Achieve your fitness goals – using Intermittent Fasting.

I know sitting at home 24/7 is not only driving us all mad, but it’s also making us eat all the snacks in the house and I am not alien to this uncontrollable need to emotionally eat. It is understandable. In this post I will share two things I have been implementing into my daily regime which has been helping me keep on track with my goals.

1. Re-calculate your daily Caloric Intake

This may seem trivial, however any type of weight loss or weight gain journey boils down to the number of calories in vs calories out. Due to most of us now home-bound, we now have a lower caloric expenditure. Your total caloric expenditure is an estimation of how many calories you burn daily where activity is considered. This is easily calculated by your Basal Metabolic Rate (“the rate at which the body uses energy while at rest to maintain vital functions such as breathing and keeping warm”) and an activity multiplier. Considering that our activity levels have dropped significantly, our daily caloric intake must also drop accordingly to match our new sedentary lifestyles. Commuting from the sofa to the fridge doesn’t count as “activity levels” sadly.  Although I am not one to promote calorie counting, I’d recommend re-calculating your daily calories bearing in mind your new lifestyle and structuring your meals around this. This can easily be done using a calorie calculator online.

2. Intermittent Fasting

Although, there are multiple variants of intermittent fasting, I will solely be focusing on time restrictive feeding (TRF). TRF is where you can consume food within a specific window of time for example 4 hrs, 7-9 hrs, or 10-12 hrs, and a fasting window of 12-20 hrs per day. Whilst some will argue that in the fasted hours of the day you can consume extremely low caloric drinks such as black coffee, green tea etc, I only consume water. TRF is a great dietary tool to utilise as it reduces your caloric intake without necessarily having to implement calorie counting. Multiple studies have shown TRF to:

 “reduce body weight and body fat, improve insulin sensitivity, reduce glucose and/or insulin levels, lower blood pressure and improve lipid profiles and reduce markers of inflammation and oxidative stress”

I know, at first glance this may sound like a bunch of jargon. However, this is crucial because insulin sensitivity, high glucose levels and Lipid profiles (cholesterol test to measure the amount of good vs bad fats in your blood) are often a result of the over consumption of food with irregular eating patterns in conjunction with a sedentary lifestyle.

Whilst it can be tempting to go for a lower TRF eating window for greater results, studies have shown a 10-12hr window to produce consistent weight loss. Gill and Panda conducted a 10hr TRF feeding window in healthy adults and this showed a 4% sustained weight loss for one-year, other studies conducted on healthy trained men displayed notable fat mass reduction without impacting lean muscle. Oddly, the human studies that demonstrate weight and fat reduction hugely depend on an eating window in accordance with the body’s circadian rhythm (our biological body clocks). Another study conducted by Moro et al, showed that restricting food to the middle of the day produced significant reductions in body weight, body fat, glucose, insulin levels and improvement in insulin resistance. In comparison to another study by Carlson Et al, who restricted food intake to late afternoon or evening which produced no significant results in weight loss or fat loss. This is suggestive that eating in accordance to our circadian rhythm allows our metabolisms to work best in the morning – afternoon (but I will delve in greater detail in a later post).

In conclusion, in this time period conduct a review of your required caloric intake in accordance with your current activity levels and formulate a structure around that. Secondly, implement an 8-12hr eating window and only eat within that window and fast for the rest. You should be able to see results by just implementing TRF, a study conducted by Adlouni et al showed a 3% weight reduction in participants despite a 20% increase in calories. Though I would recommend a combination of TRF combined with caloric restriction as studies have shown this to be the most “effective strategy to help obese women to lose weight and lower CHD (coronary heart disease)”.