggest that (tip: if you ever hear someone say “fat burning zone” they don’t know what the hell they’re talking about).

So quite simply, intermittent fasting is a way to set up your own eating schedule, and the cool thing about it is that it can be specific to you. There’s no one way to do this. We’ll talk more about the framework and some popular ways to do it in the “practical examples” section below.

Before we dive into those examples, I want to explain what a calorie deficit is. They key piece to intermittent fasting (or any diet, for that matter) is you need to be in a calorie deficit.

The Calorie Deficit

A calorie deficit is when you’re burning more calories on a daily basis than you’re consuming. This can happen in a few different ways:

1. You can reduce the amount of food you eat
2. You can increase the amount of physical activity you perform
3. You can both reduce the amount of food you eat and increase the amount of physical activity you perform

That last one is my favorite because it’s the most beneficial for virtually everyone. It allows you to eat more food each day while dieting, as opposed to the strategy of solely reducing the amount of food you eat, because you’re being physically active. You also get the health benefits of regular exercise (which you can’t see in the mirror like weight loss, but it’s just as important!) plus weight loss.

Getting yourself into a calorie deficit requires some trial and error. I’ve outlined exactly how to go through this process in my dieting guide E-book if you’d like to learn more.

A simple way to know if you’re in a calorie deficit is this:

1. Weigh yourself every morning for a week.
2. If your weight is going down, you’re in a calorie deficit.
3. If your weight is remaining stable or going up, you’re not in a calorie deficit and you should slightly reduce the amount of food you’re eating.

Practical Examples

In terms of how to perform intermittent fasting, as I mentioned above it can be done in a million different ways. It’s about finding what’s most ideal for you.

With that said, there are some popular frameworks that seem to be the most sustainable and enjoyable. I can speak to these from both personal experience and the experience and success of my clients.

The first framework is what I like to call the “time stamp” method. You identify a feeding window for each day and do your best to adhere to that feeding window. This effectively tells you when you can start eating each day, and when you will cut yourself off to stop eating.

This is often most successful when using an eight hours on, 16 hours off concept for feeding (or something similar).

For example, you might say your first meal of the day will be at 10 a.m. and you’ll finish your last meal by 6 p.m. That gives you a full eight hours to eat, and the rest of the time you’re fasting.

You “time stamp” your day. It takes a lot of the guess work out of the equation.

A second framework that I’ve seen work for a lot of people — and this is one that I use whenever I’m cutting weight — is to delay your first meal as long as possible each day. This is less defined. We’re not identifying concrete start and end times, but what we’re doing is limiting that feeding window as much as possible.

Often when I practice intermittent fasting, I can skip breakfast and get by in the mornings with just coffee for a while. I’ve been able to push my first meal back until as late at 2 p.m. (or even later sometimes). I’ve detailed more about this strategy in a previous article on the benefits of skipping breakfast.

Knowing that you’ll eat dinner around 6 or 7 p.m. means you can fit all of your daily calories into a smaller window. This can be advantageous for some because a shorter feeding window means filling up on your daily calories and feeling very full during this period of time. In the end, though, you’re still in a calorie deficit and weight loss will still occur.

When I was younger, and back before anyone had heard of or knew of intermittent fasting, I actually did this every day. In high school and college, my goal was to sleep in as long as I could. I’d wake up, skip breakfast, and eat at some point whenever it was convenient. It probably helped me avoid gaining the “freshman 15” even though at the time I had no idea what a calorie deficit was, nor did I know a lick about nutrition.

As you can see, these examples are evidence that you can play around with intermittent fasting to find a framework that works best for you. Maybe it’s the 16-8 model? Maybe it’s delaying that first meal as long as you can? Or maybe it’s something completely different?

Coaching Cues

We’ll play off that last point to outline the coaching cues for intermittent fasting.

There are no hard and fast rules here. You don’t have to fast for any specific amount of time (though, if you’re doing something like 12-12 it’s not really intermittent fasting anymore). You don’t have to eat any specific foods. You don’t have to do any specific type of workouts.

All you have to do is choose a model and be as consistent as you can. Evaluate your progress over time, and make small adjustments as needed.

Quite simply, you should take some time to experiment with different frameworks to find one that is sustainable for you. Success with weight loss, or fitness, or nutrition is all about consistency. You need to find something you can utilize and adhere to consistently, or else this diet plan will end up with all of the other failed diet plans you’ve tried.

Learn about your body and what it takes to get into a calorie deficit, and then be consistent as hell for months, if not longer.