Intermittent Fasting (IF)

I’ve never really thought of myself as a diet person. With my degrees in exercise science and physical therapy, I always thought training was more important than diet. In a way, I still do, but it certainly depends on how bad your diet is and how much you are training. So it’s very relative, and I’m also coming to think it’s a bad habit to think in terms of either-or instead of both.

Furthermore, I came to exercise from the thin side. I started weight training when I was 16 and 37 lb underweight per the ideal weight formula. And when I started lifting weights, it really worked. So historically I understood very well what it takes to bulk up in bodybuilding and weightlifting, but at the time, not so much weight loss, so my practical diet expertise wasn’t so in line with the common man. And when I was later working as a personal trainer, telling clients the advice that everyone said about three meals plus snacks… Well, to make that work, those meals have to be miserable.

And years later, a shoulder injury from dirt biking prevented me from lifting weights as I wanted (in a way fortunate, as it later helped lead to F5). So there was a time that I definitely became dad-bodish. I remember at work one day, pinching about two inches of fat on my belly and thinking, “I guess this is how it is,” and at the same time thinking, “I’m a PT, I’m still smart… I still know about exercise… people still come to me for advice…”

As an aside, have you noticed how many working strength coaches, and physical therapists, too, are fat? It’s pretty crazy when you think about it, given that exercise and fitness are their life’s work. I won’t go too far into this digression, but I think it has a lot to do with specialization and the limited “scope of one’s practice.” Where therapists are supposed to refer out to a registered dietitian (RD), which I never witness happening. And more than a third of RDs are fat too! I bet they are all thinking what I was thinking.

But I have this penchant for reading research related to anything health and fitness, and finally I came upon this one, and it was a game changer for me. I reviewed it in my blog, Eat Less for More Muscle. I honestly never thought of that. [More than a decade later, yeah, I think it’s true.]

That’s the paper that got me looking into intermittent fasting, which was then fairly new, and I thought, I’m going to try that. I liked that you didn’t have to do anything to get the benefit. You just had to do less of something—cook, take time out of your day to eat, and clean up after meals. I never felt like eating breakfast anyway. It even saves money! What a concept! So I tried it for 40 days. And as I re-edit this, I have now kept it up for eleven years.

In that time, I’ve gotten pretty good at it. I’ve tried many variations; I know what to expect and what makes IF easier, harder, work, and not work for weight loss or weight gain. I was doing IF the entire time I was developing SpineFITyoga, including when it evolved from just spine rehab into a total body fitness system.

As I made SpineFITyoga ever faster and more efficient, culminating in its F5, my 5-minute fitness program, I had to get my fasting/diet even more on point just to see what F5 could do. Incorporating several ideas I had read about and tested over the years, I came up with the idea of Carb Cycling Intermittent Fasting (CCIF). CCIF and F5, so far, have been what I have found to be the best short-term fast-loss synergy. Once there, staying there is a lot less drastic. Maintaining I was still doing IF, but without whipsawing my carbs around with carb cycling aspect. F5, and wrapping up a few weeks of CCIF, was what I was doing when I took my above banner image of this page, with me at a bodyweight of 167 lb, exactly ideal weight, per the formula, and my F5 performance pretty close to peak level.

Before going further, I think it’s worth pointing out that I don‘t think everyone should do IF. It’s hardly mandatory. If you are already at or near ideal weight, and you are happy with your diet, and it’s well rounded, congratulations, because that’s a hard thing to do these days. So, I’m not comfortable telling people with their diet on point to do anything drastic that might unbalance what’s a finely tuned machine. IF is what works best for me, and in the research it holds its own. And I think it’s what will work best for many who have failed at regular dieting, who aren’t on point. Or who, like me, want to eat typical American portions (or more), go to bed on a full stomach, and still have six-pack abs every day of the year.

However, if your diet is good, I might not worry about it. Rather, I’d focus on the other components of SpineFITyoga, either for neck and back pain relief with P5 and F5 Levels 1 and 2. Or for general to exceptional fitness with F5 Levels 2 or 3, respectively, for which I don’t think there are any comparisons for the same accessibility and time investment.

Whereas, if you are underweight, F5 will absolutely help you gain strength and muscle without any big dietary changes other than increasing calories in general, and maybe, MAYBE, increasing protein. There’s a bit of a fad of encouraging too much protein, with people left wondering why their waists are so thick (I’ll expand upon this later). And while I don’t know if IF is ideal for gaining muscle if you are underweight, as there is yet to be any research with that as the goal. I do know it CAN work, as I have successfully bulked with a 4-hour eating window and even one meal a day, just to see if I could. So if you desire to try it, my advice is to self-test and see using the scale, percent body fat, and F5 performance as your guides.

So, I like to think of SpineFITyoga as a modular gestalt, a system where the whole is certainly better than the sum of its parts. But where, if some of your parts, like diet, are already good to go, there is not a lot to gain from that aspect. However, if you think IF can help you, or you’re just curious, the following are my more important blogs (all free).