In a perfect world, the model looks like this: fast for 16 hours, hit the gym, start eating. These questions come up a lot with people who practice 16/8 intermittent fasting. So, it doesn’t matter if you have 2 meals or 8, as long as you’re getting the same number of calories, the effect will be the same.Īll of which is to say that a daily fast of, let’s say 16 hours, does not decrease your metabolism (3). The fact is that TEF is determined by your total energy intake, not how often you eat. For years, you’ve been told that eating 5-6 small meals per day helps you keep your metabolism elevated. This is where the practice of frequent feeding arose. Here’s the part that’s not true: if eating increases metabolism, then the inverse must be true, and not eating (or fasting) must result in a metabolic slowdown.įurther, it must be true that eating more often leads to more frequent increases in metabolism due to repeated TEF. Known as the Thermic Effect of Feeding (TEF), this is a measure of energy expended to break digest, absorb, and utilize the food you eat. Whenever you eat, you experience a slight increase in your metabolic rate. One study examining the effect of Ramadan fasting (sunrise to sunset for thirty days) examined found no significant change in neither resting metabolic rate nor total energy expenditure (2). The noting that fasting slows your metabolic rate is an erroneous conclusion reached as the result of lazy science. This a myth that I could write about all day, so, again, a summary. The upshot is that the discomfort from fasting fades quickly, and the benefits (both long-term and short-term) outweigh the acute inconvenience.Ģ) But Wait! Is Intermittent Fasting Bad For My Metabolism? Intermittent Fasting means eating less often, which means you’ll get hungry less often. Here’s the good news: ghrelin secretion begins to adapt to new eating patterns pretty quickly. Fasting will be hard in the beginning, because you’ve conditioned your body to produce ghrelin on a schedule, and so you have to push through that hunger. Ghrelin secretion adapts to follow feeding eating schedule meaning the more often you eat, the more often you produce ghrelin, and the more often you want to eat (1).Īll of which explains why you’re always hungry. Producing ghrelin makes you want to eat, and eating produces ghrelin…which makes you want to eat more. The abbreviated version of why this happens: there’s a hormone called ghrelin that controls hunger the production of ghrelin is dependent on when you eat. And, the longer you fast (as in, practice the habit of fasting, not maintain one single fast), you’ll find that you don’t get as hungry as often. This is normal, and it’s nothing to worry about. Your first foray into intermittent fasting can certainly bring with it a certain degree of discomfort. But probably not as a result of starting an intermittent fasting practice.
On General Intermittent Fasting 1) Fasting for 16/24/36 Hours Seems Hard–Will I Die? My articles Intermittent Fasting 101& Intermittent Fasting 201 should be enough to get you started. If you’re a complete neophyte to the idea of intermittent fasting, you’ll get a lot out of this article, but you really should check out the basics first. If you’ve read a lot about intermittent fasting, you may know the answers to a few of them. If you’ve recently begun an intermittent fasting practice, then you’ve probably asked yourself a few of these questions or at least been curious. What’s okay? What isn’t okay? Can I drink coffee still? It’s even less surprising that the same questions get asked over and over and over. Given how prominently Intermittent Fasting is featured in my programs, and how often I discuss various Intermittent Fasting protocols it’s not surprising that I get a lot of questions about the practice.
Oh look, a neat little table of contents.
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