The best tools in our nutritional plan are those that allow us to improve our consistency and adherence. Intermittent fasting has had a good reputation in the past years to accomplish this purpose.

This system belongs to our level of Meal Timing, after establishing the previous levels (Calorie, Macros, and Micronutrition) we can try this option to plan our meal schedule with many benefits.

Fasting is something that has long been associated with different practices, from religious to medicals for different reasons and for a variety of results. Recently it has become a controversy to one side of the fitness world, and the Holy Grail to the other.

I’m you have read on one side how terrible it is for our body composition to deliberately restrict ourselves from eating for an extended period of time, and somewhere else the phenomenal properties that it provides. As usual, the truth is somewhere in the middle of both extremes.

Table of Contents

How does it work

In the context of fitness and body composition, the practice of intermittent fasting was recently promoted and popularized by Martin Berkhan who challenged the idea, in bodybuilding and physique athlete’s culture, that feeding frequency (between 6 and 8 daily meals) was imperative to maintain muscle mass or even increase it. It was a daring challenge.

The proposal was to fast for a specific amount of time followed by another feeding time. Perhaps the most common one was to fast for 16 hours and eat for the other 8 hours (16/8). After all, it’s not such a crazy idea, assuming we eat between 1 or 2 hours before bed, sleep for 7 to 8 hours, it would leave us 6 to 8 hours without eating (if we decide to fast in the mornings) before breakfast.

Tangential semantic note: Even though the common saying is “skipping breakfast”, there is no such thing in my obsessive mind. Breakfast means to break the fast (break-fast), skipping breakfast would be effectively starve to death. What people mean to say is to skip eating in the morning. I know, it’s irrelevant to the article but it was something that was itching me as I was writing and my compulsive brain made me do it. Let’s continue.

A meal schedule would look then something like this:

12:00pm	Meal # 1
4:00pm	Meal # 2
8:00pm	Meal # 3

This only demands that the person doesn’t consume anything in the morning, save for some 0 calorie drinks, which allows for that black coffee we all love in the morning, and some sodas that some yearn for. The rest of the day is relatively normal to distribute our calorie budget.

Impact and Benefits

As for the old concerns, perhaps the most prevalent and shocking was the time window without eating proteins. The idea was that by not consuming proteins, the intrinsic catabolic state of fasting would incur in muscle mass loss.

This has been studied in different angles and the conclusions remain constant in nutrition fundamentals: as long as Total Protein Intake is sufficient to maintain muscle mass, no apreciable muscle loss occurs.

Of course if the goal of your diet is muscle gain (which requires a calorie surplus in the first place) you might consider not fasting and distributing your protein more evenly throughout the day, but this is another matter for another article.

Anecdotally, those who practice this strategy have reported great results in body recomposition progress, that is the fat loss while maintaining or even gaining muscle mass. With time, the apetite control inherent to fasting make the diet periods a lot more tolerable.

On this last note, on how it helps to maintain a diet, once your apetite is controlled during the fast it makes it easier to sustain a calorie deficit. Considering that our calorie budget is low, condensing it in 3 meals tends to be more satisfying and allows for more variety within those meals.

Another reason reported as an excellent advantage is of not worrying about food during the fast, planning your food for the day suddenly becomes easier and you don’t need to interrupt the flow of your day because you need to eat.

A lot of people feel more productive and have more physical energy, more mental focus, and vitality. Curiously this sensation is what allows people to train in the fasted state, feeling they have more energy and concentration even after 16 hours or more without food.

Last but not least, there are those health benefits that can offer calorie restriction especially in the form of prolonged fasts. Reduction in triglycerides, better insulin sensitivity, inflammation reduction and other fascinating emerging markers that are worth researching if it’s something that interests you.

When is it not appropriate

Now, like everything in this field, intermittent fasting is not for everyone. Some people have reported not being able to tolerate periods of time without eating. And while we all go through approximately a week or two of adaptation to this new meal timing, there are some individuals that seem to not respond well to this type of restriction.

To evaluate if you can develop an acceptable adaptation, it’s not a bad idea that on the first days you simply extend your breakfast for about an hour or so, and gradually every day keep postponing it.

This way you can keep delaying your breakfast until the point that it take the time of your usual lunch, effectively creating a fasting time window of 14 to 16 hours. Interestingly a lot of people report not feeling hungry in the mornings anyways, and that they just eat because of the alleged importance.

Another instance in which intermittent fasting may not be recommended is for people who are in a massing or bulking phase, given that usually the quantity of food is pretty high and this practice may interfere with the consumption of their total calorie budget.

Of parallel importance is the argument of maximizing muscle protein synthesis, basically the optimal way to promote it through the consumption of proteins at a frequency of every 4 hours or so, but this is beyond the scope of this article.

In any case creating a time window of 16 hours between protein consumption is perhaps unnecessary, and this ties in with the idea that if you are in a bulking phase, it’s possibly more beneficial to maintain a constant flow of nutrients.

Despite the previous points, a lot of people have followed this strategy during a bulking phase with good results. This is due to the fact that total daily protein intake is more relevant for muscle growth (with its proper training plan) than the timing. The previous note only shows the most efficient way.

How to train around this schedule

An important point that generates a lot of questions given that we all have a different lifestyle, and we are used to train in some specific hours, is how to organize our meals around training.

Evidently there are many ways to fit our training in our day, and the most important thing when designing our plan is that it should be practical and convenient, in the end remember that the idea of this nutrition strategy is to make it simple for you.

There are a couple of considerations to keep in mind whichever your case may be:

Never train completely fasted

Eat the majority of your food after training

Never train completely fasted: even though this may contradict the idea of fasting, the truth is that there is no apparent benefit of training fasted. On the other side there may be adverse effects in training after 8 hours without food. Having said this, there are many ways to avoid this problem.

Training first thing in the morning: It’s recommended to consume some fast absorbing protein like whey between half an hour to an hour before lifting weights. Some 15gr should be sufficient, and don’t forget to add them to your daily intake.

Alternatively it’s acceptable to consume some branched chain amino acids (BCAA), given their fast absorption could be consume around 10 minutes before the session.

Depending on how long you have before eating after training, it’s important to maintain amino acids in your system. So it’s viable to consume another dose of 15gr of proteins, or every 2 hours BCAA until you break your fast.

Example:

5:30am – 5:50am	Proteins or BCAA
6:00am	Training
7:30am	Proteins or BCAA
9:30am	Amino acids (if no proteins previously)
12:00pm	First meal

Training right before breakfast: The same consideration applies, the only difference being that post-training is followed by breakfast. No need to consume additional proteins or BCAA before that.

11:30am – 11:50am	Proteins or BCAA
12:00pm	Training
1:00pm	First meal

How to eat most of your food after training.

Afternoon or evening training: given that one or two meals will be consumed before training in these cases, the only recommendation here is that you eat most of your calorie budget after training.

Generally this is done to provide the vast majority of nutrients post-training, besides ensuring that you don’t train with a full stomach, which can cause some gastrointestinal discomfort. As a general recommendation, the meal that precedes training should be low in fiber and fats, with some proteins and moderate carbs. A couple of examples:

Afternoon training:

12:00pm	First meal (~20% of daily calories)
4:00pm	Training
5:30pm	Second meal (~40% of daily calories)
8:00pm	Last meal (~40% of daily calories)

Evening training:

12:00pm	First meal (~20% of daily calories)
4:00pm	Second meal (~20% of daily calories)
6:30pm	Training
8:00pm	Last meal (~60% of daily calories)

Highly important reality check: Because for some reason we tend to take to heart the recommendations, schedules, percentages and rules in general, it’s important to clarify some things in a realistic way.

The schedules are not a law or “the method” to fast. They are examples to illustrate possible scenarios where training happens at different hours in a 16/8 protocol, and everybody should adjust it to their daily routines.

The percentages of food are a reference, eating a bit more or less at any given time doesn’t affect anything in reality, but the idea is to save the majority of your food after training, again it’s not that you need to eat exactly 20%, 40%, 60% or any other specific amount.

These are examples of a 16/8 schedule which is the most common. But this doesn’t mean that if you ate between 6 or 10 hours the fasting effect is ruined. It’s of no use to be neurotic about eating at specific times, life is unpredictable.

Rest days obviously don’t have to be so structured, it’s sufficient to eat you daily calorie budget within the feeding time window.

If one day you can’t fast for whatever reason, absolutely nothing changes or any adverse effect occurs, even though consistency is what produces results, this factor of meal timing is not so relevant in the bigger picture, remember the order of hierarchy in the structure.

The most important thing to note is that this meal timing is made to create pragmatism in our lives, so we should adjust it to our lifestyle, not adjust our lifestyle to it.

Without wanting to sound redundant, the problem is that a lot of people (of which I’ve been guilty of) tend to take these guidelines as commandments that once broken seem to ruin the purpose of a diet. Use this as a tool to simplify your lives, not to complicate it.

What it isn’t

Some people confuse these protocols as a diet, or that they cause some metabolic magic of nutrient partitioning, storing everything we eat in the muscles and burning all the fat during the fast, along with other silly ideas.

It’s worth mentioning that the reputation that it has in some places, where some sort of pseudoscience cult has been created, that this allows you to eat everything you want as long as it is in that time window of 8 to 10 hours, and continue to lose weight is clearly false. Just remember that fundamentally weight loss is a result of calorie restriction and it’s governed by the energy balance.

This notion comes from the natural effect that some people have when they start eating like this, they automatically limit their daily intake by skipping meals. But eventually, if care is not taken, what you may be limiting there could be added to your feeding window, in some cases some excess. This obviously is not a positive outcome and won’t result in weight loss. Of course this doesn’t affect someone who measures calories and macros.

As a conclusion I want to remind you that this is but a tool to distribute your food for the day, and the rest of your diet should be structured accordingly, respecting the order of hierarchy. I know I’m beating a dead horse here, but intermittent fasting is a great protocol, not the magic pill to achieve your goals.

Thanks for reading, questions are always welcomed in the comments.

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