Intermittent fasting and fat loss

Philip Pape 0:00

If you've been skipping breakfast using intermittent fasting to lose fat, or for some other reason, a 2025 review of 22 trials found that intermittent fasting produces essentially zero additional fat loss when calories are the same. But there are four other things that it doesn't do. It limits how many times per day your muscles can respond to protein. It raises your cortisol during a time when cortisol's probably already jacked up. It may suppress a hormone called DHEA that your body depends on, especially after menopause. And recent research shows that fasting actually increases inflammatory markers rather than decrease them. Today I'm going to walk you through all five and what to do instead without giving up the simplicity you might like about fasting in the first place.

5 ways fasting backfires after 40

Philip Pape 0:53

Welcome to Wits and Weights, the show that puts a popular piece of fitness advice under the microscope, finds the hidden reason it doesn't work, and gives you the deceptively simple fix that does. I'm your host, certified nutrition coach Philip Pape, and former intermittent faster. And intermittent fasting IF might be still the single most recommended nutrition strategy in the interwebs right now. And I get it, I get why. It is elegant, it is simple to understand. You don't worry about what you eat, you just worry about when you eat. It simplifies your life. It shrinks the window when you could be overconsuming. And then, of course, you control your calories and you can go ahead and lose weight or lose fat. And if you've tried it, just like I have, you probably felt good about it for a while. Your body adapted to the routine. Maybe you lost a few pounds early on or not. Maybe the routine itself felt freeing in some way. Maybe you even have some other benefits that you ascribe to fasting, whether it's mental clarity or something related to inflammation or something else. But if you're over 40, especially if you're a woman over 40 who strength trains and you're trying to build or keep muscle while losing fat, that's what we do here on Wits and Weights. We're about improving body composition. Then intermittent fasting is probably working against you in ways that show up later in longer-term effects, not just short term. We'll talk about both short and long-term. We're going to cover that today. And just so you know, there's no judgment on if you like intermittent fasting and it's working for you in all the ways we're talking about today, then that's your story and you should stick to it and it works for you. In my experience, a vast majority of people don't want to intermittent fast if they don't have to. And that's what we're going to talk about, that you don't have to. And not only do you not have to, there's probably negatives that outweigh any potential positive if there even is one. Stick around to the very end of this episode because after the main content, I'm going to share three quick questions you can ask yourself to figure out whether your eating window is too narrow for your goals. And it takes about 30 seconds. It might save you months of frustration and help you make the right choices for yourself. So here's what we're covering today: five specific ways that intermittent fasting backfires, especially for women over 40 who lived. And I'm sorry to target women, but population-wise, that is who I hear using fasting the most. And it's who we tend to work with the most. But this advice really applies to everyone. So five specific ways we're going to cover. I'm not going to list them here. I don't want to give them all away. I want you to dive in and really hear the context around them. And then I'm going to give you the fix for those, which keeps everything that you might like about IF, but without the downsides. So I know it's a tall order, but let's get into it and see if we can make that

#1: Metabolism and fat loss

Philip Pape 3:44

happen. All right. So the first way intermittent fasting backfires is it doesn't actually give you an advantage for fat loss. It doesn't produce better fat loss than a standard calorie restriction by any means. And this is the foundation so many other things rest on because if it had a genuine metabolic advantage, then you might argue the other downsides are worth tolerating in the trade-off, but it doesn't. And the popular version of IF goes like this. And look, I was on IF for a decade. I've tried all versions of it. I've even done full day fasts. Okay, so the popular version is this. You skip breakfast. This is the typical approach people take, because it's, I guess, the easiest to fit into a normal schedule. You skip breakfast, you eat your first meal around, say, noon. You stop eating by 8 p.m. if you're doing the 8 to 16, but it might even be earlier. It might be like 5 p.m. if you're trying to squeeze the window even tighter. And then the fasting window is all that time after you stop eating dinner, all the way to that next midday meal where the magic happens. That's where your insulin drops, your body burns fat. Maybe you get some autophagy, you lose weight without having to count calories. It's not what you eat, it's when you eat. Oh, it's just beautiful. It's just the perfect solution, guys, right? And I know you know that, right? Because you're you're listening to this show and you're like, yeah, intermittent fasting works for me perfectly. Now, I want to be fair because I can be a little facetious, a little sarcastic at times. There is a grain of truth to all this stuff. There's also plenty of anecdotal evidence for anything that can work for people. It doesn't mean that the science isn't there, doesn't mean that there isn't an optimal range of things for the vast majority of humans. It just means that your experience might be an outlier. Intermittent fasting does help some people lose weight, for sure. But the reason has nothing to do with the fasting window. The reason is that when you eat in a compressed window, you spontaneously eat less food. We see this in studies. Okay, so this we're gonna give them that point. Studies show that when you're just like in an ad libitum free living condition, if you're doing time-restricted eating, which is the more science-y term, people consume 350 to 650 fewer calories per day, and they're not being told to restrict, they're not doing anything special or anything different. And that is a very meaningful deficit. So, so yes, people on IF lose weight, but it's because of the calorie deficit. It's not the timing itself. How do we know this? Because when researchers match the calories, a non-IF approach has the same result. So going to all the way to 2025, just last year, Cochrane or Cochrane, it's a systematic review. I love systematic reviews because that is the highest level of evidence synthesis we have, where they looked at 22 randomized trials with nearly 2,000 participants. And they compared intermittent fasting to conventional calorie restriction. The difference of weight loss was 0.33% body weight. Not 3%, 0.33%, which is definitely not clinically meaningful in any way. That is what we would call noise. Okay, so almost nothing, no difference. Also in 2025, there was a different meta-analysis, and this was in nutrition, metabolism, and cardiovascular diseases, if you want to look it up. And they looked at 20 randomized controlled trials that were specifically designed to match calories between IF and standard dieting. And so this was a very direct conclusion that what's called isocaloric intermittent fasting is not superior to calorie restriction for any health outcome. There were no differences in body weight, in BMI, or in lean body mass at any time point. And then if we go a couple years back, there was the big New England Journal of Medicine trial from 2022. 139 obese patients randomized to time-restricted eating plus calorie restriction versus calorie restriction alone for 12 months. And guess what? The results were identical across fat mass, across lean mass, visceral fat, and liver fat. So the first thing to understand is that the mechanism of action for intermittent fasting is simply calorie reduction. It is a behavioral tool to create a deficit, and that is it. There's no metabolic alchemy. You know, we're not converting lead to gold. It's nothing magic that is happening during the fasting window that gives you any sort of edge whatsoever. And when you accept that fact, that premise, then you have a different question, don't you? You have a different question. Instead of saying, look, does intermittent fasting work? The question for you is is intermittent fasting the best way to create a deficit for you, given your specific goals and situation. And here's where I'm bringing it full circle to who I'm talking to on this show. A lot of you are over 40, a lot of you are women who strength train. The answer is almost always no, is what we've found. Almost always no. And that brings me to ways number two through five that backfire for intermittent fasting. Now, since we're talking about what drives results, which is all I care about, and all you care about, I think, versus the shiny object or the shiny distraction, I'm gonna tell you quickly about one thing that does make a real difference, and that is sleep. Sleep makes a big difference. Recovery is where adaptation happens. You don't build muscle in the gym, right? You build it while you sleep. Of course, you got to go to the gym. If you're waking up hot, tangled in sheets, tossing and turning, you've got night flashes, you've got disrupted sleep, that is all recovery time that you're not getting back. And so this is my smooth segue to introduce our sponsor for today, Cozy Earth. And Cozy Earth makes the most amazing sheets. I'm not just saying that, I am saying it, but I'm saying it because I use it and I bought another pair because I love them. I've had them for a while now, many months since I became a sponsor. And the temperature regulation piece is the thing that initially sold me, but I wasn't sold for real until I actually slept in them. So they're made from a bamboo-derived fabric, and that's what lets them keep you cool, even if you run warm like I do, and it keeps you comfortable even when it's cold. So it's not like it makes you colder. It's it's a nice balance depending on the temperature. And we know that better sleep means lower stress and cortisol, better recovery, better training, and a better use of your food, whether you are intermittent fasting or not. And that was my point with this extremely smooth segue to our sponsor in that getting enough sleep is going to prevent you from having massive cravings that often lead to people saying, Hey, I need a different solution because I can't help but eat. I'm gonna use fasting. You see how that works. All right. Right now, Cozy Earth will give you 20% off with code Wits and Weights. Go to witsandweights.com slash cozy earth. The link is in the show notes. Go to witsandweights.com slash cozy earth. Check out all of their products. I love this company. If you want to support the show, go check them out. Buy a gift for someone, buy it for yourself. They have some uh amazing warranties that are backing up the product like few other companies have. Go to witsandweights.com slash cozy earth and enjoy. All

#2: Muscle building and protein

Philip Pape 11:04

right, so the second way that intermittent fasting backfires is how it limits your ability to build muscle. And this is probably the most concrete issue that matters a lot to those of you listening. When you're trying to lift weights, you're trying to build muscle, you're trying to partition your nutrients just the right way. It's just a fancy way of saying, you know, what I eat into my mouth goes toward building muscle as best as I can and also whole, you know, losing fat when possible, right? Because that's what we're trying to do. So your muscles, they respond to a few things. They respond to number one, how much protein you eat total. So you've got to have that minimum, but also they respond a little bit more to the distribution of that protein. Not as much as the total. We've got to hit our total, but they also respond to the distribution. And there is a concept called the muscle full effect. So that is after you eat a protein-rich meal, muscle protein synthesis, that's the process of building and repairing muscle tissue. It spikes. It spikes for about 60 to 90 minutes and returns to baseline within two to three hours. Now, caveat, if you eat a lot of protein, like 100 grams, there is a study that did show it will that tail drags even further out simply because you ate more protein. So you will still get benefit even if you have more protein. There's not really a too high of a level, but there is a problem when you are going long stretches of time without protein and you don't have amino acids in your blood, that can give you a little bit of a disadvantage. And I wanted to mention it here because, again, if you don't have to fast, it's good to know what you're losing when you do fast that you might want to consider in your trade-off. Um, and in this case, I'm not going to go into all the different studies. There is one I found among many that I've referred to before by Aretta in 2013, where they did different patterns of doses for protein and they found that the pattern that had more frequent meals produced more protein synthesis than the others. And again, it depends on how much optimized you want to be here. As long as you're getting your total protein, even when you're fasting, you're going to be in a good place to start, but not the most optimal place, is my point. Um, and I've alluded to the anabolic resistance piece as well. Like if you're over 40, if you're a woman over 40, especially, your muscles become less responsive to protein. So when you're not really flooding your system with a decent amount of protein on a regular basis, you definitely could have a disadvantage, let alone the other issues having to do with satiety and your expenditure and all that fun stuff. So, what does intermittent fasting do to this? Well, you're compressing the eating window to at most six to eight hours, sometimes less, where you can realistically fit two meals, maybe three meals in that time. A lot of people are trying to fit it down to only two, but oftentimes you get three if it's like, you know, noon and then four and then eight or something like that. So let's say you're a 155-pound woman and you need, you know, 125, 130 grams of protein a day, which is a reasonable target. And within an eight-hour window, if you only have three meals, now each meal has to contain about 50 or 60 grams of protein. So you might be missing out on your total protein as a result. Now, I'm not saying you can't solve that simply by getting more protein, but it does create an extra practical issue. And then that entire fasting window, of course, you're not getting protein either, which again could be more or less of a problem depending on your response and also depending on when you train, right? Where when you train, if you're training kind of in the middle of that or late part of that fasting window where you haven't eaten in a long time, um, that could be a challenge as well. So that's way number two. Way number

#3: Cortisol and stress

Philip Pape 14:28

three about intermittent fasting backfiring backfiring is it can stress you out further than you already are. Now, this is the really important one that we don't talk about a lot. We know that fasting raises cortisol. Cortisol is your stress hormone. And this is this is not debatable, it's a survival mechanism. Your body is without food, and so your cortisol is going to try to mobilize your stored energy. This is great if there's a famine. You want to be stressed, you want your stress level to come up so that you can act on this and seek out food. But it's less useful in our situation where we're just trying to hold on to muscle tissue, we're trying to lose fat, we're trying to make this as easy as we can and not get more stressed out than we already are just from our life. There was a meta-analysis by Nakamura and colleagues back in 2016, looked at 13 studies, and they found that fasting produces what they call a very strong effect, and in quotes, on cortisol levels. Now, what's interesting is that shorter, more acute fasts produce larger cortisol spikes than chronic moderate restriction. So, in that sense, the daily start-stop pattern of intermittent fasting can be provoking your cortisol more than simply eating a bit less across the whole day. Now, there's some longer fasting studies that show even more dramatic effects. There's Bergendal's 1996 study found a 1.8 times increase in 24-hour cortisol production during a five-day fast. Now, again, we're not, I know a lot of you aren't doing full fasts like that, but it's worth understanding the mechanisms here. A more recent study in 2023 by Marciniac, I think that's how you pronounce it, found that even one day of fasting produced an 11% increase in cortisol and shifted the peak of cortisol about 50 minutes earlier. Now, why does this matter? Well, two reasons. First, we think of uh women in particular, the female HPA axis, that's your stress hormone system, which is more reactive than the male axis. Women initiate cortisol responses more rapidly and produce a greater output of cortisol. It's just a biological difference. No, nothing to worry about. But it means that the cortisol hit from fasting can be amplified for women. Second, during perimenopause, the decline in estrogen, it's already increasing your baseline cortisol and this activity of the HPA axis. So now you're layering fasting stress on top of a system that's already running more stressful than it was, say, five or 10 years earlier. And then we know cortisol is catabolic, catabolic. That means it will, it'll break down muscle tissue. It increases the breakdown by upregulating the pathways, the molecular pathways that do this. We're not going to get into a biology lesson here, but it preferentially targets fast twitch type 2 fibers, the ones responsive to strength training. So it's doing all these things that work against the adaptation that you are training for. It's

#4: DHEA and thyroid hormones

Philip Pape 17:33

kind of like when you don't get enough sleep. You just don't build muscle as effectively. All right, so way number four that IF backfires is it suppresses DHEA and thyroid. Now, this one is a bit newer, and this one is also specific to post-menopausal women. This is why the lens today is more toward women with some of these issues. And by the way, it could explain some issues you are having if you're listening to the show and you like to fast, thinking it's benefiting you. A 2022 study from Krista Varedi's lab. This is the first to examine time-restricted eating and sex hormones in pre- and post-menopausal women. It found that eight weeks of four to six hour time-restricted eating, say that's four to six hours of your eating window, caused a 14% decline in DHEA. DHEA, if you spell it out, it's dehydroepyandrosterone. Hard to say, but I wanted to say it because it's in my notes. After menopause, DHEA is the primary precursor that your body uses to produce estrogen and androgens in your tissue. So if you have a drop in DHEA, it's pretty concerning for postmenopausal women who already have reduced estrogen. That makes sense. In parallel to this, there's evidence that fasting can reduce T3. We've talked about thyroid a little bit on the show. T3 is the active thyroid hormone. And there is evidence fasting can reduce it by up to 55% within 24 hours and a corresponding rise in reverse T3 along with it. So for women over 40 who are already at higher risk for what we call subclinical hypothyroidism, this is a down regulation, right? It's a metabolic downregulation because we know thyroid affects a metabolism. And therefore it undermines your fat loss because you're going to burn fewer calories. And we don't want that. We don't want that. So it's interesting that fasting could actually reduce your expenditure, causing you to burn fewer calories, even though fasting and non-fasting can cause similar weight loss if the deficit is the same. That's the big if, though. You're now affecting the output side of the equation, the metabolism side of the equation. Now, the other thing we always have to mention is with this research, perimenopausal women are often not even included in these studies. There are so many studies we rely on in this space, and we talk about perimenopausal women, but then they're not even in the population. And so the lab that I just talked about excluded it, excluded them. There's another study I found that didn't have them. And so the population most likely to experience these effects, we have the least data on. So even though they see these effects in DHAA and thyroid, they're not even looking specifically at the population. That's not to uh say that it won't happen. That's to say we don't know to what if to what extent it's gonna happen. And it could be worse, is my point. It could be even amplified for women in perimenopause. We don't know. The

#5: Fasting and inflammation

Philip Pape 20:28

final number five way that intermittent fasting could back virus, this is a very interesting one because it goes against what is often claimed, is that it can increase inflammation and not decrease it. And it might it might surprise you to hear this because so many of the marketing claims are that it's anti-inflammatory. Fasting reduces inflammation, cleans up your cells, it calms the immune system, blah, blah, blah. It sounds great. It sounds so good to sell a marketing system based on intermittent fasting. But going again to very recent research, very recent, 2025, it was a scoping review and it was published in Aging Research Reviews. The scientist's name is D-Qt. I don't know how to pronounce that, but it's D-E-C-I-U-T-I-I-S, and colleagues looked at this claim directly. They reviewed 14 human clinical trials that examine prolonged fasting of 48 hours or more, and they measured what happens to three inflammatory markers in the blood CRP, IL6, and TNF alpha. We've talked about these before. These are objective ways to measure inflammation in your body. I've had these measured myself due to an autoimmune condition. And you can clearly see these go up when you have an inflammatory response at the cellular level in your body. These are true inflammation, not woo foo foo inflammation that a lot of social media people talk about. These are the markers that a doctor can look at, okay, or a rheumatologist or what have you, you know, a functional doctor doesn't matter. They can look at these and say, okay, you've got some systemic inflammation going on. The majority of studies from this review showed either no change or an increase in these markers during fasting. So we look at CRP, C reactive protein. The levels frequently went up, oftentimes a lot, especially when people are overweight or obese, which just goes to show like inflammation is often amplified when you don't have a healthy lifestyle on top of that. Some studies found increases in the TNF alpha and the IL-6, the interleukin 6. And this is the opposite of what so many fasting proponents claim. Now, some studies did show CRP normalized or dropped below baseline after the refeeding. So in other words, the inflammatory spike might be transient. It might be an adaptive stress response, which in which case we shouldn't overblow the finding and say fasting causes some sort of long-term inflammation, but we shouldn't say fasting reduces inflammation either, should we? You know, the honest summary here is fasting appears to trigger a pro-inflammatory response during the fast itself. And then whether that resolves cleanly depends on you as an individual and also how you refeed. Now, is this a bad thing? I wouldn't say it's a bad thing. It could be like any other transit response, like when your blood pressure goes up when you lift weights. That's not a bad thing. In fact, it has some long-term benefits. And maybe we'll find a long time from now that the short-term inflammation causes a long-term adaptation. But when you're doing it regularly and you're constantly going to this pro-inflammatory state, I think most people would generally agree that's not a great thing to be in, especially when the claim is the opposite. That's really my point here. And it's not that you get a use that you get used to it and that future fasting doesn't increase your inflammation either, right? There was another meta-analysis in obesity reviews, also in 2025, and it confirmed this same thing, but from a different angle. So when they compared intermittent fasting to standard calorie restriction, the intermittent fasting actually intermittent fasting reduced TNF alpha and it didn't have an effect on CRP or IR IL6, while the standard calorie restriction significantly reduced CRP and IL6. So interesting. If reducing inflammation is one of your goals, then guess what? Continuous moderate calorie restriction seems to outperform fasting for that as well. So man, you might even go and say, make the claim now that, hey, a normal calorie deficit can reduce inflammation compared to fasting. Maybe. That's that's basically the point is you can't claim that fasting helps when it comes to inflammation. So for all of this, just to put this in a bow, I don't think this is a major health concern, honestly. I don't think this inflammation thing is a major health concern. I just think it's a a poke in the balloon of the fasting is anti-inflammatory claim. That's it. That's it. And we're looking for nuance here and we're looking for evidence.

Eating more to lose fat

Philip Pape 25:00

All right, so you're hearing all of this. You're thinking, great, Philip, what do I actually do about my meal timing and my protein and all of that? Well, that's what Eat More Lift Heavy is built for. So Eat More Lift Heavy, we just launched this recently. It's my 26-week coaching program. You got me and Coach Carol in there actively involved to help you out. It is designed specifically for adults over 40 who lift. And we've got a lot of resources specific to women over 40, especially in week four of the program, which is our nutrition foundations uh module. We walk you through how to set up your meals, how to hit some level of protein based on how often you want to eat, how to space them to maximize muscle growth, how to structure your pre- and post-workout nutrition, all of that stuff personalized to your life and your schedule, not a meal plan. Like I do not like meal plans. Meal plans are just so static. You can go to ChatGPT and create a meal plan in five seconds. It's not helpful. What's helpful is a framework that fits how you eat and then can adapt as your life changes. And then in that same or in the next phase of the program, phase two, which is kind of the middle of the program, when you're executing everything and you're adjusting based on the data, we have something called dialed in, where Coach Carroll can review your nutrition strategy weekly and monthly and help you troubleshoot in real time. So if you're looking for that extra level of support, you have that option as well. And you can avoid the problems you have today with okay, I'm trying to cram everything into two meals a day, or I'm intermittent fasting, or I just can't get enough protein, I'm wondering why my body composition isn't changing. This is how we fix it. Go to eatmore liftheavy.com. You can learn more on that page. No pressure to join if it's not for you. But if you're trying to support us and you want the best results you've ever had that actually stick, this is definitely the way to do it. EatmoreLiftheavy.com, link in the show notes. All right, so those are the five ways intermittent fat intermittent fasting backfires. There's, you know, no advantage

Structured meal timing

Philip Pape 27:00

of fat loss, fewer opportunity to build muscle, amplified stress, potentially suppresses some hormones, you know, the inflammation profiles know better. It's possibly worse than standard dieting. So if you accept all of that and you're welcome to dig into the research, what do you do instead? Well, the fix is structured meal timing. And the reason I call it deceptively simple is because, well, it is. It gives you all the benefits that people attribute to intermittent fasting, such as appetite regulation, simplicity, reduced decision fatigue, but you're not going to sacrifice these other things like the hormones or the potential for inflammation or just the ability to enjoy food more during the day, if that's something you value. So here's the core of structured meal timing. You're going to eat three to four, what I'll say are protein-forward meals every day, space about three to four hours apart across a 12 to 14 hour window. That means your first meal is within an hour or two at most of waking up, especially if you're going to train in the morning. I mean, that's bar none. If you're going to train, I definitely encourage eating before you train. And then your last meal is about two to three hours before bed. You don't want it too close to bed because it can affect sleep, digestion, et cetera. Each meal should contain at least 30 grams of protein because doing the math, that's probably where it's going to need to be for whatever size you are. You know, unless you're much bigger and you need a lot more protein. For most people, that's going to get you there. And that's a reasonable amount of protein, but it's probably more than you're getting right now, especially for something like breakfast. It's like a palm-sized portion of meat or fish or poultry, or it's a combination of Greek yogurt and eggs. That's a good breakfast thought. Or a protein shake plus a whole food source, right? Any combination of those things, if you're vegan or vegetarian, you've got fewer options, but you still have lots of other things to consider. And the 30 grams is just a nice round number. It gets you the enough protein all day if you have them in each meal when they add up. It also gives you a good amount of protein at once to kind of maximize that muscle protein synthesis, again, without overblowing that piece of it. And it also gets you to make your very first day of the meal have to have that amount of protein, as opposed to waiting and cramming it in the end, and then you forget, and then you fall short. So the biggest single change of all this for people who are used to intermittent fasting is no longer skipping breakfast. And I know that's tough if you haven't done that in a if you've been skipping it for a long time. Getting that 30 to 40 grams of protein in breakfast is a game changer. It is a game changer. It is going to set you up for so much success. You're going to feel better, you're going to feel less hungry. It's going to regulate your hunger signals throughout the day. It's going to get you, you know, a good chunk of the way toward getting your protein. There's so many good reasons for that. And all you have to do is put together a simple breakfast for yourself right now, plan ahead and make it happen. Three eggs and a Greek yogurt, a protein shake with milk, leftover chicken from dinner. Come on, leftovers from dinner. People forget about this idea. It's a great idea. Make extra meat for dinner and then have it for breakfast. Takes five minutes to do these kinds of breakfasts and it gets you going. All right. So if you're worried about losing this simplicity in the routine that appealed to you about intermittent fasting, I think this is just a replacement with a new routine. You're still going to eat at the same time each day. I recommend eating the same time each day, the same basic rhythm to your meals, even the same meals if it doesn't bore you, which for most people, you know, breakfast can be the same. And even lunches for like the whole week can be the same. And then you could do another one the next week based on your meal prep. And that way you get structure without restriction. Structure without restriction. The consistency is the part that helps, whether you're fasting or not, that's the part that's helping you. Right? The fasting, the fasting is causing other things that are potentially problems, but either way work for consistency. So don't force yourself to fast if you don't have to. Now, look, intermittent fasting is not poison. Okay. If you're, if you're hitting your protein targets, it fits your life, it feels good, you have all the performance you want, you're doing getting everything you want, then it does work for you. And I'm not going to tell you it doesn't. But I'll say the vast majority of people over 40 who are lifting weights, who want to improve their body composition, this uh structured meal timing spread throughout the day, kind of in a normal schedule, a more normal schedule. I hate to use the word normal, but you know what I mean, tends to get better results over time and has less friction as well. So the question isn't does IF work? It's is it the best tool for you with your goals at this stage of life?

3 questions to test your eating window

Philip Pape 31:22

All right, before we wrap up, remember I promised three quick questions to diagnose whether your eating window is too narrow for your goals, which I'm gonna share in just a second. But if this episode is changing or has changed how you think about meal timing, but you're not sure how to restructure your eating around your training, your schedule, your protein targets, how to get enough protein. That's exactly what Eat More Lift Heavy walks you through. The program is 26 weeks, one focus per week that builds your skills slowly over time. By the end, you're not following a plan anymore. You are owning your own plan. You know how to build one, you know how to adapt, you know how to adjust on your own. That's what we want for you. We call it a graduation model because the goal is to make the original program unnecessary and let you go to bigger and better things for the next level. Go to eatmoreliftheavy.com. That is eatmoreliftheavy.com. Link is in the show notes. All right, here are three questions you can ask yourself right now to figure out if your eating window is costing you the muscle that you're trying to hold on to or making fat loss harder. Okay, question one How many meals with 30 plus grams of protein can you fit into your eating window right now? If the answer is two or less, it's probably too narrow. You're missing the opportunities to get enough protein, and that's gonna slow you down across the board. It's gonna make everything harder. It's gonna make it harder to hold on to lean mass. And then when you do lose weight, you're gonna lose muscle. We don't like that. Okay. Listen to our last episode where we talked all about how to hold on to muscle during fat loss. That's question one. Question two are you routinely hungry, low energy, or craving carbs in the last two hours of your fasting window? Okay. If so, that is your cortisol talking to you. It is, it is mobilizing that hormone to keep you going. And then when the fat feeding window opens, you are more likely to overconsume or to make poor food choices. That's another thing we didn't even talk about today. I see a lot of people who fast and they don't eat so well during the feeding window because they're just like starving. They're ready to eat and they go hog wild. And this is a physiological thing. This is not your discipline, it's just the situation has incentivized you to do this because of the cortisol. Question three Are you hitting your daily protein but not seeing body composition changes? Now, this is an interesting one because some of you are fasting, you're still hitting it, but it could be that you are underperforming in the fasting window. It could also be a carb situation. It could be when you're training. There's a lot of could be's, but if you are hitting your protein but not seeing body composition changes and you fast, there could be an issue there with the fasting window. All right. So if you answered yes to two or three of these, you may want to experiment with not fasting anymore, widening your window at least by two hours to add another meal with protein in there, for example, or just go all out to a normal eating schedule. Do it for at least two weeks. Track what you're doing and see what changes. Tell yourself, based on the evidence, whether this is a superior choice for you or not. Don't let me try to convince you of it. Do it for yourself. That is the best evidence. All right, until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights. And remember, when you eat matters less than whether your muscles get the signal they need when they need it, and you're eating well for your goals. I'm Philip Hayde, and I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.