Today, I burned through Brad Pilon’s Eat Stop Eat, another book from the sug­gested read­ing list at Lean­gains.

This one was focused on Inter­mit­tent Fast­ing. The read­ing was short and sweet, but did not leave me com­pletely con­vinced. He did add foot­note cita­tions, so I may look through those. The basic prin­ci­ple is that brief fasts drop insulin and raise glucagon and growth hor­mone, lead­ing to fat loss.

Assum­ing that the sci­ence is solid, I’m not sure how I would imple­ment it. There seem to be a lot of vari­a­tions on IF. The author rec­om­mends 24-​hour fasts once or twice a week. Lean­gains rec­om­mends a 16-​hour (14 for women) fast every day. Fast-​5 is another pop­u­lar IF plan that rec­om­mends a 19-​hour fast every day.

As for the rules — dur­ing the non-​fasting times, you eat as nor­mal. No extra calo­ries in prepa­ra­tion for a fast or as reward after a fast. Dur­ing the fast­ing times, only non-​caloric drinks and sugar-​free gum are allowed. From a strict calorie-​restriction per­spec­tive, I can see how this plan would work. And it would be rel­a­tively easy to do long-​term since there are no types of food restricted, but it seems to fall back to count­ing calories.