How Often Should You Do Intermittent Fasting?

I had a recent question how often should you do intermittent fasting well good question and there's several ways to do it and let's just kind of go through the different ways you have something called the five and two which actually I do not like it all five days of the week you pretty much eat what you want and then for two days maybe it's going to be on the weekend you do a version of intermittent fasting which is not intermittent fasting is basically you reduce your calories down to 500 calories per day so that's kind of mimicking fasting so here's the problem it takes three to five days to adapt to ketosis so if you're gonna eat what you want for five days and then for two days go down to 500 calories you're gonna be so hungry and craving I mean what are you trying to achieve if you're trying to do weight loss you're going to spike insulin on these days and this is going to be so insignificant so I do not recommend the five and - then you have the every other day fasting where you're not eating anything for one day and then one day you're eating back and forth again it's going to be rough because it takes three to five days to fully adapt to ketosis to the point where you're like nearly a hundred percent especially if you have insulin resistance but the point is it takes longer so every other day doesn't allow you to do much adaptation so I recommend you do daily intermittent fasting so one of these right here you have 16 and 8 which is probably the most common so you're fasting for 16 hours but you're eating window is 8 hours so let's say the time between your breakfast and your dinner or your lunch and your dinner is a total of 8 hours because they don't really specify if you're gonna do two meals or three meals but you have an eight hour eating window but then you have sixteen hours of fasting for the average person this might be a very good thing now the key is not snacking of course and also what might be good is if you were to do this with two meals and then not eat anything else but in the eating window so have your first meal and then you wait 8 hours have the second meal and you have nothing to eat so you're getting the benefit of that fasting after the second meal all the way to the first meal on the next day and then you have 20 and for which I really like this one because you can start seeing even more benefits especially with anti-aging and it's very therapeutic for your brain and your heart and it's for a lot of things it's good for repair so let's say for example your first meal is at 2:00 in the afternoon and your second meal is at 6:00 that would be a 4-hour eating window with 20 hours of fasting and you're not eating anything during that period of time you're drinking water you can have coffee maybe a little cream you can take your vitamins you do tea you can probably also do things like stevia but you're not having any meals because an actual meal will trigger insulin so this is a very very good one and then you have ohm at one meal a day and a lot of people are doing this with fantastic success it's even better than this if you can do it if you're over the age of 50 and you want to lose weight this is probably what you want to shoot for as you get into it and adapt to it because not only are you gonna lose weight pretty quick but if you have any type of blood sugar issues you're gonna fast for it what 23 hours so it's a lot of so it's a lot of good repair action now if you are a diabetic and you have a slow metabolism and you're postmenopausal I recommend doing one meal a day every other day now I would work up to that but some people need to do that to see even more change especially if they're not seeing a lot of weight loss in their midsection and they just need to take it to the next level and with this - you can also add periodic prolonged fasting so you're fasting a little longer maybe every two weeks or every month maybe you go for 48 hours or 72 hours that just puts the icing on the cake maybe I shouldn't talk about cake the key thing is always make sure you're doing keto healthy keto with intermittent fasting because a lot of times these programs allow you to eat you know have a cheat meal well ideally we don't want to do that because it just kind of sets us back there's alternative foods that you can eat to give you a dessert or that you eat with the meal not as a snack that are very similar to some of the pleasure foods out there so it's when you're doing these right here every single day you're really allowing your body to adapt and get into it and so it's very easy at that point because you're not craving anything anymore so your hunger is gone these other ones you know I can't say that your hunger is gonna go away from that also you wanna look at the purpose for doing it let's say you want to lose weight well it really depends on your metabolism if your metabolism is fast then you can get away with somewhere in here okay maybe 18 and 6 if it's slow you're gonna have to go to oh man or even one meal a day every other day now if you're doing it for health reasons let's say you have Alzheimer's Parkinson's or epilepsy or some other health problem I think this would be perfect for you one of the challenges that you may have if you want to not lose as much weight is that your insulin is gonna be so low so you're gonna lose a lot of weight so you may want to just eat large meals on those two meals and make sure you add a little more fat maybe keep your carbs at 60 grams okay a little bit higher than what we normally recommend which is 20 to 50 so I mean if you're like in your 20s you can probably handle that going into in a minute fasting this is what I recommend start off with three meals a day you might already be on that but you also might be snacking so the first step is to cut out the snacking okay especially at night that's number one now if you find that difficult just add some fat to the meal okay then what happens is use the rule don't eat unless you're hungry okay in the morning am i hungry let's say you're not then don't eat go as long as possible without eating okay so ideally the first meal would be at the lunch time okay but if you're still hungry in the morning it could be the day before that supper the day before you had too many carbs okay that could be why or you may need to add more fat to the meal or you just have to give it more time or you need to add some MCT oil to your coffee here to allow you to go longer okay so anyway when you do that you're gonna go longer and long and longer so you let's say you have your breakfast here and then the next day it's here and here and then finally you're here okay so then you have two meals a day and then let's say you want to go to one one meal a day then you slowly start to eat later and later later so you do one o'clock two o'clock three o'clock that depending on your hunger let your body tell you when to eat adding fat when necessary and then make sure that you're also doing your nutrients - that will help cravings as well and make it a lot easier alright there you have it there's my answer to how often you should do intermittent fasting so if you want more knowledge on how to create a healthy body subscribe now and get daily notifications

Channel: Dr. Eric Berg DC

Views: 1,395,872

Rating: 4.9513869 out of 5

Keywords: intermittent fasting, how to do intermittent fasting, intermittent fasting guide, intermittent fasting schedule, intermittent fasting for beginners, intermittent fasting benefits, fasting benefits, intermittent fasting 16/8, OMAD, one meal a day, 16:8 diet, fasting schedule, best fasting pattern, best fasting time, dr berg, eric berg, dr eric berg, fasting, intermittent fasting tips, fasting tips, intermittent fasting pattern, patterns of intermittent fasting

Id: ZY0_GoROp6I

Length: 7min 51sec (471 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 13 2019