What’s the line between intermittent & extended?

I’ve been participating on this Reddit for about a month because I really like this community. I am constantly inspired by people’s success stories of using various forms of intermittent fasting to attain and sustain weight loss. However, I’m wondering how people think about the difference between intermittent versus extended fasting. Are these two sides of the same coin or two dramatically different approaches? To be honest, they seem super different to me. I practice 16:8 and intend to do this for the long haul because it feels sustainable, effective, and healthy. I never intend to do a 3 or 5 day fast so I am sort of confused. Do people consider multi-day fasts to be “intermittent”? Because by definition they seem different to me, not better or worse, just not intermittent.

Answer

In the IF daily thread it says to mention what type of fat, and includes 72 hour in the suggestion.

But then I posted about a 72 hour fast attempt and ppl lost their mind, lol.

I think anything over 24 hours and this group gets itchy. I’ll talk about ADF, 36:12 to 47:1. But i don’t talk about multi day fasts here anymore.

There is a subreddit for Alternate day fasting and one for fasting of you want to talk about longer stuff.

Answer

All fasting is intermittent, unless you plan to starve yourself to death. My understanding is that intermittent fasting is the general name for any kind of fasting protocol. Extended fasting is fasts that are longer than a day, and time restricted eating is fasts that are shorter than a day.

Answer

A definition of “Intermittent” is: “Stopping and starting at intervals”.

Doing something like 16:8 is stopping and starting at intervals.

But consider this, you could do intermittent extended fasting. Every other day doing a 24 hour fast.

To me, intermittent is the marching beat, extended is the duration that you march.