I've been getting some questions lately on how I've set up my Intermittent Fasting (IF) style of meal planning. I'll lay out what I've done recently. It's not really to draw any rock-solid conclusions, but just show you what I've been doing and how it's worked for me.
To understand what's going on, let me give you a little history...
From here on out, when I talk about my weight, it will be in pounds measured on my bathroom scale. When I talk about body fat, I measure it a few ways. I measure once a week in the morning after my TRAC test. I use calipers and a tape measure. I do the tests myself, but obviously try to be as objective as possible. I use a 3-site test (Jackson-Pollock maybe?) and an additional oblique measurement. I also use a neck-waist measurement and conversion chart that we used at USAFA (it actually has been fairly accurate compared to a DEXA scan). Anyway, I take those measurements and form a weighted average. This weighted average is my "accepted BF%" and what I say my body fat percentage is.
I went on a 2 week vacation in early February. I didn't train, ate whatever came natural, etc. When I came back from my vacation, my weight was down and my body fat was about the same. (253.4, 10%). Since most of what I lost was lean mass, I did a 3 week "bulk up" process (not IF). By the end of that, I was 261, 12%. My lean mass came up some, but I mostly just got fat (+1.5 lean, +6.0 fat).
It was at this point that I started my IF dieting phase. My goal was to keep lean mass the same, but drop bodyfat.
I've done very well controlled diets in the past (counting everything, etc) and to be honest, after about a year I was burned out on it. At this point I still didn't want to go back to counting everything. So I decided to set it up a little differently. Most of what I eat is within normal ranges anyway in terms of protein and fat intake. My problem has always been excess carbs. And not just excess carbs, but carbs from candy. I have a terrible sweet tooth. So my idea was to control the diet portion by controlling how much candy I took in. The idea was to go slow and controlled with the fat loss. I was and am primarily a Powerlifter and this whole dieting thing has just been an experiment to see what happens.
As for the IF protocol itself, it was pretty simple. My first meal of the day would be at 2PM. Leading up to that, if I got hungry I would chew gum or drink a zero calorie drink like Powerade Zero. That did a good job of helping me control hunger. After 2PM, I would eat pretty freely until 9-10PM, when I would have my last meal for the day. Most of my dinners were a kind of meaty... stuff. I would take 3 pounds of lean ground beef, 1 pound of ground pork, 1 pound of ground turkey, 1 cup of brown rice, and a bag of mixed vegetables, throw it all in a big skillet and cook it until it was done. That would usually last me 3-4 days depending on how often I ate it. The next three weeks went like this:
259.8, 10.9%
257.4, 10.6%
258.2, 10.0%
Lean mass was kind of all over the place, but body fat had a downward trend. It was about this time that I introduced BCAA's to the fasted period. I don't believe I made any other changes to my diet. I took 10g of BCAA's sometime in the morning. The next three weeks looked like this:
258.2, 9.3%
260.0, 9.4% (seminar week and had lots of salt the night before the test)
260.2, 9.1%
This time, lean mass and fat mass had more clear trends while overall body weight fluctuated. This can probably be attributed to my lack of analytical control over what I was eating. As I said, I wasn't really weighing food or counting carbs or anything. I did eat generally the same things most days, but once in a while I would allow myself to go off track. Also, each Sunday I would treat as kind of a "re-feed". I usually had dinner with friends and I wouldn't really pay attention to my diet at all on Sundays. I didn't go nuts and we usually have fairly wholesome food, it just wasn't diet food at all.
At this point, I was ready to be done with the diet. Somewhere in this time frame, I got it in my head that ~8% would be the goal. So I figured I'd really lock it down for the last week of the diet and try to hit that mark. For this week, I was a tiny bit more stringent with my controls. I cut out all my candy (except for sugar free jello, and even that was limited). I also tracked what I ate just for grins. By this time, most days were right around 2000 calories. I was well under 100g of carbs each day with some days being around 50g. When I went that low, I had pretty bad food cravings, though. Most of the carbs (40g) were around the workout, too.
This finished up this morning and the results were 258, 8.3%.
As you can see, if my measurements are to be trusted, I actually gained an appreciable amount of lean mass during the diet period. However, on the whole I am only +2 pounds or so of lean mass from my pre-vacation levels, which could be from anything. I started the diet with 31.4 pounds of fat weight and finished with 21.4 pounds. I took some pictures too (no I won't post them) and I am noticeably leaner as the weeks go on.
I can't honestly say that the diet caused my workouts to suffer at all. Up until the last week, the diet was actually pretty easy. Just slow and controlled. The IF style seems to work pretty good for me. At this point, I think I'm going to take this week, eat what I want and decide what to do next. Again, I'm far from an expert and I'm not presenting this as scientific evidence for anything. I'm just relaying my experience.
Feel free to fire away with any questions, observations, criticisms, etc.
