There are many different intermittent fasting plans out there.  I have included summaries of the books I have found to be most helpful in the Annotated Bibliography section of this book, and you can flip to that section to read about each one of them.  Once you decide which intermittent fasting plan you want to try, I highly recommend that you research the plan for yourself by reading the original plan as written by its author.  I have great respect for these authors, and each book on the list has shaped my thinking about intermittent fasting and why it is effective. Personally, I have tried every type of intermittent fasting plan available.  In fact, I started dabbling in intermittent fasting in about 2009.  I never viewed it as a lifestyle, however, so I would try a plan briefly, and then fall off of the wagon.  If you read my story in Appendix A, I have outlined it all there for you—the whole messy story.  Instinctually I knew that intermittent fasting would be the answer for me as soon as I heard about it, but I never would commit or follow through, until I hit rock bottom in 2014.  Once I realized that I no longer wanted to ride the weight-gain roller coaster, I was ready to commit.  I finally understood that intermittent fasting was a lifestyle and not another diet plan, and I experimented until I found what works for me.  The best part is that I have a whole toolbox full of intermittent fasting strategies that I can pull out when I need them, to suit my current situation.  I can pick and choose which strategies to implement based on how I want to live my life. In a nutshell, there are two main types of intermittent fasting strategies:  plans you do every day (an “eating window” approach), or plans you implement a certain number of times per week (an “up/down day” approach). Which approach to intermittent fasting is the best?  It’s the one that makes you feel in control and the one that you can follow long-term as a lifestyle.  That’s important to understand from the beginning —intermittent fasting is a lifestyle.  It isn’t something that you start today and then end when you get to some arbitrary “goal weight.”  Something you start and then stop is a DIET.  Intermittent fasting isn’t a diet—as I said, it’s a lifestyle. Before I get into the specifics of an eating window approach vs. an up/down day approach, I want to talk about hormones again.  From the insulin chapter, you may recall that insulin is the key to fat storage vs. fat burning.  If you keep insulin as low as possible in your body, you are able to burn fat. If insulin is high, your body wants to store fat.  Insulin is the key hormone to understand if you want to lose weight and keep it off long-term. Insulin isn’t, however, the only hormone that affects your results.  There are other hormonal regulators of appetite, as described in this paper, which is called, surprisingly, “Hormonal Regulators of Appetite”. To overly simplify a very complex process, ghrelin tells us that we need to eat, and leptin tells us that we have had enough.  If your body is sensitive to both ghrelin and leptin, and everything is working as it should, you will remain at your ideal weight effortlessly, and your appetite will tell you when to eat and when to stop.  We are born with these hormones working perfectly in concert with one another.  A baby doesn’t know how many calories he has had, but he gets hunger signals to let him know that it is
time to eat.  If you have ever tried to feed a toddler who isn’t hungry, you have seen that it can be impossible.  If they aren’t hungry, they aren’t going to eat, which is how we should all live our lives. Children come to us with appetite hormones that are working perfectly, and then we force them to eat at mealtimes on an arbitrary schedule, and then we feed them highly processed foods, both of which work together to cause our kids to completely lose sight of their satiety signals.  Thanks, mom. When we follow restrictive diets, count calories, eat according to an arbitrary meal schedule, etc., we disconnect from our satiety hormones.  We eat because it is time to eat.  We eat because food is available.  The more we do it, the worse shape we are in. Bottom line, if you have had trouble sticking to a diet, it isn’t your fault—it’s your hormones.  The overwhelming drive to eat is coming from ghrelin, telling you to eat more.  You are no longer able to get the signals from leptin, telling you that you have had enough.  Understand that uncontrollable or constant hunger is a sign that you have made some dietary choices that aren’t working for you.  On the other hand, satiety is a good sign, telling you that your body is happy with what you are doing. So, why I am I mentioning this here, in the chapter on finding your perfect intermittent plan?  Stick with me.  If you flip to the back and read my description of Dr. Herring’s second book, Appetite Correction, in the Annotated Bibliography, you’ll see my explanation of the state he calls “Appetite Correction”, or AC.  (You really should buy his book and read what he has to say; it’s worth it!) What he calls “appetite correction” is actually a state of regulated hormones.  You suddenly have leptin and ghrelin working as they should, and part of this is because you can access your fat stores appropriately due to low levels of circulating insulin.  You eat according to appetite and never have to count another calorie again, because you have gotten your hormones back into the state that nature intended.  Hallelujah, and pass the collection plate.  (You may not get that joke if you aren’t a southerner...) Remember this when you are experimenting to find your ideal intermittent fasting plan: you need to look for the one that gives you this hormonal correction Dr. Herring describes as appetite correction.  It won’t happen overnight, as it takes time to undo years of damage.  Once you get there, though, you’ll know, because you’ll have a level of peace around food that you have never had in recent memory.  You can pass up cake, because you are full.  When I stick to my preferred intermittent fasting lifestyle, I live in a state of balance, where ghrelin and leptin work together to control my appetite, just as nature intended. In the next 2 chapters, I’ll summarize both the eating window approach and the up/down day approach to help you decide which might be the best fit for your lifestyle. Then, in the next chapter, I describe my own preferred approach to intermittent fasting, called the One Meal a Day (OMAD) lifestyle.  Even if the name of it sounds overly restrictive, and you are hesitant to commit to such an “extreme” plan, I suggest that you read that chapter with an open mind.  I have found my own best results and the most dietary freedom with the OMAD lifestyle.  It’s the plan that gets my hormones into balance the best.  If you had told me that 5 years ago, I would have refused to believe it, but it is true.