I tried 16:8 intermittent fasting… This is what happened
In this post I share with you why I tried intermittent fasting for weight loss, what it was like, what my results were and some before and after photos.
Today I’m sharing with you a really intimate post… my intermittent fasting results, including my 16:8 fasting weight loss results 1 week, my 1 month results and my intermittent fasting before and after pictures.
I have a confession, 6 months after I shared my results from running four times a week for three months, I fell off of the running wagon. I think that because I had reached my goal (I lost 20lbs for my trip to Punta Cana by running four times a week) that I felt that I could take a break. I looked great, I felt great and I thought I didn’t have to run as often to maintain the way that I looked and felt. Of course missing one run a week quickly became missing two runs a week, and next thing I knew I hadn’t run in 6 months and my weight creeped up, I tried a HIIT transformation challenge in the past, and I worked out with a virtual personal trainer, but this time I decided to try Intermittent Fasting. These are my 16/8 fasting results 1 month.
What is Intermittent Fasting?
Intermittent Fasting is really a lifestyle choice where you eat during specific periods of time and fast for the rest of the time. There are many variations of Intermittent Fasting and different people tend to choose what works best for their lifestyle.
One of the goals of Intermittent Fasting is to limit your calorie intake by temporarily putting your body into a fasted state. This in turns invokes various healing and regenerating processes in the body {*}.
How do you do Intermittent Fasting?
The most standard approach is called the 16:8 intermittent fasting method. Under this system, you choose a 16-hour fast window during which time you do not consume anything other than water, tea, or black coffee. The other 8 hours are for consuming food.
What Are Some Other Types of Intermittent Fasting?
5:2 Intermittent Fasting – The 5:2 diet basically calls for only eating 500 calories or less on your fasting days for 2 days out of the week and eating normally the other 5.
24 Hour Fast – Some people practice fasting for a full 24 hours once or twice a week. This is also called the “Eat-Stop-Eat” method.
What happens to your body during Intermittent Fasting?
When you eat, your body naturally converts carbohydrates into glucose. Then, your pancreas produces insulin to help absorb the glucose to burn as energy. The glucose that isn’t needed immediately for energy then gets stored into fat cells.
During Intermittent Fasting, the decreased amount of carbs you are eating, in turn, signals to your body to reach for the stored glucose from those pesky fat cells for energy.
And thus, we are burning calories from the fat and reducing our fat stores.
Related: How Much do You Need to Eat to Lose Weight? – When it comes to losing weight there’s a magic number of calories you need to consume. Eat too many and you gain weight, eat too few and you gain weight.
Why did I decide to try Intermittent Fasting?
Truthfully, I decided to try 16:8 intermittent fasting because I needed to do something drastic. I was eating everything and anything, all.the.time and I gained 30lbs over the course of two years. Most of that weight was gained during the last year. Wanting to break the weight gain cycle, I needed to do something drastic, but easy. I also didn’t want to try anything dangerous.
The 16:8 Intermittent Fasting Method
I decided to do the 16:8 method of Intermittent Fasting because it seemed to be a method of Intermittent Fasting that fit my lifestyle the best. Most people who try this method stop eating at 8 pm, then fast for 16 hours until noon.
I am one of those people who wake up every morning absolutely STARVING, so waiting until noon to eat wasn’t something I thought I could handle, so I decided that I would start fasting at 6pm until 10am the next morning. That meant I would wake up, have a black coffee (yes, you can have calorie free drinks during the fasting period), get ready for work, drive the kids to school, drive to work, then have a small breakfast at my desk at aroung 10 am to break my overnight fast.
Along with my 10 am breakfast I also kept healthy foods at work that I could eat whenever I wanted to during my 8 hour “eating” window.
How I got started with Intermittent Fasting
The best part about Intermittent Fasting is that it’s a unique weight loss method that doesn’t take a lot of effort or preparation. My eating “window” was 10am to 6pm so most of my meals were during the day while I was at work. Because my time is limited while I’m at work, I pretty much only have time to eat what I made available to myself by bringing it to the office. I don’t have time during my workday to get away to buy a lunch. I’m fortunate in that we have a fridge, freezer and microwave at the office. On Mondays i would bring in all of the food I had prepped for the week.
At 10am I would break my fast with protein rich greek yogurt and a fruit, either an apple or a banana. At noon I would defrost a high protein frozen dinner in the microwave for my lunch, and eat a cheese string, or have one of my high protein salads, usually with a chicken breast. In the afternoons I snacked on carrots and hummus, and at 5:30pm I would eat my last meal of the day – usually whatever my husband had prepared for us to eat (pasta, chicken fingers & fries, chicken caesar wraps, etc).
My first few days of Intermittent Fasting
I have to admit that the first few days of Intermittent Fasting were really hard and took some getting used to.
As I mentioned above, my weekday mornings are busy, so delaying my breakfast wasn’t the hard part. The real test came in the evenings when I was bored and waiting for my daughters to finish their hockey practices in arenas where the arena fries and popcorn smelll sooooooo good.
On the first night it was really hard to resist the snack bar temptations. I felt like it took ALL of my willpower to resist. On the second night I brought a bottle of water with me to drink while I waited for their practices to end. I quickly realized that drinking water really helped with the urge to snack…. It turns out that in the evenings I wasn’t actually hungry, my evening snacking and cravings were because I was bored and thirsty!
There were a few evenings that first week where I had an evening snack, so the next morning I delayed breaking my fast until noon. Those days were considerably harder. Thankfully black coffee is ok while fasting, and I normally drink my coffee black so there was no adjustment there.
Try these easy keto recipes
What were my 16:8 fasting weight loss results for the first week?
My 16:8 fasting weight loss results 1 week: After a week I found that my normal cravings for all things sweet diminished. I tried to drink a lemonade one afternoon and found that I had to water it down because it was far too sweet for me!
My One Month Intermittent Fasting Before and After Photos
It’s only because a picture says a thousand words that I’m sharing these photos with you. These are my 16:8 intermittent fasting before and after photos. The picture on the left was taken on day 1 when I weighed 147.9 lbs, on the right you can see that I felt much more confident when I weighed in at 140.5 lbs. A weight loss of 7.4lbs! My 16:8 fasting weight loss results 1 week was an average of almost 2lbs per week!
My One Month Intermittent Fasting Results
My 16:8 fasting weight loss results 1 week was only half a pound so I was pretty discouraged. The second week I lost 2.5 lbs, then I lost 2 lbs the next week, and 2.4 lbs in the last week. This resulted into a total of 7.4 lbs lost.
My Intermittent fasting results 1 month 16:8
Final thoughts about my 16:8 intermittent fasting results
I’ve tried a lot of weight loss fads over my life time, some are crazy hard to do (Whole 30 I’m looking at you), and other methods have been easier. Out of everything I’ve tried, I found Intermittent Fasting to be the easiest to get started with, and also the easiest to stick with. It’s not a complicated weight loss plan, nor was it hard to fit it into my lifestyle. I liked that my cravings for sugar diminished and I snacked a whole lot less. Overall I’m pretty sure I consumed far less calories because I was snacking less. I think this is why I I experienced the weight loss that I did. I can see how partnering Intermittent Fasting with regular exercise and even a keto diet could take your weight loss to the next level.
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What are My next steps?
I enjoy trying things for a month at a time because it gives me a long enough window to see some results, so my next step will be to partner Intermittent Fasting with running four times a week. I like to run in the morning before work so my running will be done in a fasted state, and I hear that fasted cardio is great for fat loss. Running four times a week has been very effective for me in the past so it’ll be interesting to see the results of running four times a week coupled with Intermittent Fasting. Stay tuned for my next post in a few months when I share my results from that experiment!
- If you’re looking to try running for weight loss, check out my post and my running weight loss results here.
- If you’re looking to try HIIT for weight loss, check out my post and my 12 week HIIT Challenge Transformation Results here.
- If you’re looking for how to lose weight by fasting, then check out my Ultimate Guide to Fasting for Weight Loss.
If you or someone you love is struggling with an eating disorder, you can get help. Call the National Eating Disorder Association helpline at (800) 931-2237 or visit nationaleatingdisorders.org. Or call the National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Disorders helpline at (888) 375-7767 or visit anad.org.
