Did I get your attention?

Honestly, if you love food and love meals and love breakfast, this new “it” trend in the nutrition world sounds like a nightmare. What about breakfast being the most important meal of the day?

I had no interest in it until people around me started doing it. Normal, sane people… and they started LOVING it! They had more energy, started losing weight, and were actually not hungry.

I was intrigued so here I am, looking into Intermittent Fasting (IF) – for dummies.

It’s not about WHAT you EAT but WHEN you eat. Ok, easy enough. Way simpler than Keto and… just about every diet out there. It’s an eating PATTERN of fasting, then eating.

I decided to look at the 16/8 method. Eat for 8 hours, then skip eating for 16 hours. Ok, I sleep about 8 hours a night. So this really involves not eating for 8 hours, in a row. Welp… I’m hungry already.

Online the popular eating time is 1-9 pm. This goes against everything my body is used to. I usually get up and have my coffee starting at 6:30, breakfast around 8. I have dinner around 6:30 and really don’t eat after dinner at all. Aren’t we supposed to stop eating long before bed? This just throws everything my body knows out the window.

And why are people doing it?

Well, the idea is that you will eat fewer calories overall. And lose weight.

According to Harvard Health, the gist of it is, “Between meals, as long as we don’t snack, our insulin levels will go down and our fat cells can then release their stored sugar, to be used as energy. We lose weight if we let our insulin levels go down. The entire idea of IF is to allow the insulin levels to go down far enough and for long enough that we burn off our fat.”

Lower insulin means higher growth hormone, which can potentially increase your metabolic rate.

But of course, when you are in the fasting mode other good things happen. Who knew? Insulin drops to make body fat more accessible, Human Growth hormone shoots up, which is good for muscle gain and fat loss.

Keep in mind, when you CAN eat, you can’t go LITERALLY hog wild, lol. A huge component to the weight loss aspect of this is reducing caloric intake.

More than just losing weight, there are claims that lots of other good things can happen too: fasting can lower blood sugar which can protect against type 2 diabetes, fight inflammation, may reduce bad cholesterol, be good for brain health and even a longer life span.

These all sound very positive but skipping meals and severely limiting calories can be dangerous for people too – especially those who have diabetes or on blood pressure of heart disease medication.

There is an extremely high dropout rate because.. YOU ARE PROBABLY VERY HUNGRY!

After combing through the Internet, I weighed the pros and cons, and decided that it’s not something I am going to try right now. I might try it in the future. Sometimes you just need something to “reset” yourself and get you jump started with diet and nutrition and this seems like it might be a good option. As for now, it’s 8:09 am, my tummy is rumbling, and I can’t imagine making it until 1pm to eat my first meal. We all have our own rhythm with our eating cycle, and today Intermittent Fasting is not going to work with mine.

What about YOU? Tell us if you like it, inquiring minds want to know!