Bodybuilders are reporting amazing before and after results from intermittent fasting. See the proof and discover how you, too, can lose weight the quicker, easier way.
Intermittent Fasting for Weight Loss
In the world of bodybuilding, athletes are always using different techniques to gain more muscle. Athletes switch up their workout routine, try to sleep longer hours, use supplements or make changes to their diet to gain more lean muscle. One effective way of getting fast results through a change in dietary habits is intermittent fasting.
What is Intermittent Fasting?
Intermittent Fasting, or IF, is centered around the idea of eating your daily requirement of food in a smaller time period. In general, a bodybuilding diet requires you to eat small meals every three to four hours. So, if you generally wake up at 7 a.m. and go to sleep at 11 p.m. at night, you’ll have around four to six meals per day.
Intermittent Fasting uses a different dietary approach to help you gain muscle faster. Instead of eating all day long, you’ll eat within a specific time frame that spans 8, 6 or even 4 hours.So what results can you actually get?
Here is one fitness enthusiast who loves the improved performance delivered by intermittent fasting, and has posted a video with before and after photos to prove it:
The Science Behind It
The key to your success with intermittent fasting lies in the way the body produces insulin. Insulin is a hormone that allows your body to use glucose, or sugar, from the foods you eat.
If you are eating frequently throughout the day, your body always has a ready supply of glucose and this decreases your insulin sensitivity. Decreased insulin sensitivity makes it harder for you to both lose weight and gain muscle. Conversely, after a period of fasting, your insulin sensitivity increases.
Fasting decreases the amount of glycogen (stored sugar) in the body. Fasting on a regular basis gets the body in a habit of using glycogen stores, instead of using sugar from the food you recently consumed.
This in turn increases your insulin sensitivity and turns your body into a fat burning, muscle-making machine. If you are fasting consistently, the food introduced into your body is used to build muscles instead of converting to glycogen.
- INCREASES lean muscle mass
- RAPID results in 30 days
- NO side effects
- BURNS fat
- ENHANCED nitrogen retention
- 100% LEGAL
A Different Approach to Training...Try It!
If you are using intermittent fasting to help you build muscle faster, you have a few different training options. One option is to train on an empty stomach before your scheduled time to eat.
For example, let’s say you get up around 7 a.m. in the morning and you’ve decided to go to the gym. If you have an eight-hour window for eating that starts at around 10 a.m., you can use supplements like BCAA’s to help you get through your workout.
Then you’ll be able to start eating when you finish working out. When you do eat, your body will immediately use that fuel to repair your muscles. Another option is to schedule your training towards the end of the time you can eat.
If you prefer to schedule your feeding time later in the day, ending around 9 p.m., you can save the bulk of the calories you consume for the day until after you train. You can have a small meal before training and then after you train you can eat the rest of your daily caloric requirement.
How Many Benefits Do You Want?
Although you are decreasing the amount of hours that you eat during the day, intermittent fasting will give you a little more freedom in what you eat.
You should always strive to eat a healthy diet composed of protein, carbs and healthy fats, but with Intermittent Fasting you can have more of the fun foods you crave.
The occasional pizza or fast food meal won’t really harm you, because your body has trained itself to burn fat instead of storing it. It also gives you some freedom from eating every three hours throughout the day.
Amazing Before and After Results
So all that theory is great, but how good is it all in practice? Well, check out the photos below to see for yourself. Just click the arrow on the right of the picture to scroll through and see how eight amazing people have achieved huge body improvements through the use of intermittent fasting:
This Really Works!
There are a lot of claims in the bodybuilding world, and it can sometimes be difficult to figure out what you should take notice of, and what you should ignore. But intermittent fasting is not only based on sound scientific principles, it is simply common sense!
If you start implementing this technique today, you can expect to see rapid results. No-one is promising miracles, of course, you still have to pay proper attention to diet and exercise in the usual way. But intermittent fasting can certainly accelerate your results and help you get the body of your dreams.
If you chose to have an eight-hour window for eating, that means that you only have three meals to prepare instead of six. You can also decrease the amount of cardio you do with Intermittent Fasting.
Since you’re eating less frequently, your insulin sensitivity has increased and your body burns fat more easily and uses the nutrients you consume to help you build muscle.
Disadvantages of Intermittent Fasting
The major disadvantage of Intermittent Fasting is that you’ll have to get used to it. Like all forms of dieting it comes with a period of adjustment. If you were used to eating often during a 12 or 16-hour time frame, you might initially feel more hungry or tired. Another disadvantage is that you have to consistently eat only during the time period you’ve set for yourself. If the hours you can eat are from 7 a.m. until 6 p.m., you have to stick to that time period in order to get the results you want.
Intermittent Fasting Protocols
There are several different ways in which you can implement intermittent fasting. You need to experiment to find out which works best for you. You may want to start with a light schedule, then step things up gradually as you get used to how this affects your body.
You can expect to feel hungry during the first week or two of the schedule. That is because your body is used to getting food at certain times of the day, and when you change the routine, it will complain loudly! But if you stick with the protocol, your body will adapt to the new routine and those hunger pangs will diminish considerably. So hang on in there!
Here are some protocols for you to try:
16/8 Hour Intermittent Fasting Protocol
In this schedule, you fast for 16 hours a day. Although that may sound a lot, remember that you might normally eat no food between, say, dinner at 8.00pm and breakfast at 7.00am. So extending this from 11 hours to 16 hours is just a matter of giving breakfast a miss.
Once you get used to this, you can try extending the 16 hours to 18 hours – or perhaps even 20 hours a day. This might sound like a real challenge, but you will soon get used to it. And when you see the pounds dropping off as a result, you will be addicted!
Here are two ways of achieving the 16/8 hour protocol. Basically, you can choose to either skip breakfast or dinner. Choose the option that is the best fit with your lifestyle and your personal preferences:
You don’t have to stick to these hours exactly. You can shift the times forwards or backwards to suit what works for you.
The 24-Hour Intermittent Fasting Protocol
This is a different approach to intermittent fasting, where you actually skip a whole 24 hours of meals to put your body into serious fasting mode. So you eat normally on most days, then on fasting days you skip two meals, so that you create a whole 24-hour period without eating.
Get Results Fast
You only have to look at the 'before and after' photos above to see how effective intermittent fasting can be. We all want to find shortcuts to losing weight, but they are few are far between. But like High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT), intermittent fasting offers a genuine, science-based way to 'cheat' your way to faster loss. It takes some willpower, for sure, but the results are undeniable.
Intermittent fasting can definitely help you get the bodybuilding results you want, and it can help you get them quickly. You'll need to give yourself time to adjust to your new way of eating, but once you do, you will find that you actually want to eat less throughout the day. And once you see how quickly you lose fat and gain muscle, you'll be telling all your friends about intermittent fasting.
