Will Intermittent Fasting Help Me Lose Weight?

Well let me ask you this, does a pig love slop? The answer to both of these is a resounding YES!

Do you desperately want to shed some extra pounds and feel like you’ve tried everything and failed? Have you ever tried intermittent fasting and if so were you consistent with it (because that is key)?

Society is no help. They are telling you that you need to exercise more, eat more often and add more low-fat products to your diet. That is terrible advice and it never works… are you aware of the obesity epidemic we are battling right now?

Intermittent fasting is about meal timing which allows the many hormones you have in your body to work simultaneously to help you feel in control of your eating and also burn the excess fat resting in your body just waiting to be used for fuel.

I have been practicing intermittent fasting for 18 years now and all I essentially do is delay my breakfast every morning about four hours.

Alongside that, I have also lowered my carbohydrate intake to mostly come from fresh vegetables, consume all of my calories in just three meals a day and I’ve increased my fat intake to be about 50% of my calories.

It sounds unconventional in today’s standards of dieting but it actually follows the pattern of our ancestors who never had a problem with excess weight.

Let me give you an example of what my day looks like:

I wake up around 7 AM and have black coffee. Around 8:30 AM, I will drink my pre-workout. At 9 AM I do 30 minutes of exercise in my home and drink some BCAA’s as I do so. My first meal will come around 11 AM, which is usually a veggie omelette. I wait to have my second meal until around 3 PM and it’s most likely a big old salad. My last meal is around 7 PM and it’s most likely a little bit of meat and a very large portion of vegetables cooked in olive oil and topped with a pat of butter… Yum!

Intermittent fasting may sound scary at first because your first thought is you won’t be eating when you’re hungry but that couldn’t be further from the truth. With this pattern of eating and the types of food that you do eat within that eight hour period… You always feel satisfied and food just isn’t constantly in your forethought anymore like it is when you eat all day with plenty of carbs.

You’ve got to give it a try, it’s literally both time AND life saving!

So Join my next Intermittent Fasting Group By Clicking here or go to https://melissamadeonline.com/8-hour-abs-free-group/

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The Ultimate Guide To Intermittent Fasting For Women

You’re not a guy, and you shouldn’t be trying to intermittently fast as a guy. Intermittent Fasting for Women is something quite different.

When I’ve done my research into intermittent fasting, I’ve noticed that most of the “experts” are men. And although I have learned a ton from them, I’m also not trying to build enormous biceps and pecs!

Men and women store fat differently and men and women definitely burn fat differently. So in a nutshell, women need to approach intermittent fasting differently than men do.

In this blog, my goal is to share with you the best approach for women to maximize their fat burning while intermittent fasting.

First of all, this advice is for all my healthy women out there that aren’t pregnant, breast-feeding or battling any health conditions right now.

We know all too well that us women like to store body fat more than men.  And we know this is because we are blessed with the ability to create life and sustain it. However, that does make it a bit tougher to have that lean and athletic body that many women are working so hard for.

Have you ever gone on a diet with your spouse only to have him lose weight twice as fast as you and consider grounds for divorce because of it? Yeah, me too!

I married my high school sweetheart, Mick, so we essentially grew up together. In our 20s, our diets were very high in carbohydrate and low in fat and we ate every 2 hours without fail.

We also lived in the gym seven days a week.

Mick was WAY leaner than me even though we ate the same types of foods and pretty much did the same workouts.

It was so frustrating.

In our 30s, we spent a little less time in the gym but adopted a higher protein diet. It was at this time that I really started being consistent with intermittent fasting. I got a job at the gym to teach group exercise in the morning and so I started doing that on an empty stomach. Mick was still getting up in the morning and eating breakfast.

That’s when I really started to notice that my physique was catching up to his.

He was still in the mindset he’d lose muscle if he didn’t eat breakfast. You should see him now though…hubba, hubba! Now that we’re both in our 40s, we both intermittently fast together and I will confidently say (even in fear of being tickled to death when he reads this) that through most of our 30s and 40s I have kept a leaner body.

It was this experimental truth that intermittent fasting not only gets you leaner but it’s especially true for women.

Intermittent Fasting for Women – How It Works

Our hormones play a huge role in how we look and feel…HUGE! Human growth hormone (HGH) is the key for women to shed the excess body fat that they’re working so hard to do. And naturally, men have higher levels of HGH than women do. But intermittent fasting for women is an exceptional way for us  to increase our production of HGH so that we can be fat burning machines as well.

Let me explain: HGH production is at its highest during sleep, exercise and trauma. HGH has an indirect relationship with insulin. So when your insulin levels are lower, your HGH is higher (and the very reason it rises when we sleep). HGH rises during childhood, peaks during puberty and then declines from middle age on…BOO!The good news is, is HGH rises when there is no insulin and your bloodstream. This only happens during a fasted state and at the very end of your sleep cycle. As I mentioned earlier, HGH also rises when we exercise… Keep that in mind. We want to get that HGH released as much and as long as we can in order to achieve the lean bodies that we are after.

This is going to happen by you doing 3 things in conjunction of one another. They are:
#1 choosing to get a good nights sleep every night. By getting in your eight hours of sleep every night, you are giving your body time to deplete the insulin in the blood stream and spiking HGH.
#2 waking up and continuing to fast for a few hours in the morning will continue to rise your HGH because you are not eating causing your insulin levels to rise.
#3 exercising in the morning, after a few hours of fasting is another way to continue to get that HGH up and you remaining a fat burning machine.

This is the trifecta when it comes to getting your body to reach for those fat stores, generate lean muscle to increase your metabolism and give you the energy to see results and make it a lifestyle.

So let me give you an example of how to implement this style of fasting. I call it my “11-7” rule. This means that you go to bed around 11 o’clock PM and wake up at 7 o’clock AM. Work out at anytime between 8 and 10 AM and then have your first meal around 11 AM. Have your last meal around 7 PM and close the kitchen down.

It’s a very easy habit to get into and to keep… Even while traveling.

Now I know for a lot of you that timeframe might not work. Maybe you work a night shift or your hours are very erratic. It is a bit harder to find that sweet spot for you but once you create a pattern that works well for you and you can stick with it… Then you will see just as good of benefits as I do with my schedule. It’s all about consistency!

These three habits (sleeping well and fasting and exercising in the morning) all by themselves will give you great results but by putting the three together you will really see a return on your health investment.

Now I know what’s going on in your head right now. You’re asking me, “Well, what do I eat in that 8 hour window?”

That’s a great question but I want you to remember that intermittent fasting for women is about meal timing and not necessarily meal planning. But let me just remind you that if you put junk in your body, you’re going to look and feel like junk. Fill your plate full of things from the farm and not the factory. Look at the ingredients of your food and if you can pronounce them all and the list is no more than 8 ingredients long, then you should be OK.

We’ll cover what to eat specifically on a future blog. Let’s face it Intermittent Fasting for Women has worked for me.

Exercise and Intermittent Fasting

I get tons of inbox questions about intermittent fasting and exercising.

When it comes to cardio, it’s generally recommended that you exercise on an empty stomach, so that the calories burned come from body fat and not from the foods you consumed beforehand. This means you can perform a workout like HIIT fasted at any time before your first meal.

What about strength training? It actually goes against conventional wisdom to strength train on an empty stomach. A lot of personal trainers do not recommend it as it’s supposedly detrimental to strength gains and may even lead to muscle catabolism.

Diets Don’t Work

I know why your past diets have failed you and I’d like to share why! But first, let me share with you a study I recently read about…

311 overweight women were assigned one of these popular diet programs: The Atkins Diet, The Zone Diet, The LEARN Diet or The Ornish Diet. They were given the book that was written about it and also were personally schooled on it by taking 8 one hour classes explaining EXACTLY how to follow the diet she was assigned to.

Mousey Meal timing!!

• By Melissa McAllister

Diet studies on mice don’t interest me near as much as studies done on humans but I did find this interesting! Some huge medical advances have started with those furry critters!

In today’s busy life, people are staying up later and eating much later too. A new study by researchers at the Salk Institute cautions against eating later at night (or more specifically, longer hours in the day), suggesting instead that restricting caloric consumption to an 8- to 12-hour period might keep high cholesterol, diabetes and obesity at bay.

The results, just published on December 2, 2014 in the journal Cell Metabolism, add to strong evidence suggesting that it’s not just what we eat but when we eat it that matters to our overall health. However, this has not yet been tested in humans.

In this study, nearly 400 mice, ranging from normal to obese, were introduced to various types of diets and lengths of time restrictions. They found that the benefits of time-restricted feeding showed up regardless of the weight of the mouse, type of diet and length of the time restriction, respectively.

Regardless of whether their diets were high in fat, fat and carbohydrates or just carbohydrats, mice that were given time restrictions of 9 to 12 hours, and consumed the same amount of daily calories as their unrestricted counterparts, gained less weight than the controlled group.

Even more interesting, the mice that had already become obese by eating a high-fat diet freely, researchers restricted their food access to a nine-hour window. Although the mice continued to consume the same number of calories, they dropped body weight by five percent within a few days. On top of that, eating this way prevented the mice from further weight gain (by about 25 percent by the end of the 38-week study) compared to the group that kept on the freely available high-fat diet.

This is just one study of so many. I keep researching and do find many different schools of thought but I tell ya, the evidence is pretty stacked in favor of meal timing…not just meal planning!