Intermittent fasting is simply eating within certain windows of time. It is NOT starving yourself like some people think. At one point I was doing an 18 hour fast with the 6 hour eating period. With the way my schedule was at the time, I would start my first meal around 11am and stop around 6pm or so (depended on the day). Like most people, I hated going to sleep hungry so I pushed my window further into the day because I could tolerate being hungry in the morning but I could not tolerate it while trying to sleep. Like some other people have already stated, your body WILL adjust and every day it becomes easier and easier.
Now onto breakfast. Remember that technically speaking, breakfast is the meal where you literally “break your fast”. I know traditionally it means the first meal you eat within an hour or so of waking up but honestly you have to ditch that mentality. You can never truly skip breakfast. You just change the time around from when you eat it. So when people say they are “skipping breakfast” because they are doing intermittent fasting, they’re really saying “I can’t start eating until later in the day” (past the traditional time frame of when breakfast normally is).
So intermittent fasting and skipping breakfast aren’t really that comparable honestly. Intermittent fasting is just being more stringent on WHEN you eat food. So some people absolutely HAVE to eat early in the morning and that’s totally fine. But if you’re serious about the fasting then you have to stop eating earlier in the day and you’ll probably get hungry during the night. It sucks but your body will adjust after awhile; you just have to stick with it. Consistency is more important than dedication (as dumb as that sounds). You have to stick to it day in and day out. Pair the fasting with good exercise and the weight will fall off.
The ‘average’ place to start is 16:8, so:
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16 hours of fasting (eg 8pm to 12pm, skipping breakfast, no snacks in this period, can have water, black coffee, green tea (no sugar, no milk))
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8 hours of ‘feeding’ (eg 12pm to 8pm). In this period is where you re-fuel your body, aiming for your optimal calorie intake. For 16:8 this usually means two meals. Aim for cleaner eating, nutritionally good food.
From there you can play around with what works for you – there’s 18:6, 20:4, 22:2, 23:1 – first number is the fasting window second is your feeding window.
