Logically, if that were true, no one would be able to starve to death, and people who have bariatric surgery wouldn’t lose weight.
That said, there are a ton of books about how the fasting thing works. In essence: insulin makes you store fat (as well as doing a bunch of other stuff.) When you eat you produce insulin. WHen you go a period of time without eating, your body stops storing fat, uses up the stored glycogen and then has to go to fat for energy. The more time your body spends in a fasted state, the more fat you’ll burn. Hope that helps :)
IF doesn’t mean restricting calories to the point that your body feels starved; it just means timing your eating which helps regulate hormones and helps the body learn to burn fat for fuel. Congrats on giving it a try and glad it’s working for you!
8.5 lbs in a month is a good rate of weigh loss , don’t sniff at this accomplishment. IF is retraining your bodies expectations of when you’ll be feeding it, it’ll take time, but stay on track and keep a calorie deficit and the results will come. Best of luck.
Let me tell you how I started and I lost 17 kilograms. I did the 16/8 fasting because I was a student and needed food during the times I was at college because sitting in class drained me. I would break my fast everyday at 10 am with 2 cups of warm water. Then after 30 minutes I would eat something light for breakfast, like overnight oats. I tried to drink 2 cups of water every hour. Around 1 pm, I would have fruits or sliced apples and peanut butter. Around 4-5 pm I would have my lunch. And I didn’t restrict myself, but I also didn’t eat junk food or fast food. I would eat chicken, meat, or fish with 1/4 cups of rice, salad and veggies. It was enough to make me full without feeling stuffed. Then I would stop eating again until 10 am! But from 5pm until I slept I still tried to drink water! So I stuck to basically a meal and a half every day.
I stayed away from sugar! I wasn’t too harsh on myself with carbs. But sugar was a big NO for me!
I was 84 kilograms. After 2 weeks I became 78! That’s when I was like WOW… wtf is going on. It really motivated me because I couldn’t even remember the last time I was 78 kilograms. I suddenly had more energy, I was sleeping earlier, it was insane to me. Then after 2 months I was 73. Then I hit a plateau. That’s when I started to run for 15-20 minutes a day. Then the pounds just slipped off until I reached 67 kilograms. Which is the perfect weight for someone my height (5”9).
It was probably the easiest diet I have ever done in my life. And I have tried every diet possible! The first week is definitely the hardest because you’re not used to it. But once you see a couple pounds or kgs drop, it’s just uphill from there! You will get so motivated and all the cravings go away. It got to a point where I didn’t even eat breakfast because I wasn’t hungry… after 16 hours of fasting!!
It’s honestly so rewarding. You can eat your normal foods during the eating window, but since your putting in 16 hours of fasting, mentally you start craving healthier stuff and it just leads to a life style change.
So basically, time 16 hours you fast, you body starts to burn it’s stored fat. And your insulin reaches, let’s say zero. So eating anything during the fasting hours can spike your insulin and you don’t want that because the fast breaks.
Best of luck 🤞🏼
I can’t explain it like your 5 but I can explain it. Here is how it works in a nutshell….
You have two energy storage systems, the fat storage system and the glycogen storage system. Both of these systems are controlled by insulin. Insulin is the hormone that tells the cells to “open up” and absorb excess glucose in the blood stream. Glucose is tightly controlled. Your body has an energy priority where it will use glucose first, then glycogen, then fat in that order. Glucose (Blood Sugar) is the most immediately available form of energy available after eating, then long term storage of glucose is glycogen, this is stored in the liver and in muscle tissue. Fat is long term storage of all energy beyond what we carry around for glycogen.
When we get low on glycogen, Motilin and Ghrelin hormones will signal hunger to the brain and we will eat. When we eat our blood sugar rises. This will trigger the pancreas to release insulin into the blood stream to bring glucose back down. Once the cells are full excess glucose is stored as glycogen, we have limit of about 2000 calories at the liver, and if there is any excess glucose beyond that we will store it as body fat. There is virtually no limit to how much body fat we can store. When our fat cells start filling up with fat they release a hormone called Leptin which tells the brain to stop eating because we are full. Note: When we eat fat it doesn’t trigger insulin but instead gets handled by the gall bladder and stored as fat directly.
When we ignore hunger signals, our bodies will continue to work through our glycogen stores until a certain point. Since the brain requires glycogen to function the body will shunt off using up all the glycogen for daily activity and perform a process known in the literature as “Metabolic Switching”. When this happens a hormone cocktail of Adrenaline, Cortisol, and HGH are released in the body. Cortisol breaks down fat tissue into Acetyl-COA which is then used to make ketone bodies that we use for fuel. Breaking down fat is a slower process than converting glycogen to glucose so Adrenaline speeds up the process. HGH (Human Growth Hromone) is there to preserve muscle mass, because the body is aware that fat stores are available and there is no need to slough off muscle to stay alive.
As soon as we eat anything that triggers insulin all of this stops and we go back to running off of glycogen.
All fat loss works this way. CICO does it by restricting calories to drive down glycogen, KETO does it by restricting foods that trigger insulin which drives down glycogen, IF does it by restricting time to eat which drives down glycogen.
Starvation Mode can occur if you have very little body fat and are already underweight. If you have body fat then your body will use that up before you starve.
Notable interactions: Insulin and Leptin are very closely related. For most people it is very easy to sit down and eat 3000+ calories in pizza, but damn near impossible to eat the equivalent in steak (30oz +). This is because insulin BLOCKS leptin signalling. Where in the case of the steak, since there isn’t the carb load as the pizza Leptin signals are very clear.
The Glycemic index: This is a tool used to help judge how quickly food turns into glucose. The higher the score the faster it turns into glucose. Foods like pizza will have a much higher score than food like steak or fish or any other protein. Vegetables in their raw form are very low glycemic but once you cook them the indigestible cellulose releases a bunch of sugar, which is why they tend to “sweeten” after cooking, even here I would still recommend eating them.
To keep it simple, think of eating in terms of which fuel source you want to reduce. For most of us its fat. Ok, that was easy. Now eat foods that help you lean on fat stores and/or do fasting. What foods are those? Foods that are low glycemic and foods that are low in sugar, and When do I fast? In your sleep so either add time before you go to bed or after, to hit your windows. Done.
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I hope this helps.
edit for clarity.
IF helps most people with calorie management.
Calories in v calories out is what it all boils down to. Some people can out eat 16:8, 12:4, or even Omad. I’m one of those people. So I do two 48s a week and omad the rest. I lose 1-2lbs on the weeks I do what I’m supposed to.
The ELI5 thing I’ve heard is the fridge/freezer analogy. The freezer is your fat (long term storage) and the fridge is your readily available sugar/carbs. When you eat (carbs) regularly, it’s kind of like your body is focusing on what’s available in the fridge. It doesn’t matter if the freezer is full or not, you’re basing how hungry you are on how full the fridge is. So when you are on a caloric deficit, nothing’s in the fridge, and your body is going “omg I’m out of reserves, I need more food.” Even if you’re using food from the freezer and the freezer has plenty available, that’s not what your body is concentrating on.
Keto/IF (i.e. restricting access to carbs) helps your body focus on the freezer to gauge how much energy you need instead. It will still eat out of the fridge (readily available energy) before going to the freezer, but it will no longer care as much about how much food is in the fridge. It will go, “oh that meal was nice, but I don’t need more right now, because we have enough energy stored in the freezer.”
So your weight still depends on a caloric deficit, but IF/keto can make it mentally easier to keep up a caloric deficit.
IF simply reduces the window you have to eat your allotted calories, so instead of 4 or 5 small meals you get to eat 2 bigger meals.
In the end IF is not magic, and you still need to adhere to Calories in vs calories out if you want to lose weight.
Edit: I really hope the Starvation mode myth ends up dying in the future,it creates so much misinformation and is very detrimental to people’s weightloss journey.