For a long time, thanks to my beautiful friend, Sam, I religously followed the standard “you must eat 6-7 small meals throughout the day” routine. This routine helped me speed up my metabolism and get me on track. It does work tremendously for her, and it does work for a lot of people, and it did get me on the right track, but I thought that it was the only correct way if you wanted to be healthy and lose weight....so I did it. Day in and day out. My doctor, at one time, had suggested intermittent fasting for me along with nutritional ketosis (with my choice of fasting options), and I thought..."fasting? ummm, how about no."

 

After being in ketosis and following the 6-7 meals/day (that's preparing roughly 35-49 mini meals a week!) strategy for a few months or so, though, I was starting to get annoyed with having to prepare so many meals, carry around Tupperware, and eat so many darn times during my workday. Being in ketosis makes you less hungry and I felt like I was forcing some of my morning scheduled mini meals when I wasn't even hungry.  I did a little research (of course) and decided to give my doc's suggestion, intermittent fasting, a try. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Some people fast every other day, for 24 hours once-twice a week, for 20 hours a day, or for 2 days at a time. I wanted to find a healthy method that would be sustainable and would let me have a normal social life. After much research I found out that the easiest plan to stick to long term and the healthiest fasting plan (for me) would be an intermittent fasting based on The 16/8 Leangains Guide: 16 hours of fasting, 8 hours of feeding. Since I normally had to force down my breakfast and morning snack just to keep my calories at a healthy level for the day, I decided to include those hours in the fasting period and eat during the lunch to dinner window (all my day's calories) from 12:00p-9:00p (I changed it up a bit to fit my personal social life & schedule and did 15 hours fast, 9 hours feed).

 

From 9pm, through sleep, until lunch at noon the next day, I fast (Water, sugar free gum, and other non-caloric beverages (unsweetened teas, etc) are okay during the fasting period).  This was actually a very natural transition for me since hunger wasn't really an issue for me in the morning. Also, I think it really helped that I had alrady been in ketosis for nearly 3 weeks at that point (and as I mentioned, ketosis is a natural appetite suppressent since your body is no long craving addicting glucose-containing 'nourishment'). Even though I'm no longer eating 6-7 meals a day, I still prep all my meals on Sundays (there's just less of them now, only about 15!) A typical "feeding period" for me now looks like:

 

• Fasting & Sleeping: 9:00PM-12:00PM (Noon)

 

• 12:00P (Noon) Post-Fast Lunch: Typically some kind of vegetable base (cauliflower rice, broccoli, veggie steamers) with some type of meat (chicken, homemade chicken salad, tilapia, salmon, ground beef, nitrate-free deli meat) and some type of cheese or hard boiled egg concoction

 

• 3:30P Afternoon Snack:  Raw cauliflower/broccoli and Ranch dressing or roasted almonds and some dark chocolate

 

• 6:30/7:00P Dinner: This is where I still like to get healthfully creative/DOMESTI-Kait-ED: spaghetti squash or zucchini "noodles" with low carb "alfredo" sauce, clean spicy turkey & cheese-stuffed peppers, etc. (I try to make 2-3 different dinner meals on Sundays to have options to choose from during week nights)

 

• 8:30P Post Dinner Snack:  Low carb protein smoothie or a homemade low carb chocolate bomb

 

• Fasting & Sleeping: 9:00PM-12:00PM (Noon)

 

1300-1500 Kcals, 10-15g Net Carbs, 90-110g Healthy Fats,

50-80g Protein (more if I do an intense workout), ~10g Sugars