Here’s a site you can check out for info & links. Link takes you to app page where you can sign up to participate, if you want. Click on science for videos, etc. https://mycircadianclock.org/
From what the research suggests – exposing yourself to bright sunshine & eating most of your calories earlier in the day provide the best results as your body idigests food more efficiently in the morning. Weight loss is a secondary goal/benefit of this approach.
Quote from recent article. “As often happens with nutrition research, results from fasting research have been borrowed and packaged into ill-informed fad diets. Panda’s research formed the basis of one such product, branded as The 8-Hour Diet. The book, cowritten by an editor at Men’s Health, which covered Panda’s research when it came out in 2012, claimed (right on the cover) that dieters who restricted their food consumption to an eight-hour window every day could “watch the pounds disappear without watching what you eat!” This idea, says Panda—who was not involved in producing the book—was unsupported by his research as of 2012. “We never claimed that we could make fat mice lean with the eight-hour diet,” he says. “In our first paper, we just prevented obesity from happening”
“Extending the research into humans, Panda’s lab recently published a study of eight otherwise healthy people with body mass indices between 25 and 30 (in the “overweight” range, according to the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey). When the study subjects ate all of their food for the day in 10 hours, instead of 14 or 15 (as they tended to do before the study), they lost an average of 4 percent of their body weight and reported having significantly more energy and more satisfying sleep over the 16-week trial period, with the benefits sticking around for up to a year.”

Full article here http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/49462/title/Running-on-Empty/
Video that might prove useful
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-R-eqJDQ2nU

TiggyB,

The concept of having breakfast is a relatively new concept. If you follow it back it only goes back about 70 years and was started by breakfast cereal companies. No vested interest there, right? Eat when your hungry.

Breakfast as a meal has only been around since 17th century and as bigbooty says the current favourite of sugar stuffed cereal was started by Mr Kellogg.

The Romans used to eat one meal a day, usually at noon.
Throughout history the poorer classes used to go to work without eating, and at one point would start their day with a mug of ale. If they had lunch it would be a hunk of bread left over from the night before.

I don’t eat breakfast as eating first thing in the morning doesn’t agree with me. I am not convinced that adults need it as all that most of us have done since dinner is sit on the sofa then go to bed, so we’ve not used up much energy since eating dinner which is for most the largest meal of the day.

I rarely eat before lunchtime and on FDs I only have dinner which means 23:1 and a substantial sized meal as dividing 500 calories into 3 doesn’t go very far.
I usually have brunch and dinner on non FDs.
I also eat dinner early and rarely have any food after 7pm.

Not eating in the mornings has had no adverse effects as I have no problem working out at the gym in a fasted state even on the morning after a FD.

Professional medical endorsement of limited eating windows is hard to come by as most of the medical profession are still telling us to eat the kind of diet that has caused a diabetic and obsity epidemic.

I have been doing both for 8 days now – that is three 600 cal fasting days, eaten in a 9 hour period and five days of eating and drinking as I wish in a 9 hour window. Normally on 5:2 I would be happy with a loss of 2 lbs a week. In the last 8 days I am down 7 lbs. This rate of loss is unlikely to continue, but as an introduction to the combined system it is impressive. Especially as physically I have been unusually inactive – no long walks or gym and too much time driving.

Penguin, 7 lbs is amazing, especially since you don’t have a ton of fat to lose. My last week (actually 6 days) was 3.6lbs with one fast day and 10 hour morning eating window on NFD’s.

Penguin. How did you loose 7 lbs. in eight days? Three days of fasting at 600 calories and the other five days just regular eating just within a 9 hour window!? That is quite amazing and I think exceptional. Did you eat in any particular way to help loose the weight? I would love to loose that amount of weight in that amount of time!

Beforeallelse, when I wanted faster weight loss I did try 4:3 (3FD per week) and also AD (alternate day fasting). The weight loss will be greater providing you don’t suffer from a binge eating disorder. I do, and found that the more FDs I did the more likely I was to overeat on my NFD – effectively cancelling out the extra effort from those extra FDs. In then end I found that I had to have a minimum of 2 NFDs between FDs to minimise this risk and have any hope of sticking to my TDEE on the NFDs.
If binge eating is not a long-standing problem that you have, then extra FDs should be helpful for quicker weight loss.

diverdog – Thanks for the helpful information on Christa Varaday’s book. I may get that but for now just following the advice should suffice. You seem to have done a lot of reading about the IF approach to weight loss.

LJoyce – More good information to help me. I think I might get carried away with trying to do the 500 calorie daily. I will take yours and diverdog’s advice regarding the every other day. Maybe I will shoot for 4:3 and 3:4 see if I can maintain that for awhile to start the weight to come off more easily. I have so far to go and I become impatient. So three fasting days on alternate days and when I feel really positive and able I will try four fasting days alternately. I will keep you all posted.

penguin – I know what you mean about a large breakfast. I find if I do a large lunch I often skip supper or have soup or some veggies.

Thank you all so much for the support. I have a long way to go and it is very helpful.

Actually walked for 40 brisk minutes this morning. I don’t exercise. I have arthritis in my feet and one is very bad requiring an insert for my shoe and it is hard to stand for any length of time and walking is ok but I am a bit wobbly. I know that not being able to exercise properly will slow down my weight loss so that is one of the reasons to just cut out more calories if I can.

Beforeallelse, I am located in Las Vegas Nevada. Don’t worry about not exercising now. Most of the fat loss will always be from caloric reduction. Walking is great and as you lose weight it will be easier and less stressful on your joints. Perhaps swimming would be good for you.

Good luck with your efforts and post often.

Diverdog – hello my American buddy. I have dual citizenship with the United States. I was curious about your name. Do you scuba dive?
Thanks for the support. It is good to have someone out there that can respond sooner. I will focus on the calorie reduction then. Thank you.

Diverdog – my husband bought me a six-month membership to the YMCA and it has a pool. I went a few times but it is difficult getting in and out of my bathing suit. I put the membership on hold and started to focus on loosing weight. Certainly, the pool exercise is very good I just have a tough time getting motivated to go and get into the bathing suit! A bit embarrassing and I am a bit shy. Excellent suggestion though. and I will get back to it when I loose a few more lbs.

Beforeallelese, yes I love to scuba dive and do so a couple of times a year. A bit more about me. I am a 66 YO man 5’10” tall and weigh 175 lbs. In my 40’s I weighed 240 and got motivated to get healthy by a heart attack scare. At 50 I weighed 180 lbs and have kept the weight off since then.

My goal is to increase my healthy lifespan through good nutrition, exercise, reducing exposure to toxins, better sleep and a tranquil mindset.

We did 5:2 from April 16 and I hit target on 20th September, since then I lost another half stone. I’ve switched to 16:8 and maintaining well. I just omit breakfast and eat first around 1pm.

That way I find that I can eat what I like.

Penguin – How exciting. Sounds very beautiful and the idea of white water canoeing is more than just exciting it sounds a bit scary too. Is it safe in a canoe? It’s a pitty they didn’t find the guy that let loose the boar in the forest. what a thoughtless thing to do. Canoeing must be very good upper body exercise I would imagine. thanks for sharing. I enjoyed hearing about it.

I follow the 16:8 program daily. Then for losing the weight I do two alternate days of fasting eating no more than 500 calories. The other five days I try to keep my calorie count at the level that it should be for maintaining my goal weight. That’s about 500 calories a day less than it takes to maintain my current weight.

The first two weeks I just did the 16:8 and lost four lbs. Then I started the two alternate 500 calorie fast days for nine days. so for a total of 23 days I lost 12 lbs. On the 23rd day I ate 2000 calories and gained back a few lbs. Dissapointed but I assume that will balance out in a few days.I just didn’t think I would gain 3 lbs in one day! High price to pay for one day of eating.

Any suggestions on how to eat a normal meal like a two pieces of roast beef and vegetables and my other meal was a small chicken breast in a Greek salad. I don’t get how I could gain so much. I am a bit peturbed.

LJoyce I think I might have made the same mistake you talked about with doing the fasting days (500 calories or less) back to back. I had 500 calories then the next day it just turned out that I only ate 800 calories. Unintentional. Then the third day was my official fasting day so I did 500 calories again. I felt fine. but as you can see by my post above, I had two meals. One was a Greek salad with chicken and the other pork lion two pieces with vegetables and the calories showed to be about 1900 for the day. It could have been my poor calculations on the calories but I still gained three lbs. back. Ugh.

I’m trying to work on 5.2 and 16.8…. almost managed it yesterday…my new day 1 after a rubbish week.x