[graaja]

Originally Posted by Red Liner

Limit your workout to 45 minutes for some time and see how you sleep. Intensity can be the same as before (reduce rest time if needed, or increase time spent within each rep). If you are already doing this - no problem.

Actually all the workouts are 45 minute workouts. But I give some recovery between sets to bring down the heart rate before doing the next set. This adds about 10 minutes to the workout. Also, I do only 2 or 3 workouts a week. The remaining days are either recovery workouts like Yoga, stretching etc. or just rest.

Originally Posted by Axe77

Must it be the specific one in the link or their other options listed from same brand also serve the same purpose? I see turmeric, apple something, mint etc. too.

Yes. Chamomile is a specific version made from a flower. The other flavors will not have the same effect as Chamomile. Alternate brands can be tried.

https://www.amazon.in/Twinings-Pure-...grocery&sr=1-5

[Rubbertramps]

Originally Posted by graaja

Intermittent Fasting 101

When we think of diet (low fat, low carb, keto, Atkinson’s and so on), it is always about what food to eat and what food to avoid.

Thats a concise and easy way to explain IF. Thank you for that. I am at a BMI of around 20. But I have fat around my mid section and elevated cholesterol. I am thinking of doing intermittent fasting to reduce my mid section and thereby cholesterol.

But i am worried if i stay longer in IF, i might go underweight.
How do you recommend eating in the Eating Window. Should the eating window of 8 hours in a 16: 8 IF be packed with food.

Lets say i usually consume 2000 calories per day. Should I pack those 2000 calories within the 8 hours of Eating Window? That way i get to maintain the weight and the fasting window helps me burn fat and thereby my mid section?

[graaja]

Originally Posted by Rubbertramps

I am at a BMI of around 20. But I have fat around my mid section and elevated cholesterol.

But i am worried if i stay longer in IF, i might go underweight.
How do you recommend eating in the Eating Window. Should the eating window of 8 hours in a 16: 8 IF be packed with food.

Lets say i usually consume 2000 calories per day. Should I pack those 2000 calories within the 8 hours of Eating Window?

Without more details like your age, height, weight, waist size your general body composition, your physical activities and your diet, it is difficult to give a clear answer. I will try to give you a high level approach.

If you have a BMI of 20 and still fat around the mid section, it indicates you may not be having enough lean muscle mass.

If you get rid of the fat around the midsection without putting on lean muscle mass, then naturally you will reduce more weight and will go underweight. This is not related to intermittent fasting.

What you need to do is at the same time you reduce the fat around the mid section, you need to build lean muscles. For this you will have to include strength training in your schedule.

Coming to diet, you can do the 16:8 IF protocol. It is not very critical to calculate calorie intake, but in general, a little deficit is needed (which usually the reduced eating window will create). If you include strength training, then this deficit is not needed.

But you will have to cut sugar and keep carbs in moderation.

What is your diet like? Are you a vegetarian or non-vegetarian? What is your staple food? Is it rice or wheat? What is your sugar in take? Do you have coffee or tea with sugar? How often do you consume sweets and pastries?

Reduce the portions of rice and wheat and replace it with portions of vegetables and meat. Cut out sugar from your regular diet completely. Have sugar only occasionally. This is very important to increase fat metabolism.

These are general guidelines that should help you reduce the belly fat, build lean muscles, and also control your cholesterol levels. Let me know if you have any specific questions.

[MiKeMo]

Hello everyone!

This is my first post on the forum since my membership was approved last month.

Though I came to know about Team BHP community while reading a travelogue, I got hooked to the forum here on various and varied threads. However, I must admit that the effect this “fat to fit” thread had on my life, was the most profound. I want to express my heartfelt gratitude to @graaja and other boarders here.

So, let me narrate my experience with Intermittent Fasting or IF here. Please bear with me for a longish post…

It all started in March’21 when I was down with COVID. Team BHP forum was one of my most read site (of course, as a Guest), and by sheer luck, I found this thread, and boy, what an effect it had on me! Though I was aware of IF as a concept, the way @graaja has put it here - simple language, logical flow, and personal experience – I made up mind to implement it after getting cured.
Some personal background- I am not suffering from any chronic / lifestyle disease, however, mostly due to sedate lifestyle I started putting on weight and it increased from 69kg to 75kg (height 171 cm). I started training with a certified trainer, but after 1.5 years of the efforts, my health improved, but couldn’t reduce my weight, especially the tummy.

I started with a 16-hour fast regime since mid-April’21, and along the way got my wife, brother and sister-in-law into IF practices, and slowly others in family and friends are following/getting interested. Results are astonishing, to put it mildly- I’ve lost c.11kg in around 4.5 months. More importantly, I feel way better mental and physical health-wise. Due to my religious linkages, fasting is not new to me, however following a strict regime of fasting and low carb (no wheat & rice), low sugar diet helped me a lot. Icing on the cake was benefit my wife got. She’s a diabetic and hence started with 13 Hr fasting in April end. The effect on her health was more pronounced. Though her weight got reduced quite slowly, her hb1ac reading came down 6.4 to 5.9. As a result, after three months, her doctor reduced dosage of regular medicines.
I can add one or two such examples from my family/friends here, but you get the drift ��

I will try to add more on my personal regime etc as we go along, with the hope that my personal experience would be helpful to the TBHP community.

[graaja]

Originally Posted by MiKeMo

So, let me narrate my experience with Intermittent Fasting or IF here...

Welcome to TBHP!

That is a fantastic progress you have achieved. It is great to hear that you have motivated many in your family and friends to follow this lifestyle and that they have all improved their health. Thank you so much for sharing your experience.

Keep inspiring and motivating

[motorworks]

Thanks to graaja and this thread, I have been following IF for most of this year, well except for about 5-6 weeks in Feb and April when I got COVID twice in a span of 2 months.

The primary reason for IF is to try and maintain weight, especially since i work from home 2 days as week. For reference I’m about 171cms in Height and current weight hovers between 73-74 on most days. I have this tendency to put on weight so quickly, it’s so unbelievable! In the last 10 years I have gone from 83-84 kgs to 72-74 kgs nearly 3-4 times. And during few of these instances I went thru a diet program which was simple and good, but I found it unsustainable with ever changing lifestyle scenarios! So, thanks to this thread, I started IF seriously earlier this year and quickly lost about 2-3 kgs in the first 30-40 days. And I have kept this routine now as a lifestyle change!

However, here comes the difficult part, my wife thinks I’m on to something very unhealthy, and
to make it worse, we recently had a comprehensive Health check up ( since I also turned 40 this year) and the hospital dietician went on about eating right etc and before you know it, she was giving lectures on why IF cannot be a permanent shift in eating behaviour and all this in front of my wife!

And just at this very same time, I happened to shift jobs and it looks like I would have at least 3 days work from home, meaning heavier meals at lunch etc. So I clearly told my wife that I cannot let go off IF right now. And like I said earlier, just 3 weeks in to my new routine of Work from home, I have put on 1.5kgs!

I’m now thinking that I need to balance my work from home routine with some basic running. Earlier, I used to go for runs on Saturday and Sunday mornings, and I do about 10k on one of the days and 5k on the other. Plus some daily walks in the evening provided work gets over by 7. So with this new routine, I see my evening walks getting affected since i predict calls going late in the evening, and hence thinking of alternate days 5k morning run. My concern is, if I’m on IF and my first meal is only at around 1pm, would the 5-6k run on alternate days put some pressure on the body?
Lastly, if any one has any link on IF which sort of convinces my wife, well it would be icing on the cake! Thanks!

[graaja]

Originally Posted by motorworks

My concern is, if I’m on IF and my first meal is only at around 1pm, would the 5-6k run on alternate days put some pressure on the body?
Lastly, if any one has any link on IF which sort of convinces my wife, well it would be icing on the cake! Thanks!

In fact, a 5-6k run in fasted state will do wonders in fat burn. There are many professional endurance athletes who are adapting to IF and fat metabolism to fuel their runs. I have been working out in fasted state for the past two years and have absolutely no issues. You may feel a little lack of energy in the first few runs. This is because the body is not used to switching to fat burning and is expecting glucose. When you feel lack of energy, just stop running and switch to brisk walking. Within a few days, you will see you feel energetic through your runs in fasted state.

About convincing your wife, IF is not a diet. It is a healthy lifestyle our forefathers followed before all this abundance of food which resulted in a lifestyle of eating throughout the day. There is an ancient proverb that says one who eats once a day is a yogi, twice a day is bhogi and thrice a day is a rogi. Also, look at all the eating habits in our culture. Jains eat their last meal before sunset. That is IF. In older days before the advent of electricity, everybody used to finish their dinner before dark. That is IF. Also farmers used to work in the field (still many do) from early morning and have their first meal only at 10 or 11AM. That is IF.

Dieticians talk about balanced diet and eating 5 small meals a day because that is what the system teaches them. Just like many other reversals like the idea that fat is not the root cause for heart disease, or the idea to avoid pesticides and chemical fertilizers in agriculture, I am sure IF will be accepted as a healthy lifestyle by the system and dieticians will start prescribing IF in the future.

There are tons of videos in YouTube that explain how IF works and why it is not something that is bad for health. Check out the YouTube channel by Dr. Ekberg. He has some very good videos.

Hope all this information will help to convince your wife.

[motorworks]

Originally Posted by graaja

In fact, a 5-6k run in fasted state will do wonders in fat burn. There are many professional endurance athletes who are adapting to IF and fat metabolism to fuel their runs. I have been working out in fasted state for the past two years and have absolutely no issues. You may feel a little lack of energy in the first few runs. This is because the body is not used to switching to fat burning and is expecting glucose. When you feel lack of energy, just stop running and switch to brisk walking. Within a few days, you will see you feel energetic through your runs in fasted state.
.

Thanks again @graaaja for all your inputs, hope to start my alternate day 5-6k runs from the coming week! Your other points on how IF has always been in our system is a mind opener! Was always there, guess we just never saw it that way!

[MiKeMo]

Originally Posted by graaja

Welcome to TBHP!

Keep inspiring and motivating

In continuation of my last post, let me add some more details of my experiences with IF.

I started with 16 Hr fasts, and wifey with 13 Hr fasts. For first two months I kept track of my fasts through Zero app. Once IF became routine, I have reduced usage of the app. The maximum fast duration has been 21 hours fast which I did seven or eight times till date.

During this initial period, cheat days were kept at minimum, once every 15 days or so. The second wave lockdown also helped as outside food was generally avoided 😊. As I noted earlier, my weight came down to 65kg in four months, and my office reopened. Since then, cheat days have increased to once a week or once every ten days. In any case, I try to compensate it with higher fasting time in subsequent week.

The first real difficulty we (meaning my family and my brother’s family) faced was regarding planning everyday meals without wheat, rice and sugar. Again, detailed posts by @graaja were very helpful.

We started with roti & dal meal in the morning and soup & salad in the evening. After various permutation and combination, we have settled for mix of both. The broader menu consists of:

• Roti: Barley and Jowar. We prefer to have Bajra in winter only (will become part of regular diet this winter)
• Dal & vegetables: all types. One vegetable we consciously avoid is, potato
• Instead of rice, we use quinoa and kodo millet
• Soup: Broccoli, mix-veg, bottle gourd, pumpkin, etc. generally all vegetables soups
• Salad: mix of Indian, Asian, Mediterranean and other salads
• For cheat diets, we try to club healthy dishes along with some sin-dishes. We have restricted sweets to just one or two sweets which we are very fond of, and is generally home made

Next comes one more important step for IF – schedule. My current routine looks like:
1. Fasting from 7.30 pm to 12.30pm the next day, at minimum
2. Green tea at 9am, followed by nimbu-pani without sugar at 12.30pm
3. Lunch after 12.30 pm
4. Fruits, dry-fruits or Jowar khakhra type snacks around 4pm
5. Dinner at 7-7.30 pm

One more aspect I would like to add here is Training / exercise. I do medium intensity training three days a week. Though I read in this thread about other members’ experience about IF along with exercise, I was worried how would I cope up with fasting and exercise as my training time is in the mornings. After first two weeks, to my utter surprise, I felt even better doing exercise within fasting period. I didn’t feel any excessive tiredness or weakness as my training intensity increased. Clearly my body adjusted itself with this new reality.

All in all, after six months of IF, it has become our lifestyle...a heathy lifestyle if you will!

[nibedk]

Any good Android app for IF tracking. All I need is a basic one which can track my fasts, along with the weight fluctuation. The goal is just to be able track my fasting time and weight. Custom setting available for any app? Though I follow 16:8 IF - I go off food for 24-36 hrs once a week and have gone off food for around 48 hrs in last few months.
An app which lets me record my fasting in custom mode (where I can change the timing of fast period on a daily basis if required)

The issue am facing is though there has been good weight loss around 6 Kgs in about 8-12 weeks I still feel its has not been that effective. Just wanted to track for a few months to be see if there are any deviations. Will make dietary changes only post the analysis.

I stopped IF for a couple of weeks as I had been to my native for the first time since 19 months (when the first lockdown happened). I knew it would be impossible to follow it as we had to meet a lot of friends and family and came back gaining a good 3 kgs in just about 14 days.

[graaja]

Originally Posted by nibedk

Any good Android app for IF tracking. All I need is a basic one which can track my fasts, along with the weight fluctuation. The goal is just to be able track my fasting time and weight. Custom setting available for any app? Though I follow 16:8 IF - I go off food for 24-36 hrs once a week and have gone off food for around 48 hrs in last few months.
An app which lets me record my fasting in custom mode (where I can change the timing of fast period on a daily basis if required)

.

Check out the Zero Fasting app available both on Android and iOS. It has all the features that you are looking for. It has standard fasts and also custom durations. It can track your fasts and provide you with good reports.

[am1m]

Originally Posted by MiKeMo

So, let me narrate my experience with Intermittent Fasting or IF here.

I started training with a certified trainer, but after 1.5 years of the efforts, my health improved, but couldn’t reduce my weight, especially the tummy.

Good stuff! Thanks for sharing your experience, motivation for someone like me who has just started incorporating IF. I'm not doing it to lose weight- in fact I've always been a bit underweight, but started because of bad cholesterol numbers and because for the first time in my life, I now have tummy fat and love handles! Want to lose those.

So far have found it easy to cut out sugar and sweets. A 12-15 hour window between dinner and lunch even with a morning run before eating anything seems to be quite possible too, so far. But the challenge will now be to limit rice intake, since for us rice is pretty much a staple with lunch and dinner.

Have you seen some belly fat reduction (not just weight loss) after your 6 months of IF? I guess I need to include some weight training too not just the running and swimming that I do.

[Samurai]

So I had this recurring pain in the base of my palm. Yesterday, I discovered I could not bend my palm backwards for doing pushups. That is my most important workout, so I consulted an ortho today.

After the x-ray and blood test, the result is out. I have a ligament edema at the base of my wrist, where ulna connects to the wrist. Need 5 days of IFT and Ultrasound therapy and one month of medicines. My Uric acid is high thanks to the high protein diet I follow. So the doctor asked me to reduce all the high protein food, which leaves me with egg, and some veggies.

He said next thing would be gout, something I never want to get.

[MiKeMo]

Have you seen some belly fat reduction (not just weight loss) after your 6 months of IF?

Yes, I have seen reduction of c.3 inches in my waist size. Don't ask me how I'm managing with my clothes, though As I noted earlier, I could not reduce belly fat whatever I tried in my training sessions over one and half years. I believe that this reduction, along with overall weight reduction, was the benefit of IF.

All the very best, in your journey to be fit!

[am1m]

Was passing through a popular tourist location recently and was surprised to see a bunch of kids being led in the activities by one of the participating national athletes at that sport. Been a long time since I saw that many kids and not a single overweight one among them. And not a single one was staring at their phones- in fact I don't think I even saw any of them with a phones- which is again an uncommon thing these days. These kids were performing at a pretty high level, even by adult standards, certainly beyond hobbyist. Spoke with the trainers and was pleasantly surprised to learn that they were employed by the school and the school was investing in the facilities and gear. Irrespective of whether any or most of the children reach the top levels at the sport, I'm sure that for those of them who catch a fancy for the sport, fitness and healthy choices will become a lifelong habit. I think these children are less likely to smoke in their teens or binge on junk food simply because that will immediately affect their performance. Peer pressure in their case is more likely going to be pressing for healthier options! Great to see such an early start! (And regrets that it took me till my 30s to get on that track.)