Why Intermittent Fasting May Not Be For You

If you are considering trying intermittent fasting, then you’ll want to make sure you understand how it works as well as what it really means. The basics of intermittent fasting are that you restrict when you eat food between a certain number of hours in the day. Normally, the hours you eat (known as your eating window) last between 8 to 1 hour (1 hour being on the extreme end and also known as OMAD).

While plenty of people swear by intermittent fasting, and that it has helped them to lose a lot of weight, it is not actually some magical diet. For some people, it fits their lifestyle well. For others, it’s simply too hard to restrict the time when they eat and it actually ends up being worse than simply eating throughout the day. If you try the fasting diet, and it doesn’t work for your lifestyle, then move on to something else.

Intermittent fasting doesn’t allow you to eat whatever you want and as much of it as you want. In spite of claims to the opposite, you still need to make sure you’re eating less calories than you burn throughout the day. Intermittent fasting helps you to control the number of calories you intake by limiting the hours in the day that you eat, but it doesn’t mean that you have an unlimited number of calories that you can eat.

Furthermore, intermittent fasting may be harder for some and lead to overeating. If you find that you’re the type of person that needs to eat right when they wake up in the morning, and right before they go to bed as well, then fasting may prove difficult. While you may need to figure out a way to decrease how much you’re eating, fasting can often lead to overeating in people when they fail to not eat.

The reason that you may overeat is due to a hormone called ghrelin. This hormone is what tells your body that it’s hungry and you want to eat. If you are restricting when you eat, but ghrelin gets to you and you eat outside of that window, there’s a good chance that you’ll be overeating. If you’re not able to consistently stay on your fasting diet then you’ll be eating more calories than you should.

Furthermore, you may be overeating in your eating window due to ghrelin. Just because you make it to your eating window doesn’t mean you’ll now be able to control how much you eat during that window. If you’re simply overeating every day then intermittent fasting isn’t actually helping you to lose any weight. If you can’t control your hunger, then you need to find a diet that will allow you to do so.

You may also find that you’re extremely hungry and have little energy when you aren’t eating. If you can’t function normally because you’re so hungry, then the diet is not worth it. You need to find a diet and foods that will give you enough energy to make it through the day while also being able to lose or maintain your weight. Low energy is common among those that do a fasting diet.

Intermittent fasting is not the answer for everyone. Ultimately, to lose weight you need to eat less calories than you burn in a day. If you’re not doing that, regardless of the diet you’re on, you’re going to gain weight. Fasting works well for some, but not everyone. If it’s not working for you, then move to a diet that you can sustain for the rest of your life.