Muscle for Life with Mike Matthews - How to Get Started with Intermittent Fasting in 5 Simple Steps

Episode Date: May 10, 2018

Intermittent fasting is pretty simple. At bottom, you don’t eat for most of the day, then you cram all of your calories into an “eating window” that can last anywhere from a couple to 6 to 8 hours. If that sounds stupid, uncomfortable, or even unhealthy, I understand. I thought the same thing when I first heard about it years ago. It turns out, though, that it’s not like other fad diets. It’s not going to go the way of the grapefruit diet, “detox” cleanses, and the dodo bird. On the contrary, intermittent fasting can be an effective tool for improving dietary compliance, it has good science on its side, and it doesn’t have to be unpleasant. In fact, many people enjoy IF more than traditional eating patterns, mainly because it allows you to have larger meals. What IF isn’t, though, is a miracle maker. It won’t automagically help you gain muscle and lose fat at the same time, burn away that belly fat, or stay young forever. As you’ll learn in this episode, the fundamentals of proper dieting still very much apply, and the main reason to do it is simply because you like it. It isn’t complicated, either. There are just 5 simple steps to getting started: 1. Choose which protocol you want to follow. 2. Calculate your calories. 3. Calculate your macronutrients. 4. Create a meal plan that works. 5. Train while fasted (optional). Let’s take a look at each. Want to get my best advice on how to gain muscle and strength and lose fat faster? Sign up for my free newsletter! Click here: https://www.muscleforlife.com/signup/

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Hey, Mike Matthews here from Muscle for Life and Legion Athletics. And in this video podcast, we are going to talk about intermittent fasting, which is very popular these days and which, according to many people, can benefit you in many different ways and some people even say that it is a transformative almost transcendent style of dieting that is superior to traditional dieting in just about every way now if you are skeptical when you hear something like that especially when you hear something like that, especially when you hear something like that about what really just boils down to cramming all of your calories into a shorter eating window, that is good. You should be skeptical because let's face it, fad diets come and go each and every year. And every few years, there seems to be a shift in the macro trend of fad diets. So if you go back to the 90s, for example, the macro trend was low fat

and then the fad diets of that time were just variations of low fat diets. And now it's all about high fat dieting. And so now you have, for example, ketogenic dieting is on the upswing. More and more people are asking about ketogenic dieting these days. Before that, it was paleo, a different version of high-fat dieting. And in a few years, undoubtedly, it will be something else. And the reason why you should be skeptical of mainstream dietary trends and mainstream fad diets is most of them are just marketing most of the time. Meaning that really what you're seeing is smart marketers coming up with new twists, new hooks, new angles that will get people's attention. And that's because the gatekeepers of the mainstream media,

the people that determine which books get published, which articles get published in which magazines or on online sites, which people are brought on to talk shows and so forth. They want new. They want something that hasn't been said before that has an interesting twist to it. And there's nothing nefarious there. I understand from a marketing perspective, new is one of the most powerful hooks you can use. It's like free. Free is probably the most powerful, but new is up there. New is in the top three probably. And so when something new comes along like fasting, especially in the case of fasting where it's counterintuitive, it is contrarian, it is against

the advice that we've been hearing for a long time. We've been hearing for a long time that breakfast is the most important meal of the day. And if you don't eat breakfast, then all of these bad things are going to happen. You're not going to be able to lose weight. In fact, you might even gain weight and you're going to have brain fog and blah, blah, blah. So we've been hearing that for a long time. And if somebody comes along with something new that goes against some established, everybody knows type of thing that has marketing power and people know that, and then it gets a lot of propagation, especially in the mainstream. In some cases, the package that

is presented to everybody really is just more marketing than anything else. Paleo is a good example of that. Paleo is brilliant marketing. I mean, it's on the decline now, but it really had a run. And that's because it was marketed very well. It had both history and science on its side, or at least people thought it did. And that makes for a very compelling proposition. We now know that the history, though, is really just mythology. It has been thoroughly debunked. The paleo diet has nothing to do with how our ancient ancestors ate. It made for a good story,

and made for a convincing story, but in the end, that's really what it was, is a story that was made up to sell a diet. And the health and nutritional and physiological science that has been used to sell it has also been severely criticized. Certain aspects of the diet are indisputably good. High protein diet, good for most people in most circumstances. Eating a lot of relatively unprocessed, highly nutritious foods, good. But the saturated fat orgy, not so good. And the reason for that is research shows that some people can indeed eat a lot of saturated fat and see no negative consequences in terms of cholesterol and particularly LDL cholesterol

levels. However, many other people cannot. If they eat too much saturated fat, their cholesterol levels rise to unsafe levels and, their cholesterol levels rise to unsafe levels and their LDL levels rise to unsafe levels. And over time, this of course increases the risk of heart disease. Now, in the case of intermittent fasting, it not only has a lot of marketing firepower, but it also has legitimacy as a perfectly valid and scientifically validated way of eating. It's not a miracle maker, despite what many people tell you, and it is not necessarily inherently better than traditional dieting. But if you like it, and many people do, many people prefer an intermittent fasting style of dieting over a more traditional style of dieting simply because they enjoy eating fewer larger meals

and they enjoy having a smaller eating window. And some people actually enjoy the feeling of fasting. So for example, one method of doing intermittent fasting, which we're going to get to more methods in a minute, is simply skipping breakfast. Many people like how they feel when they skip breakfast. And in the end, that really is the primary benefit that intermittent fasting has to offer is simply enjoyment. You might enjoy it more than traditional dieting. And if you do, that is the main reason to do it. Any other potential health benefits that might be associated with it are either exaggerated or just unverified. There's still questions, especially in the context of people like us who eat well, who exercise regularly, who manage our stress levels well, who generally just live a healthy lifestyle. And as a corollary then, if you don't like

intermittent fasting, you're not missing out on anything.'t do it just stick to traditional dieting you will do just fine for example i don't particularly like it i do it on the weekends sometimes because i am generally less active on the weekends i'm not lifting on the weekends i will do some cardio whether it's biking or walking and i'll do some yoga sometimes but i am usually dropping my calories by about two or 300 calories on Saturday and Sunday. And an easy way to do that is simply to skip the meal that I would normally eat in the morning, which is something light. It's usually just like a protein shake and a banana. And so I will skip that and start eating around noon. Hey, quickly, before we carry on, if you are liking my podcast, would you please help spread the word about it? Because no amount of marketing or advertising gimmicks can match the power of word of mouth. So if you are enjoying this episode and you think of someone else who might enjoy it as well, please do tell them about it. It really helps me. And if you are going to post about it on social media, definitely tag me so I can say thank you. You can find me on Instagram

at Muscle for Life Fitness, Twitter at Muscle for Life, and Facebook at Muscle for Life Fitness. Okay, so now that we have all the preliminary stuff out of the way, let's get to the meat and potatoes of this video podcast, how to get started with intermittent fasting, five simple steps. So the five simple steps are choose which protocol you want to follow, calculate your calories, calculate your macronutrients, create a meal plan that works for you. And then the fifth one is optional, and that is train while in a fasted state. Okay, so let's talk protocols. Let's start with lean gains, which is very popular in the body composition space and was popularized, was created and popularized by Martin Burkhan, whose website you can check out at leangains.com.

Now, Lean Gains is my personal favorite intermittent fasting protocol because it is very simple. And I also think it's best suited to us weightlifting folk who care about gaining and preserving muscle simply because the fasting periods are not excessively long. So here's how it works. Men should fast for 16 hours every 24 hours and they should eat all the food that they eat in the eight hour feeding window that that provides. And women should fast for 14 hours and eat food in the remaining 10 hours. It's also worth noting that you are not supposed to eat or drink any calories during your fasting period. You can drink black coffee, you can drink tea, you can drink diet soda, you can chew zero calorie gum, but calories are a no-no while you're fasting. Now, how most people follow lean gains is they simply skip breakfast. So for example, if you have your last meal of the day

at 8 p.m., then you have to go 16 hours before you eat again, which means your first meal is at noon the next day. That's pretty easy to do for most people. That fits most people's schedules and lifestyles. Okay, so let's talk about Eat Stop Eat, which is another popular intermittent fasting protocol designed by Brad Pilon or Pilon. I'm actually not sure how to pronounce his last name. And it's pretty simple, but more difficult for most people than lean gains because it calls for long fasts that can really grate on your nerves and test your endurance of hunger and cravings. So how it works is very simple. You fast for 24 hours once or twice per week. You can start your fasts whenever you want in terms of time of day, but they must go for 24 hours. And you also are not

supposed to eat or drink any calories during those 24 hours. So it's a true fast, but you are allowed calorie-free beverages like coffee, tea, diet soda, and so forth. Now, if you're wondering why people would even want to do that, well, there are some potential health benefits associated with it. Although again, I would say they are probably inconsequential compared to the benefits of just being healthy, not being overweight, eating a lot of nutritious foods, exercising regularly, not drinking much alcohol, not smoking, blah, blah, blah. But some people also find that it helps them manage their energy balance easier. And the reason for that is if you look at your energy balance from a weekly perspective, and in case you're not familiar with energy balance, it is simply the relationship between the amount of calories you're eating and burning. So if you look at that

from a weekly perspective, instead of a daily perspective, and for one to two days out of that week, you are eating no calories, you get to eat more calories on the other days. And so how I've seen many people do this is eat Monday through Saturday and fast on Sunday or eat Sunday through Friday and fast on Sunday. Some people do fast both Saturday and Sunday, but that is rare because it's pretty hard. You don't feel very good, but many people can go one day without eating as long as they drink plenty of water and are not super active. Okay, moving on to the warrior diet, which is a style of intermittent fasting that was popularized by the book of the same name written by Ori Hoffmeckler. And it involves fasting-ish, and I'll explain what I mean in a second, for 20 hours a day and eating most of your food in one

large meal at night. Now, the reason why it's fasting-ish is Ori says that you can eat some, a small amount of fruit and vegetables and protein during that 20-hour period leading up to the feast, which means that it's really not fasting because of course, if you're eating even small meals, you're elevating your insulin levels and that's breaking the fast. A couple other quibbles I have with the warrior diet is one, Ori says that eating a lot of food at night is more in line with our biology and will help us gain muscle and lose fat faster, sleep better and more. And unfortunately there really isn't any good evidence for that. And in fact, research even refutes some of it. And the warrior diet also makes it very hard to manage your macronutrients properly because good luck eating two or 300 grams or more of carbs, for example,

in just one or two meals with all the protein that you need in fat. It is very uncomfortable. So in the end, I guess I would only recommend the warrior diet to people who just like to eat one meal per day. Moving on, let's talk about alternate day fasting, which as you can guess, and this is also generally referred to as ADF, is a method of intermittent fasting where you alternate between days of eating and not eating. Now, like the warrior diet, your fasting days are not really fasting because you are told to eat 20 to 25% of your total daily energy expenditure, which comes out to five to 700 calories for most people. And then on the following days, on your eating days, you're supposed to eat more or less the

calories that you burn, which of course makes ADF a weight loss diet because you're not supposed to increase your caloric intake over your TDE to compensate for your low calorie days. Now, I think ADF can make sense for many people who are overweight and rather sedentary, and you can find many examples of it working well in the scientific literature. However, I don't think it is well suited to most of us fitness folk for two reasons. One, if you want to minimize muscle loss while you're doing it, then you are going to have to eat basically nothing but protein on your low calorie days. So you're gonna have to turn it into like a protein sparing modified fast would be the technical term. And while that can work, it is not enjoyable. And the second reason why I

don't really like ADF for us fitness people is your workouts are going to be worse than usual, regardless of whether you do them on your low calorie days or higher calorie days, you are not going to have the energy and the endurance that you are used to. Okay. So those are the protocols I wanted to talk about. There are other protocols out there, of course, but they're all patterned on the ones that we just talked about. And again, if you're new to intermittent fasting, just start with lean gains. It is a good protocol. It's simple and it works. And it is especially good again for us people who are into working out. So the next step, once you have your protocol decided on is calculating your calories. And this is very important. Calories in versus calories out matters just as much when you are intermittent fasting, when you're using an intermittent fasting style of dieting as when you're using a traditional

style of dieting. You simply cannot get around the importance of energy balance. And if you're not sure how to do that, check out the link that I'm going to put down in the description below because it explains to you a bit more about why caloric intake is important and also has a handy dandy calculator that you can use to figure out how many calories you should be eating. And if you are just listening to this, you can find this article at legionathletics.com. And if you go search for intermittent fasting, you will see an article I wrote along the lines of how to get started with intermittent fasting in five simple steps. So, of course, the long story short here with calories is if you want to maintain your body weight, then you are going to be eating somewhere around your total daily energy expenditure.

Of course, that's a moving target. You're never going to hit it exactly, but you're going to calculate it as accurately as you can and then try to stick to that number as well as you can. If you want to lose fat, you are going to be eating less energy than you're burning every day. I recommend a moderately aggressive, but not reckless deficit of about 25%. If that is too much for you, try 20%. If that is too much for you, try 15%. And if you want to gain muscle and if you want to gain muscle and not fat, then I recommend a, well, you're going to gain some fat, but if you want to gain as much muscle and as little fat as possible, then you want to be eating more calories and you're burning slightly more. I recommend 10 to 15% more calories than you're burning. So 110 to 115% of your TDE. And the next step is calculating your

macros, your macronutrients, turning those calories into protein, carbohydrate, and fat. And this is important because when we're talking about weight, if we're talking about gaining or losing weight, then calories in calories out tells us everything we need to know. Energy balance is the long and short of it. If however, we want to gain muscle and not fat or lose fat and not muscle, then we have to go beyond calories in versus calories out. We have to look at where those calories are coming from in terms of protein, carbs, and fat. And if we can optimize that, then we can not just gain weight or lose weight, but we can learn how to optimize our body composition and that really ultimately is the goal and again if that's news to you then click

the link to the article in the description down below or go to the article that i just described earlier because there is a bit more that you might want to learn about it. And again, the calculators will make this very easy for you. But the simple formula for macros is if you are dieting to lose fat, then I recommend that you eat one to 1.2 grams of protein per pound of body weight per day. Or you can simply set that to 40% of your daily calories if you are very overweight, and that would mean eating an absurd amount of protein. Now, if you are maintaining or lean bul would mean eating an absurd amount of protein. Now, if you are maintaining or lean bulking, then you can eat anywhere from 0.8 up to 1.2 grams of protein per pound per day. You don't need to go above one gram per pound per day. Probably if you do like eating more, that's totally fine. And some evidence suggests that you really don't need to go

above 0.8, but one gram per pound of body weight per day of protein is a simple, safe, easy to think with recommendation. From there, dietary fat is next. I recommend 0.25 to 0.3 grams of dietary fat per pound of body weight per day. If you are cutting and if you are maintaining your bulking, I recommend anywhere from 0.3 to 0.4 grams of dietary fat per pound of body weight per day. And if you are curious as to what types of dietary fat you should be eating, I will put a link to an article down in the description below that breaks it all down. And for those of you who are listening, head over to muscleforlife.com and search for dietary fat and check out the article. I believe it's the definitive guide to dietary fat. I don't remember the exact title,

but it will come up on MuscleForLife if you search dietary fat. And that of course leaves us with carbs. How many carbs did you be eating? Well, you just allot all the calories that you have left to your carbs. Now, if you're not sure how to do that, again, do just check out the article down in the description below. Or if you're listening, do head over to Legion Athletics and search for fasting or remittance fasting. Check out the article because I break the math down in that article and just give you a calculator, which again, makes it very easy. All right. So now you have your calories, you have your macros. The next step is creating a meal plan. And that is exactly what it sounds like. It's a plan for the foods that you're going to eat every day and at what times. And I really recommend that you put a little bit of time into

this because it makes dietary compliance very easy. It means that you don't have to try to make on-the-fly decisions of what you're going to eat every day. You don't have to worry about fiddling around with MyFitnessPal. You can just do the work. And if you are proficient at it, it really doesn't take more than 10 or 15 minutes to make a meal plan. If it's your first one, maybe it'll take you 30 or 45 minutes. But once you have it, it's just makes it very easy to stick to because you get to know exactly what you're eating every day in exact amounts. And you get to eat the foods that you like. And you don't have to wonder if your numbers are too high or too low, both your calories and your macros.

Now, if you're not sure how to make a meal plan, again, I have an article linked down below that breaks it all down for you. And if you're listening, you can head over to legionathletics.com and just search for meal plan. And you will see an article that I wrote that shows you how to do it. And that brings us to the last point, which is optional. And it is fasted training. Training while in a fasted state, which physiologically speaking is a state where in your body's insulin levels are at a low baseline level. So your body has finished processing your last meal whenever it was, and now it is surviving off of its fat stores, basically waiting for the

next meal. Now you don't have to train in a fasted state if you are doing intermittent fasting and there aren't any major benefits to training in a fasted state. There are some benefits if you're cutting and I'll get to that in a second, but many people just prefer it. They just like the feeling of having nothing in their stomach when they're lifting, especially people that train early in the morning. Now, if you're cutting fasted training can be beneficial if you combine it with a few supplements like caffeine, sinephrine, and yohimbine, because research shows that if you take fasted training and you add those supplements into it, you are not only going to lose fat faster, but you are also going to lose stubborn fat faster.

So the fat that takes its very sweet time, you know, for us guys, it's usually the lower abs, love handles area. For most girls, it's the hips and thighs. Now I know that sounds like complete fake news, very fake news, but it's actually not. There's good science behind it. And if you want to read about that, just check out the article that I linked down in the description below. And again, if you're listening, head over to Legion Athletics and search for stubborn fat and just read that article. And that's really it. This video definitely ran on longer than I was hoping. I just talked too much, man. Anyways, the long story short here is that millions of people out there are searching for shortcuts and hacks to gaining muscle and losing

fat faster. And many of the PDF and pill pushers are really on the intermittent fasting bandwagon these days. And the reality is intermittent fasting is not going to help you get the body you want any faster than traditional dieting, unless you just like it more. In other words, if it helps you with your dietary compliance, if the unconventional meal timing just fits your lifestyle or just fits your preferences more than traditional dieting, then great. It's for you. If however, you know that you're not going to like it, or if you try it and you really don't like it, like me again, I wouldn't say I really don't like it. I just don't particularly prefer it. I like eating smaller meals every few hours, starting with a small meal before I work out. Usually I'll have

a banana with a scoop of protein. If I want more carbs, I'll mix that with some rice milk, an extra 20 and 25 grams of carbs. I prefer that. And then I like to work out and then eat within an hour or so of my workout. So, you know, I'm eating three-ish hours after that first meal and eating a few hours after that. I prefer that. And I also really should mention that research has shown that eating fewer, smaller meals with at least 20 grams of a high quality protein is probably better for muscle gain over the long term as well. And if you want to read about that, I'm going to link an article down below on protein timing, which if you're listening, you can find at musclefulllife.com, search for protein timing, and I break that down. Hey there, it is Mike again. I hope you enjoyed this episode and found it interesting and helpful.

And if you did, and don't mind doing me a favor and want to help me make this the most popular health and fitness podcast on the internet, then please leave a quick review of it on iTunes or wherever you're listening from. This not only convinces people that they should check the show out, it also increases its search visibility and thus helps more people find their way to me and learn how to build their best bodies ever too. And of course, if you want to be notified when the next episode goes live, then just subscribe to the podcast and you won't miss out on any of the new goodies. Lastly, if you didn't like something about the show, then definitely shoot me an email at mike at muscleforlife.com and share your thoughts on how you think it could be better by me. Seriously though, I'm not big on promoting

stuff that I don't personally use and believe in. So instead I'm going to just quickly tell you about something of mine, specifically my hugely popular and 100% natural pre-workout supplement pulse. It has sold over 250,000 bottles in the last several years, and it increases energy, improves mood, sharpens mental focus, increases strength and endurance, and reduces fatigue without the unwanted side effects that you probably experience with many other pre-workouts or the dreaded post-workout crash. It's also naturally sweetened and flavored and contains no artificial food dyes, fillers, or other unnecessary junk. And all of that is why Pulse has over 3,100 reviews on Amazon with a four and a half star average and another 500 plus reviews on my website also with a four and a half star average so if you want to feel focused

tireless and powerful in your workouts and if you want to say goodbye to the pre-workout jitters upset stomachs and crashes for good then you want to head over to www.legionathletics.com and pick up a bottle of pulse today And if you're not sure which flavor to get, I highly recommend Blue Raspberry. It's my personal favorite. And just to show how much I appreciate my podcast peeps, use the coupon code podcast at checkout and you will save 10% on your entire order. And lastly, you should also know that I have a very simple 100% money back guarantee that works like this. You either love my stuff or you get your money back, period. You don't have to return the products. You don't have to fill out forms. You don't have to jump

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