Intermittent Fasting: How It Works & What It Does To The Body

Foreign.

What's going on, everybody? And welcome back to the Filled with Science podcast. You're here with your host, as always, of course, me, myself and I, that is Max Coleman, AKA Coleman, et al. And as is tradition, sitting in front of me, as always, is just Dandy Dandy, AKA Daniel Plotkin, AKA Danny Boy, with featuring his new mic stand, which looks incredible by the way. For those of you watching. Okay, let's just jump right into it. All right, today we're going to be talking about the elusive, the famous, the infamous, in some cases, intermittent fasting, oftentimes referred to in the literature as time restricted feeding. And rather than talk about, give a quick outline of like what we're going to do, we're just going to jump right into it. So, Danny Boy, what is intermittent fasting?

Yeah, so intermittent, intermittent fasting, stated simply, is basically just eating for less time or having periods where you eat for a lot less and then other periods where you eat for a lot more. So basically it's any time where you either restrict your eating window or I mean, actually it's just restricting your eating window. But where you do that restriction varies, unfortunately, across tons of studies and also with individuals describing what they do. So the most typical intermittent fasting you see, at least in our space, is usually somewhere around an eight hour eating window where people start eating at around 12 and stop at around, you know, 8, 7, whatever it is, in terms of it doesn't have to be a strict eight. And I think you, you make the joke all the time where it's just a fancy way of saying that you skip breakfast, which I think is true for a whole lot of people where it's just really that they start eating later in the day and that sort of helps them eat less calories. But in the literature and also just generally you could have days, so oscillate, one day not eating, one day eating. You could have four hour eating windows, you could have 12 hour eating windows. You could have pretty much any variation of intermittent fasting. And as long as you're being consistent about or relatively consistent about when you're eating and when you're not eating, it would be considered intermittent fasting. Or in the literature, I think it's more commonly referred to as time restrictive feeding, which is to my knowledge, pretty much the same thing.

Definitely the same thing. But we always like to, if we can complicate or add more syllables to something that means the exact same thing. We always do it in scientific writing for some reason because we don't want the layman to be able to understand what we're saying. Otherwise they would understand the, the fakeness that science actually. Science actually is.

Right?

Yeah. So there's four general categories I believe at least that I'm aware of for time restricted feeding or intermittent fasting. There's like you said, alternate day fasting and even that has like some subcategories because some people do one day of eating and then one day of eating 500 to 600 calories or something like that, as opposed to a true no eating whatsoever for that day. And then there's. I didn't know about this until we started. I started like looking into it a little bit more for this episode. But twice weekly fasting is a thing where you just take two days of the week and you're eating very little or to nothing at all for those days. That one sounds really interesting to me. And then there's within the day fasting and that can either be done early in the day or later in the day. And that has a probable, theoretically a limitless number of, of combinations you could do. But the most common being 24. So you're eating for four hours out of the day or a 168 where you're eating for eight hours out of the day. And the 168 one is the one that I say is like, yeah, cool bro. You're, you're not having breakfast or you're not having dinner. Like it's really not that in strict of a diet. Right, for sure. Oh, sorry. Okay, so that kind of is what intermittent fasting is. Let's talk about. Are there any benefits to intermittent fasting or time restricted feeding? Like specific inherent benefits outside of it just allows you to eat less calories. Are there any like health benefits? I know that it's very common for people to say that when you fast, you're training your body for whatever the fuck famine that we're not going to experience hopefully in our life. But are you aware of any inherent specific health benefits that intermittent fasting brings that traditional dieting? Doesn't?

Yeah. So basically here we're talking about benefits that are outside of caloric restriction. So when you lose weight, when you lose fat, tons of good things come along with it. So a lot of the trials suffer from the fact that when you tell people to eat within a certain window, sometimes they end up eating less. So you see a whole bunch of good things happen to blood pressure, blood sugar and tons of other, you know, things related to good health. A1C, so marker of inflammation, so on is commonly looked at as well. But the specific question is, is there an effect independent of that calorie restriction? So if you didn't lose any weight, would you still see some benefits? And the answer seems to be maybe a little bit, but probably not enough for you to suffer through it, especially from what we're starting to see more and more in human trials. So early trials in animals showed extreme promise, like really, really promising stuff where you saw tons of blood sugar benefits. And like, it was truly absurd, like very, I think similar to some of the gut microbiome research in animals early on where you would do a fecal transplant and they would just, you would make a fat mouse, a skinny mouse. Like, it was very promising stuff. And I think the issue with using mice as a model is that they have very flexible metabolism. So a lot of it could have also been to do with how they were structured in the mice and people. Not or not, not, not considering. But when interpreting it, interpreting way too much, because you have to think about a typical day for us is a much shorter amount of time in our whole lives than a mouse. So a day for us is like a month for a mouse. So you're literally having the mouse fast for an absurd amount of time if you scale it to humans. So I think that's one factor. But early evidence in humans did suggest that if you stay within a 12 hour eating window, so actually not that very truncated intermittent fast, there were some benefits to blood sugar, blood pressure, things like that, particularly with early intermittent fasting. And there may still be some merit to that where if you eat earlier on, you'll get some benefits. But I would contend that especially if you're resistance training, you're so sensitive to blood glucose and things like that that even those small benefits that potentially you'd have would wash out. So I'd say that the majority of evidence shows that most of the benefits that you're going to have from intermittent fasting are going to be because you actually lost fat and were calorically restricting and not inherent to the fast itself.

Yeah. And on top of the proportion of the rats lives, like a day for a rat or 12 hours for a rat of not eating was on top of that being a larger proportion of their lives than us. There's also no psychosomatic, you know, aspect of eating for mice either, or rats. I mean, then there might be. We just don't know it yet. Yeah, I don't want to. Yeah, I'm sorry, PETA, please don't come after the Built with Science podcast for me saying that we just don't know it. And it's much easier for us to starve rats than it is for us to give humans a dietary protocol and then let them go free in the real world and just hope that they adhere to it because we're not locking them in little cages for X amount of time. Well, sometimes we are. With the freedom of choice to leave in metabolic ward studies, it's important to point out. And then also I believe, and you can correct me if I'm wrong here, I believe the majority of early on research in humans with time restricted feeding was done on obese populations and that showed some pretty favorable outcomes with respect to the health markers you were discussing. And then, and again, correct me if I'm wrong, but once more research started coming out on leaner individuals, people that fell more into healthy and quote, unquote normal BMIs, we saw less promising findings from those studies, which is probably the majority of the people listening to the Built With Spines podcast don't fall under the obese population, I would imagine.

Right.

Okay. So not a whole lot of inherent health benefits with respect to intermittent fasting. Let's talk about some of the pragmatic benefits, some of the more practical benefits of intermittent fasting. So more of the somewhat psychological and psychosomatic things that we were just discussing how for some individuals it allows them to restrict calories a little bit more easily. And it's really important to point out that this is very inter individual. So some individuals, if you look at studies looking at this, they, some individuals find it much easier. And if you just talk to individuals who've tried intermittent fasting, like Danny Boy, I don't know about you, I've, I, I think we've both tried, I think you and I both have tried every diet under the sun at some point in our lives. But I've tried intermittent fasting and I personally find it way easier than eating consistently throughout the day. Like I'm one of those people where if I don't eat for the first several hours of the day, it's super easy. Like I just forget that I'm hungry and then I get to eat much more satiating and, and, and satisfying meals later in the day, which I really enjoy. But for some individuals, if you don't let them eat for the first, if you don't let them, if they choose not to eat for the first eight hours of the day or what, maybe they're angry, all they're doing is thinking about how hungry they are and they're not able to Focus on other things like at work and stuff. And now I'm getting into the detriments. But point is, for some people it can be a really, really nice way of going about dieting. And another reason is, is because most of the protocols that we see in research for intermittent fasting and time restricted feeding is you are, it's you, you aren't allowed to eat for a certain period of the day, but then in the portion of the day that you are eating, you can eat whatever you want. It's ad libitum. So you can eat as much of whatever it is that you want to eat. And that still for a lot of people results in caloric restriction throughout that day. So earlier you said sometimes intermittent fasting and time restricted feeding results in reductions in body weight. It seems to be a pretty successful intervention for people losing weight. If you look at the, the pooled effects of most of the studies on time restricted feeding, most of the studies find a reduction in fat, mass and body weight in general. So it can be a really good tool for losing weight if it's something that works well for you. But just you need to make sure that it actually works well for you.

Right?

This, because you're able to eat whatever you want throughout the day can feel a lot less tedious than, you know, having to be careful about what you're eating throughout the day. So like whether it's tracking your calories and your macros or just making sure that you're eating like Paleo or keto or carnivore, whatever it may be, whatever diet you're following, the notion of not having to think about it can be really freeing to a lot of people. I don't eat it for this time and then I get to eat whatever I want for this time and I don't have to think about it at all as opposed to I get to eat whatever I want, but I have to be really conscientious about either the types of foods or the amounts of foods that I'm eating.

Right?

Another thing, and I kind of basically said this already, but it's really nice to be able to have large meals when you're dieting. When you're losing weight, it's nice to be able to feel as if you're eating a large amount of food, especially a lot of pretty tasty food, because the thing is, you can have really large meals not doing intermittent fasting like you could have if, let's say you're on a regular diet of 2000 calories and you can eat Whatever you want. You can still have very large meals throughout the day, volumetrically speaking, but not energetically speaking. So like, I can have a giant bowl of salad for breakfast, lunch and dinner and feel incredibly full, but that still isn't really as satisfying as having a giant bowl of chicken and rice twice a day, later in the day, if that makes sense. I don't know if you have anything you want to add to some of the more pragmatic benefits of intermittent fasting.

Yeah, I think that's probably the largest benefit in that people can sort of backload their calories or front load their calories. Interestingly, some of the studies that I've seen asked for how people felt or how enjoyable intermittent fast was and whether they could see themselves doing it in the real world. And the early ones, the late ones, pretty consistently people said that they'd be fine with, but the early ones was the same. To my knowledge. The few studies that I've seen where people are like, yeah, well, it wasn't that bad. So it seems like your body's pretty good. We have some evidence on this that your body's pretty good at adapting its clocks to whatever you do consistently. So my recommendation from a pragmatic standpoint would be to be somewhat consistent on whichever window you choose, because obviously hunger signals all that is going to sync up. So I think that's something that's important to point out. And one thing that I found kind of wild that I would have guessed a lot more people would be less happy on the early intermittent fast because there's a lot of just even societal things.

Yeah, I was gonna say social aspects of like late night eating and, and stuff like that.

Exactly. Maybe they just got a whole bunch of like hermit old people that didn't give a crap and preferred to not be. Maybe they got a whole bunch of people like me. They were like, oh, sorry, my eating window.

Yeah, it was, it was only done on, on geriatric individuals waking up at 4am and going to sleep at 8pm so it was easy for them. Yeah, I can't imagine personally, like every time I've done intermittent fasting, it's been save, like, save my calories for the evening, like start eating at 3pm or something like that. I can't fathom getting all my calories in before the afternoon. And then just like, I dad that like even just thinking about it right now, like, scares me, the idea of not being able to eat before bed. And since we're talking about the benefits, we'll. We'll we'll, we'll talk about the, some of the psychological benefits but we basically were just saying that yeah it, for some individuals this can be something that this is staying no problem. But again, huge inter, individual variation between people. For some people this is a horrible thing, like a horrible way of going about dieting for them because it's something they can't think about.

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But before we get into that, let's talk about some of the potential detriments of intermittent fasting outside. And this is inherent detriments, right? Uh, this is outside of the inter individual differences. Like some people find it harder. But there are a lot of studies now looking at resistance training in conjunction with intermittent fasting and a lot of them suggest if anything like no, generally no differences and if anything a slight benefit to doing a, a more normal eating window. So there was a meta analysis done in 2021 looking at eight studies and six of them, six of the eight studies were looking at fat free mass and its effect on or intermittent fasting's effect on fat free mass when compared to traditional caloric restriction. So eating whenever you want. But obviously calorie matched and protein matched for a lot of the studies as well. That's important. But they had individuals training anywhere from like two to three times a week and doing either intermittent fasting or regular. I've said that like six times now. I apologize. Point being, in the study they suggest that there was no difference between them and that is true. Statistically, significantly speaking, there was no statistically significant difference. But if you look at the effect sizes, they do moderately favor doing a regular feeding window as opposed to a time restricted feeding window. And this makes sense if you think about it. We also have some protein feeding data that would corroborate this in that if you spread your protein out more evenly throughout the day, it's probably better for lean mass accrual and lean mass retention as well when doing something like a diet, but the effects are small. So I would say to an individual like who's interested in doing fasting, you totally can and it's probably not going to make a huge difference on your gains. However, if you're looking to get as jacked as possible, it's probably not your best benefit. But then you talk about, well, what if intermittent fasting is like, better for an individual? They find it much easier than a traditional caloric restriction, then yeah, obviously I would have them do that. Even if we're sacrificing potentially a little bit of gains or a little bit of lean mass retention during a diet. Do you have anything you want to add to the detriments of intermittent fasting?

Yeah, I think the only evidence that would sort of be in line with what you're mentioning is what we were talking about earlier where people ate, well, what they termed a skewed diet. So you ate just a really, really, really, really large dinner and very small meals earlier on. And the hypothesis there being that you won't get to the protein amount that maximizes muscle protein synthesis earlier and therefore less times where you're actually feeding and less amount of protein might end up being a situation where you end up with less anabolism. So less muscle mass accrued. And there was one study that suggested that. So while not specifically intermittent fasting, it sort of lent itself mechanistically to what we would speculate about somebody that was doing intermittent fasting where they're getting less protein feedings and potentially one really large bolus of protein, which I don't know if you want to mention now, the new study on that, but sort of goes hand in hand with what we're speaking about.

Yeah, I mean it kind of suggests that, like, probably isn't a huge thing to worry about. Danny Boy is referring to a study where they were looking at, I'm, I'm assuming here, a muscle protein synthetic response to different amounts of protein feeding. And the ti. I think the title of the study is no Upper Limit to the MPS Response to Protein Feeding. Which is like, I know that we're trying to get better about our titles and resist in exercise science, but like, come on, like, we, we don't need to clickbait our titles. So like, don't be misleading in our titles.

Right?

There's another one that's like, there are no, no non responders to exercise in, in whatever population, people. Anyway, it doesn't matter. Yeah, Danny. Anyway, they found no upper limit to the muscle protein synthetic response to protein feedings, but the, the highest they went to was 100 grams. I think their rationale for that was no one would eat more than a hundred grams of Protein in a feeding, like my brother, like, oh, that's, that's light work. Are you joking? Like, come on now. I go to a steakhouse and I eat triple that, if anything.

Right.

Anyway, explicitly in the paper that we chose an amount that would be, I think it was something along the lines of impossible, which yeah.

Is clearly get out of here.

I've done that by accident.

So, yeah, there's like Thanksgiving dinner. Are you joking? Like, it must have not been American researchers.

They probably aren't.

Oh, let's go. Anyway, so, yeah, the. Basically we don't have a lot of wonderful research in this, but the most direct research we do have suggests that like intermittent fasting probably isn't ideal for maximizing protein or lean mass accrual or retention while dieting or gaming.

Right.

And we'll talk about some ways of modifying intermittent fasting so that it can be a little bit better. Oh, and I want to point out, I, before Danny Boy and I had several conversations before recording this about I thought that there was data looking at if you were working out in your feeding window, it didn't really matter if you were doing restricted feeding or not. I don't think that's the case. I think most of, in fact, I think all. I could be wrong. But I think all of the studies in that meta analysis that I was referring to earlier had individuals working out during their fasting during their feeding window. So it doesn't matter. It doesn't seem to matter when you're working out whether it's in the fasted state or the fed state, it still probably isn't ideal for muscle growth.

Right.

But like I said, we're going to talk on, we're going to touch on how you can go about intermittent fasting to hopefully best set yourself up for this. And then we'll even talk about how you can modify intermittent fasting, which is actually something Danny Boy and I do ourselves when dieting to make it a little bit easier for us and without the risk hopefully of, of missing out on any lean mass retention while dieting. Right. So let's talk about the fact that no matter what type of intermittent fasting you're doing and no matter if, if you're doing it or not, all of the same rules apply.

Right.

So for some individuals. Right. So we still need to be in a caloric restriction. We still want to be eating mostly, you know, whole food sources like fruits, veggies, lean meats, whole grains, nuts, seeds, all that good stuff.

Right.

And we want to make sure that we're still getting in our requisite amount of protein, anywhere from 1.6 to 2.2 grams per kg, 0.7 to 1 gram per lb of body weight.

Right.

Um, I want to make sure that we're doing that. And the thing with intermittent fasting is that some individuals can do intermittent fasting without losing any weight at all. Like for instance, I myself have a gnarly appetite and if I go, if I only give myself eight hours to eat in a day, I mean, you give me an hour to eat in a day and I'm going to out eat my caloric expenditure for that day, no problem. Um, especially if I'm eating like very high pro, very highly processed, super palatable foods. I don't care how much time you give me, I'm able to consume more than my expenditure for the day. So it's important to remember that even if you're doing intermittent fasting, you need to adhere to the same principles of healthy eating and dieting if you want to, whether you're doing this for health or weight loss regardless.

Right.

You want to say anything about how the same rules apply to intermittent fasting. Did I miss anything?

There's. Yeah.

I just think that psychological shift is important where you keep in mind that just because you're in a window doesn't mean that weight loss is guaranteed. So there's tons of people, including myself and clients who, if you try to go about doing intermittent fasting with the assumption that you're not going to get the calories or go above your maintenance calories. It's not a safe assumption is what we're trying to say here. So make sure that you do some modifying and find what works for you in terms of the actual composition of the food and even the timing of the food during that window to make essentially the best recipe for you successfully actually getting into the caloric deficit. Assuming that the reason you're intermittent fasting is because you're trying to get into caloric deficit and not for some other reason that you prefer, whatever.

But even, even if not like, even if you're just doing it for health, like you still need to be adhering to like the principles of healthy eating, which is like basically everything we just lined out.

Oh yeah, for sure. I was just saying in terms of the deficit side of things, assuming that you wanted that because like there's people that might just prefer that window and therefore they want to be at maintenance while using the window or they want to even like that would be kind of weird. But trying to, I have to do.

So I have to do it even when bulking. So we're going to talk about maybe we'll get into this right now, but, like, I have to do intermittent fasting or a spared version of intermittent fasting, even when I'm bulking because of the same thing that I was just saying. Like, my appetite is just gnarly compared to my total daily energy expenditure. So even when I'm bulking, I have to be really careful. Especially with all the research we have coming out saying, slow the fuck down on your bulk. Like, I need to be careful on my bulk. So whether it's maintenance or bulking or dieting, I'm basically doing some form of intermittent fasting, which sucks, but you got to do what you got to do. Okay. Yeah. So let's talk about how we should go about training, because we kind of talked about how we should go about dieting, which is just adhere to all the same principles you would if you were doing a traditional diet, just having yourself a window while you're doing it as well.

Right.

Like for instance, and just a last thing on this, like, I have to track my calories even when I'm doing intermittent fasting. And it would be better. I don't have to do this super strictly anymore. But when I first started doing it, I absolutely did. Because if I wasn't tracking my calories, like I said, it would be super easy for me to encourage myself and outdo the whatever number of calories I was allotted for that day. So I was mixing IFYM and intermittent fasting and proteins paired modified fast all into one.

Right.

Yourself.

I did say engorge myself. Anyway, I've been watching too much Harry Potter. Okay. How should Engorgio is a spell in Harry Potter? For those of you who don't know, that's what I was. I know Danny boy probably knows that. Anyway, how should we go about training while doing intermittent fasting?

Danny boy, how dare you forget that I took Latin for two years in high school.

I'm so sorry, dude. I'm so sorry.

Yeah. So how to go about training when intermittent fasting. I think a lot of these are kind of common sense, but they are corroborated in the literature. So there seems to be a performance decrement if you train fasted. So making sure that you do your training around that meal, especially with a little bit of carbs, is probably a very good idea. Beyond that, I don't think there's any super art rules there, but basically, just try to find a time where you have the calories and you have good performance over time. So I think for me, being a little bit more consistent about when I do my training, particularly when I'm in a deficit, is usually a good idea because I find there's more lulls in the day where I, I don't feel as good, especially when I'm pushing the deficit more as the diet progresses. So I think consistency, if you can manage that and just making sure that you get some carbs and some food around training are the, the main two things that I'd recommend.

Yeah, and I think that because outside of performance, which is the closest proxy we generally can have to muscle growth with respect to this, but because the data that we have suggests that it doesn't really matter if you're training in the window or not, you're probably just gonna have to figure out what works best for you. Which is shitty advice for a scientific podcast, obviously. But it's honestly like the most evidence based answer I can give with respect to this particular topic. It's like, I personally like training in the morning, not like first thing when I wake up, but I prefer training relatively early. And the data that we have on performance in the morning would suggest that's probably not your best bet. It's pro, it's not a huge deal. The detriments are like very nominal, especially if you consistently do it, like Danny Boy was just saying. But I also don't like eating in the morning, so what I like to do is have a big meal before bed and then wake up. I am fasted, but it's better than going several, several hours and then, and then training. So that, and if I do it consistently enough, it doesn't really make a huge difference for me performance wise, but it's definitely something you won't, don't want to be that inconsistent with. It's probably not a great idea to train in the morning in general with respect to performance, and it's definitely not a great idea to train in the morning while fasted for that day in the morning. So whatever you do, just try your best to be consistent with you. But remember, like we're talking pretty nominal differences with respect to even performance, like hypertrophy, it doesn't seem to matter a whole lot regardless of when you train. With respect to intermittent fasting, it's probably more of a dietary interference there with respect to muscle growth. But as long as you're consistent with it, it's probably not a huge deal. But yeah, go ahead, just.

I, I highly doubt that the studies that we have are powered for such small differences. Yeah, but they could.

No, they're pretty small sample sizes on average. I mean, dietary interventions in general or. Hold on, sorry. Resistance training interventions in general. Typically very small sample sizes. Dietary in conjunction with resistance training studies. Like you're lucky if you get 20 subjects, generally speaking. Like they're usually very small. And when you're expecting such small differences between groups anyway, you know.

Yeah.

They're most assuredly underpowered just to. Yeah, sorry, agree with what?

Is it a way to do a within subject design for nutrition? Like just.

I'm sure that we could rig up their intestinal tracts so that it only delivers food to one half of the body for the day? I don't know, I'm not a doctor, so.

Yeah, exactly.

Surely there's a way to do that. Right?

Yeah, I think we could figure it out if we tried really hard. We tie two humans together and we give them the same like blood supply and nutrients and then clamp it for part of the study and then unclamp it. That'd be pretty sweet. I know we've done that in mice where they share. We've sort of tied them together and so a young mouse to an older mouse and then there were some benefits to the older mouse from tying them together. Do.

Yeah. So since we're on the topic of really up stuff, let's talk about some of the psychological detriments of time restricted feeding. So like I was saying earlier, that's crazy, Danny boy, what you just said. That sounded like something out of a Saw movie or something. But yeah, we're probably not going to see that study done anytime soon. I'd volunteer if I was tied to you. If we could conjoin our bloodstream, I'd happily do it. Um, anyway, yeah, that's basically. Honestly, getting your. Your genes into me would be the equivalent of me taking Anavar. Um, all right, let's talk about some more slight detriments to intermittent fasting. So like I was saying earlier, a lot of inter. Individual variation between people and how they respond to intermittent fasting with respect to how easy they find it. Um, but to kind of highlight this a little further, some people find it much easier. And I think I saw this on Renaissance periodization page. Basically was like intermittent fasting can be for some people, it's a really great way of. It's a really great option for weight loss that makes dieting seamless. And for others it's a more socially acceptable way of binge eating disorder, essentially.

Right.

And I, I Kind of like looked into this very like very briefly, so to take this with a grain of salt. But I did find one study, there was a survey study where they got like 60 something individuals who practiced intermittent fasting and had them fill out this disordered eating questionnaire essentially and they found like some pretty not favorable results with like almost 32% of the participants scores being at or above the like clinical cutoff for disordered eating. So just pave and this is way outside of Danny Boys and I's expertise is not something that like I can speak to for sure, but it's just something to be mindful of if you don't find, if you find yourself not responding well psychologically to intermittent fasting. It's a really important thing to keep note of something you want to add there, Danny Boy.

Yeah, it's just naturally my inclination is to want to opine on, you know, subjects that are definitely you should tread lightly on and whatnot. But hot take here. I think that these surveys and just overall from what I've seen seem to be either we all have a massive problem, which could very well be the case, or they're just so sensitive to differences in.

Do you find yourself thinking about food every once in a while? Yeah, exactly. Oh, I think anorexia nervosa.

People that are actually dieting and so you know, whether you're actually capturing or whether the surveys were designed to capture whether people actually have a problem, especially dieters and whether they have a problem because dieting, and I think this is important to point out, dieting is not necessarily or by definition not meant to be sustainable forever. So having stint of time where you're potentially in leaning toward a more quote unquote disordered eating pattern is potentially not an issue for many people. And obviously we have, you know, friends and family and us who don't think that we have eating disorders. But you know, we do a lot of things that might be considered extreme at times, but generally speaking we just have some pretty good rules that try to follow. And it's not like super detrimental in terms of like we don't feel like for a lot of the diet that we're doing something super restrictive even. So that's important to point out. But I think the overarching point here is kind of sort of along the lines of like addiction and things like that. If you believe you have a problem and it's getting in the way of life events and it's getting in the way of your happiness and stuff like that, then it's Very important to address that. Cut back, find, find a professional and so on. But by the same token, I don't want people to feel like, oh, if I'm feeling any sort of discomfort or I'm having to miss one thing that I really wanted to do, that that's not completely normal because it definitely is. Like you have to make some sacrifices if you're trying to get leaner or you know, be in a sustained caloric deficit.

Yeah, I think it was really beautifully said. I think that there's this dichotomy between individuals saying, and this is getting better because of, of things that, like what you just said. Basically dieting is not sustainable by definition. You're not supposed to be in a, a in perpetuity caloric restriction like that. You'll die, you'll weather away to nothing and you will die. And that's just, and not to mention like, you would have to have like the strongest willpower on earth to actually do that.

Right.

But the, the dichotomy comes in when people say, you know, it's not a diet, it's a lifestyle. And there are grains of truth to that in that there are certain lifestyle and environmental changes you need to make to be able to sustain the weight that you lost from a diet. But that's very different than thinking that a diet is something that you need to follow in perpetuity.

Right.

That's just not how it works. And I feel like people can conflate those two things very often. I think people can confuse saying that it's a lifestyle change, not a diet or a choice or whatever it may be with I need to do this for the rest of my life. And there are very big differences there that maybe we'll touch on in a, a different episode. But yeah, big takeaway here is that monitor your own responses to intermittent fasting with respect to psychology. And note that you are going to have to make sacrifices when doing a weight loss phase of any kind, regardless of if it's traditional caloric restriction or some sort of time restricted feeding. But just pay close attention to it. And if you find that it's something that's leading to a lot of emotional distress and a lot of food, like hyper food focus, maybe we need to find another route for you to go about dieting.

Right.

Okay, let's talk about how you and I do intermittent fasting, right. Because like I said, kind of alluded to earlier, Danny boy and I do a form of intermittent fasting when we're dieting, when we're trying to Cut. That looks a lot like intermittent fasting, but with some slight differences. Right. So, Danny boy, you want to touch on how you do that? Because we do the same thing. So.

Yeah, I feel like it's just kind of skip breakfast, have some caffeine to hold me over until about lunchtime. And then I'll have usually actually a very small lunch, too. I'll have, like, a lot of veggies with another protein source, usually, you know, chicken or lean beef or fish, tuna, stuff like that. And then for dinner, I'll have a pretty substantial dinner, which, as we mentioned earlier, still needs to be controlled. I've tried to do this style while just. Oh, man, I have, you know, 1500 calories left for dinner. I could just.

McDonald's it is.

Yeah, exactly.

But which is like three double cheeseburgers and you're done.

Yeah. So, I mean, you could even, even with like, quote unquote, healthy stuff, you can pull it off. I've like, housed, you know, whole, like, you know, those smoked salmon things, which are obviously, you know, great macros, but I've literally two packs full, just housed just in between donuts and with like, this much cream cheese. Just absurd stuff.

Just, you know, I haven't lost weight on this new diet, but I think it's just my body adjusting. I think eventually it's going to come down to it. All right, that wasn't smart. Packs of smoked salmon also, you said the macros on those are great. For those of you who don't know, there is a ton of fat in smoked salmon.

Yeah, yeah. But they're great for, you know, a person who has a lot of calories left and there, there's a good amount of protein in them.

And that's how macros work. Yeah, macro.

Protein is a macronutrient.

No, it's not.

It's a high.

Yes, it is. Yes.

So, yeah, there's definitely things you can do in order to mess that up. Even though you have a lot of calories.

Yeah, the, the, the macros on a large, extra large, deep dish, Domino's meat lovers pizza are great. They have a lot of protein. This, this pizza has 50 grams of protein and only 454,500 calories. It's a great option for people with lots of calories at the end of the day for intermittent fasting.

You just compared two things that are not comparable. That's a straw, man. I think we know somebody who would disagree with your tactics right now.

Oh, yeah. So just to reel it back in real quick, Danny boy, And I generally do intermittent fasting the same way where if we're dieting we'll wake up, I do it a little differently. And then upon waking up, I have a protein shake that happens to have caffeine in it. Premier Protein. Throw us a sponsor that's really nice because one, it kind of ties me over for a little while and I'm getting like a, an NPS spike as soon as I wake up in the morning, which is nice though, not necessary or anything like that. And then later in the day I'll have probably like another protein shake or something like that. Probably with some carbs, something like, for instance, like something like this. I'll have this with a protein shank or something that's just so that I can do my workout with at least some carbs in my system. And then later in the night I'll have one or two much larger meals. And that's really important for me. And I know Danny Boy feels the same way where if I want to have like a nice good sleep for the night, I need to go to bed having some food in my stomach. Otherwise I'm not going to sleep at all. I'll just be thinking about how hungry I am. So generally speaking, even if you're doing traditional time restricted feeding, I do recommend doing it in the night rather than the morning. However, that's something you're gonna have to play on your own. Like some people, they do fine doing it in the morning, some people don't. But generally for my clients I recommend do it later in the day if you're gonna try it at all. Because generally speaking, it's nice for most people to have a big meal before they go to bed.

Cool. I.

Do you have anything else you want to add before we wrap all this up?

No, other than there's some very cool long fasting stuff that people should definitely try.

Just a year of fasting. Oh, oh, actually. Thank you, Danny Boy. There's one more thing I want to say. Oftentimes I've seen very loosely that sometimes when people do like long term fasting, they the drive to drink fluids is lower. Like you have less of an impetus to drink fluids, which can lead to some dehydration issues. So if you are going to do intermittent fasting or time restricted feeding, it's important to cue yourself to drink water or fluids of some kind while doing it just because you might have less internal cueing to do so. And we don't want to run into any dehydration problems. So thank you. That's important to note.

Basically you're saying carry around a gallon.

Of water jug and a motivational water jug that has like different times of the day for when those are so stupid. If you take nothing else from this episode, trust your kidneys. Essentially, if you're not doing time restricted feeding, especially your kidneys, do an unbelievably good job of telling you when you need to consume water. Unbelievably good. Nothing pisses me off more than motivational water bottles, bro. Like I don't get it.

Your first unbelievable sounded very chump basket. Unbelievable.

Unbelievable. All right, politics aside, today we talked about intermittent fasting. There's a bunch of different ways of going about intermittent fasting. Four general categories. You can either do it alternate day where you eat some on one day and none on the other. Then you have twice weekly fasting or just fasting at some point throughout the day. Whether that be 20 hours of not eating, 4 hours of eating, or 16 8. Any combination. There doesn't seem to be a lot of inherent health benefits or performance benefits to fasting. Some data promises suggest that it might be superior for some longevity and some health markers, but very loose data. It's important to take that with a grain of salt. Pragmatic benefits are that it can be really beneficial for a lot of individuals with respect to it. They find it easier and less restrictive to do time restricted feeding and it's nice that you kind of kind of eat ad libitum. But regardless, it's important to remember that if you're doing time restrictive feeding, you have to adhere to the same general dietary principles for both weight loss and health, right? So you got to eat most of your foods come from lean meats, fruits, veggies, seeds, nuts, whole grains, stuff like that, with a little bit of junk food and fun in there as well. But just have to make sure that you are at least creating a caloric restriction of weight loss is the goal. And sometimes restricted feeding or time restricted feeding won't do that inherently for you. Generally speaking, we do advise not doing time restricted feeding just because the very limited data that we do have suggests that even though moderate probably isn't your best bet for building the most amount of muscle possible or retaining the most amount of muscle possible while dieting, right? And generally speaking, if you're going to do it, it's best to train as close to your feeding window as possible. And regardless of where you train or how you train, just try your best to be consistent with it as our bodies seem to be good at Adapting to whatever we do consistently with respect to training.

Right.

Regarding psychological aspects of it, be careful. For some individuals, like I said, it's really great and a really easy, seamless form of weight loss. For others, it's kind of a black hole of potential disordered eating. But again, a lot of inter individual variations should just be wary of that. And then if you want to try intermittent fasting, but you kind of want to do it in a way that ensures that you are still kind of maximizing your benefits from resistance training and protein intake and stuff like that, try doing intermittent fasting in the way Danny Boy and I try it, where we have small protein feedings throughout the day, and then later in the evening, we're able to have slightly larger meals to kind of help us feel a little bit more satiated before we go to bed. All right, Anything you want to add there?

No, I think that's good. Just wanted to stress that I don't think we mentioned it explicitly, but trying to get within that window at least two, but ideally three protein feedings would be a good idea. So making sure that each of those feedings is at least 30 grams of protein is also probably a good idea. Where let's say you were having, you know, a Greek yogurt when you broke your fast. If that Greek yogurt is like one of those tiny ones, then you may not be maximizing the muscle protein synthetic response. So making sure that each feeding is enough protein is probably a good idea, especially when you're restricting that window.

Awesome. All right, as always, thank you all so much for listening to the Built With Science podcast. If you have anything that you'd like us to cover that we haven't yet, feel free to. Feel free to reach out to us @builtwithscience on Instagram. And as always, thank you for listening. Peace.

Sam.