Intermittent Fasting Part 1 – A Diet Strategy to Get You Ripped
For many people, losing fat and keeping it off is an impossible task, and they’d sooner reach China by grabbing a shovel and flinging dirt around. The road to leanness is littered with the remnants of horrible-tasting food, dingy Tupperware containers, and the dreams of those who abandoned their quest because of the seemingly insurmountable difficulty.
We’ve all been there at one point or another, but those who’ve managed to travel the wasteland and emerge on the other side victorious have done so by finding a way to stay on the path while others fell to the wayside, rules be damned.
And let’s face it: the fitness industry has managed to create a lot of rules and myths, both intentional and unintentional, to keep people in a constant state of fear and dependence, but the concept of intermittent fasting has come around and anecdotally proved that many of these claims are based off faulty and cherry-picked research, or are just flat out lies. Freeing people from the shackles of dogma and letting them indulge their inner hedonists without an ounce of guilt has helped hundreds if not thousands, achieve the body of their dreams.
Finally! A Powerful Diet That Anyone Can Follow
Forget about Atkins, low-fat dieting, low-carb dieting, the South Beach Diet, or any of those other fad diets. Here is a nutrition strategy you can use year in and year out to maintain ideal body composition, to get shredded for a show, or to lean out for summer.
Without further adieu, I’d like to introduce you to the new sheriff in town and how he can help you get to where you want to be as fast and painlessly as possible.
Intermittent fasting (IF) is a highly popular health trend. It’s claimed to reduce weight, improve metabolism, and even boost lifespan. Each of the most popular intermittent fasting methods involves a way of eating using regular short-term fasts. These fasts help you consume fewer calories and optimize hormones related to weight management. If your goal is to improve your eating habits this type of diet strategy could help you significantly.
Let’s take a look at 5 popular intermittent fasting methods and the benefits to your weight loss and your health.
A ketogenic diet, often known as a keto diet, is a low-carb and high-fat diet. It has been shown in several studies to be useful for weight loss and certain health concerns. The hardest part about it is knowing how to start a ketogenic diet with food, and nutritional and lifestyle changes.
A keto diet is very beneficial for shedding extra body fat while remaining hungry, as well as treating type 2 diabetes or metabolic syndromes according to researchers. The benefits of a keto diet include shedding extra body fat while remaining hungry, as well as treating type 2 diabetes or metabolic syndrome. The primary focus of the ketogenic diet is to restrict carbohydrates (carbs) in order to burn fat for fuel.
In this article, you’ll discover all you need to know about how to start a ketogenic diet, including safety concerns and nutritional efficiency. There is a great resource in the book, The Complete Ketogenic Diet for Beginners: Your Essential Guide to Living the Keto Lifestyle, so certainly once we examine this initial strategy, it could be worth your effort to check out the book.
The benefits of Intermittent Fasting (IF) continue to turn up in research and studies.
improved insulin sensitivity, blood glucose, and lipid levels
relief from inflammation
improved metabolic efficiency and reduction in body fat composition
increased energy, decreased lethargy
improved mood and mental clarity
reduced LDL and total cholesterol
helps prevent, slow progressing, and possibly reverse type 2 diabetes
protection from cardiovascular disease
improved pancreatic function
And of course one of the best benefits of IF – less time spent agonizing over meal planning and perfecting your diet.
For 18 years I’ve studied nutrition, changing my diet around to meet my current goals – bulk, cut, health, lean gains, etc… I’ve done a 0 carb diet, low fat meals, I subsisted on a Chanko diet once for a month, tried paleo eating, juicing, hell at one point I even ate nothing but apples and canned tuna for about 4 weeks straight. So far nothing has been as easy or felt as good at intermittent fasting.
In today’s society, many people put premium on being thin. Many factors, especially the media, contribute to the notion that what is beautiful is a well-sculpted body that doesn’t show the slightest hint of fat. This has led many people to interpret fitness as looking like those sexy models as an epitome of ideal body. Some has been into different weight loss plans, such as the Medifast, and other crash dieting just to get rid of their extra pounds.
The results of crash diets are dire. Those people trying to lose weight by sacrificing their nutrition are actually punishing themselves. They are constantly living in a condition of hunger which eventually leads them to feel exhausted all the time. Worse, it can lead to collapse and many other health risks. Crash dieting can literally make someone crash.
Those who intend to shed those extra fats in their body must realize that there are weight loss plans which do not lose the essential nutrients of the body. Healthy choices in food and proper exercises are the major keys in losing weight the healthy way.
For beginners, it must be understood that a variety in the foods a person eat is actually essential. One should not be easily taken by the low carb/high protein diet mindset which some fitness people propagate. Maximizing protein intake, in and of itself, is not a balanced diet. Sure low carbs and high protein can help retain and build muscle while simultaneously losing fat, but a diet consisting of, for example, 5 meals of chicken and broccoli each day, is not a healthy diet and can actually make you sick.
I have always been a big supporter of eating breakfast and eating frequent, small meals all day long. Both for fat loss and for muscle gain. That is, until a year ago when I started investigating Intermittent Fasting and Martin Berkhan’s Leangains protocol, Jon Pearlstone’s EET, and the ‘Eat. Stop. Eat.’ plan.
Since I started believing in the Intermittent Fasting hype, I have learned so much more about the benefits of IF, and I use the strategy pretty much every day. It is unusual for me to eat before noon or 1pm, and my most productive time of day is pre-meal.
Aside from IF and sporadic gym training, I’m not actively trying to lose weight, yet I’ve lost about 15 pounds in the last year while keeping my strength level. I haven’t decided whether or not IF is best for muscle gain, but you can’t beat it for fat loss.
Here are some links you can check out for more info about Intermittent Fasting:
Since the late 1990’s Dr. John Berardi has published 8 scientific abstracts; 15 scientific papers and textbook chapters; presented at nearly 50 scientific, exercise, and nutrition related conferences; and published countless articles online.
His first articles at Testosterone Magazine so many years ago, provided me with the basis for everything I know about nutrition today. Over the past couple years I have published Dr. Berardi’s popular nutrition tips with much success. Today I want to give you a link to his extremely interesting review of the Intermittent Fasting diet protocol.
Basically, Dr. Berardi sets about to lose 20 pounds of fat by following an Intermittent Fasting diet. He tries the following popular IF programs:
Alternate day fasting (ADF) – 36-hour fast/12-hour feed
Eat Stop Eat – 24-hour fast, 1 or 2 times per week
Warrior Diet – 20-hour fast/4-hour feed
Leangains – 16-hour fast/8-hour feed
Random meal skipping
As the experiment spans several months, Berardi logs his meals, moods, workouts, and even 23 health markers including blood glucose, cholesterol, tryglicerides, and testosterone level. You can see his final progress pics as well – check out the back shot, his back is simply shredded at the end of the experiment.
Dr. Berardi ultimately decides that a combination of the different programs works best for him. He liked 5 days of Leangains followed by a Warrior Diet weekend, and he liked Eat Stop Eat with a 1-day per week fast but hated the 2-day per week fast.
Trust me. Read the whole ‘book’. You will learn more than you might think.
How to Drop Weight If You Are Tired of Restrictive Diets
If you’ve had trouble following your current diet plan, you might do well with a diet that is tracked on a weekly basis.
It’s hard to follow a strict diet plan every day. The demands of most popular diets require users to keep a log of everything they consume and keep constant track of calories – and many times, people fail at their diets because they don’t fee like they’re able to keep up with all the details. Constantly monitoring caloric intake is simply too tedious for most individuals.
Strict Diets Often End in Failure
Here’s an illustration: An article published in the International Journal of Obesity in 2007 shared the results of a study of several diet plans with strict calorie tracking requirements. The study gathered 311 overweight females and randomly placed each of them on either the Atkins Diet, the Zone Diet, the Ornish Diet, or the LEARN Diet.
5 Ways to Improve Your Chances of Sticking to a Strict Diet
Your research is complete. You have a blank food log ready to go. You know exactly how many carbs, proteins, fats, and calories to eat each day. You even have an alarm set to go off every 3 hours to remind you to eat a snack or drink a protein shake. You’ve got anywhere from 10-20 weeks to reach your target body fat, but you know full well that cheating can be disastrous.
You know from experience that after 2 weeks your body is going to demand that you feed it some of your favorite tasty treats. But this time is going to be different. This time you are going to stick it out. So how are you going to stick to your diet for the required time? How are you going to hit your goals?
It is far from impossible. In fact thousands of bodybuilders do it every day, and you can too.
Here are 5 strategies to help you stay disciplined on a strict diet. (more…)
Eating 5 or more meals a day is great for weight gain, but not so good for weight loss, and is not optimal for good health.
We already know that increased meal frequency does not increase the metabolism or decrease appetite. In fact eating more than 3 meals each day can often lead to increased calorie consumption over time, because people eventually get bored and tend to begin to ignore their meal portions, which results in overeating.
Conversely, we know that fasting tends to decrease your appetite once you get past that first 6 hour fasting window. We also know that intermittent fasting lowers insulin resistance and blood pressure, and promote lightening-fast weight loss. Knowing those facts, here are a couple more great reasons to switch to an Intermittent Fasting lifestyle, for good health and efficient fat loss.
First, The Study Results
To keep you interested, we’ll talk about the research results first, then we’ll look at the studies.
New studies on periodic fasting by the American College of Cardiology have determined:
periodic intermittent fasting seems to reduce the risk of falling victim to type 2 diabetes by 50%
intermittent fasting also decreases your risk of developing heart disease
HDL cholesterol increases during an intermittent fast
triglycerides decrease during an intermittent fast
human growth hormone (HGH) levels increase during a fast, leading to weight loss and muscle gain
HGH increases by a factor of 20 in men and a factor of 13 in women, on average
One of the safest and fastest weight loss solutions on the market.
Weight lost, stays off.
Oral supplements like HCG drops are just as effective as injections.
Save money at the grocery store with a very low-calorie diet plan.
The HCG diet is the world’s leading weight loss diet because it’s effective, safe, and easy. There’s no better way to shed unwanted and unhealthy pounds. Simply use a proven HCG diet supplement along with the recommended diet guidelines and your body fat will simply melt off your body. The HCG drops make it super easy to tolerate a very low-calorie diet. A moderate exercise routine is recommended.
Intermittent Fasting Part 3 – Training to Burn Fat
And so, faithful readers, we have arrived at the final installment of our intermittent fasting series. In part 1 I gave you a brief overview as to what intermittent fasting is and what some of the benefits are. In part 2, I laid out the guiding blueprint to help you create your own nutrition plan, but today we’re gonna talk about how to create the sexy via resistance training.
Here are the results of Roger’s recent bout with Intermittent Fasting – Nice work Rog!
I view intermittent fasting as more of a long-term lifestyle change as opposed to a quick fix, and as such it should be approached in a way that addresses health as well as body composition. Before I get into more details, I want to express to following tips that will greatly increase the likelihood of you creating an awesome physique.
