**SW (Nov 14): 250lbs/113.4kg
CW (Nov 18) before refeed: 240.7lbs/109.2kg
CW (Nov 19) after refeed: 245.1lbs/111.2kg
Height: 6’0/183cm
Age: 21 (22 in Dec)**
outside of the 6am-6pm fasts the church made us do as kids, complete fasting noob here.
decided to get serious with my life, couldn’t sleep longer than 3 hours a night, was pretty stressed with classes and my adhd symptoms were getting worse. after research, i decided to get into intermittent fasting. again, having done 6-6 fasts as a kid, it seemed easy enough.
**started doing 20:4 and eventually 21:3 in the middle of the week, would take adderall at 8am, eat at 3pm, stop eating at 6, continue to 3pm next day.** The numbers on the scale fell off but i knew based on research that that was water weight so i knew not to get excited.
Over the week, i ate meal prepped dishes prepared the saturday prior to beginning from one of the popular meal kit services here for accurate caloric measurements. **I eat mostly one meal a day within my 3 hour window and it ranges from 700-1000calories.**
**from what i’ve read online, this is by far too little to eat for a male of my height, weight and age and it could negatively impact my metabolism and subsequently my ability to lose weight. so i decided to have a refeed day on friday and maybe saturday to avoid this happening but i’m not certain of this decision** and wanted to come online to ask more experienced people what their thoughts are?
I realize this might be a bit long so for convenience, i will embolden key parts of this and will ask the questions at the bottom to shorten everyone’s reading time.
- **Is it really bad to eat calories that low while intermittent fasting?**
- **Do refeed days actually help or will they just slow down my progress?**
- **Do I have to actively measure my calories on a refeed day or just eat cautiously?**
- **Is my fasting regimen good enough to lose consistent fat with? I don’t exercise regularly, typically 2-3 times a week. What could I change to maximize my fat loss potential?**
Answer
Wouldn’t it be easier to simply up your calories and eat them consistently then trying to fit a refeed or two during the week. Even children need over a 1000 as toddlers so at your height and weight is definitely low. I think you could easily eat 1700 and still continue to lose.
If you prefer the refeeds you can do weekly total calories instead, for example if you choose to up your calories to 1700 it would mean almost 12K calories a week which you can displace into low and high calorie day depending on your preferences as long as you hit the weekly calories you choose to set .