Intermittent fasting methods
Leangains Method: The Leangains method is the most popular IF method. With Leangains, you alternate between 16-hour fasted periods and 8-hour feeding periods. You can schedule the meals whichever way works best for you. If you're not a morning person and you have to force down your breakfast, start eating at 12 noon and finish at 8pm. If you need breakfast every day, adjust accordingly.
Your diet should be high in protein, and you should follow the basic principles of nutrient timing (eating the majority of your carbs post-workout, etc.). You should also include fasted training.
Alternate Day Fasting: Alternate Day Fasting is pretty simple; on this plan you eat every other day.
On “eating” days, you eat within a 12-hour window. For example, you could eat from 7 am to 7 pm on Monday and then fast until 7am on Wednesday. Some people follow a modified approach where they interpret fasted days as restricted days where they consume fewer than 600 calories, but don’t actually fast. During feeding days, you can essentially eat what you want without limit.
See also: Ask A Trainer: How Do I Stay Fit While Travelling?
Meal Skipping: The free-form, hippie version of IF. Proponents of this method try to mimic the eating patterns of our evolutionary ancestors who, in the hunting and gathering days, didn’t have regular access to food.
With this method, you’re encouraged to randomly skip meals a few times a week. Food choices should also be close to what our ancestors ate, which is essentially a Paleo diet.
Eat-Stop-Eat: In this intermittent fasting plan, developed by Brad Pilon, you fast for 24-hour periods up to two times per week (never on consecutive days). Food choices aren’t restricted on eating days, as he theorises that fasting even once per week will put you on a weekly 10% caloric deficit. However, you are urged to eat a normal-sized meal when coming off a fast (so don’t shovel food into your mouth until you feel nauseous), and to generally eat within reason.
Warrior Diet: The warrior diet involves 20-hour underfeeding periods followed by four-hour periods of overfeeding (a binge eater’s dream), making it suitable only for hardcore intermittent fasters. During the underfeeding periods, you can still consume fruits, vegetables, and small amounts of protein. Anything substantial must be reserved for your overfeeding period.
