The dietary practice of restricting your food consumption to a specific window of time. It is used as a supplement to your diet. In this fasting state, our bodies can break down extra fat that’s stored for the energy it needs.

Intermittent Fasting (IF)

Health

<ul><li>Skipped meals - when you skip over a meal to induce extra time of fasting. </li><li>Eating windows - this condenses your entire macronutrient intake between a 4 and 7-hour window. The rest of the time you are in a fasting state.</li><li>24-48 hour cleanse - where you go into extended fasting periods and do not eat for 1-2 days.</li></ul>

Approaches to intermittent fasting

The process by which the cell devours itself. <ul><li>Non-essential parts like damaged proteins are recycled and invading microorganisms and toxic compounds are removed. </li><li>Autophagy plays an important role in stopping the aging process, reversing disease, and preventing cancer, but it doesn’t happen all the time. </li><li>Autophagic processes can be initiated by fasting, protein restriction and carbohydrate restriction.</li></ul>

Autophagy definition and benefits

<ul><li>Mental Clarity. Once your body is keto-adapted, your brain can effectively run on ketones, which are derived from the fat breakdown in the liver.</li><li>Fitness while fasting. The benefits include higher metabolic adaptations, improved muscle synthesis and improved response to post-workout meals.</li><li>Intermittent Fasting and Muscle. Intermittent fasting is beneficial for muscle mass while fat mass decrease significantly.</li><li>Autophagy. The fasting process will activate autophagy in your cells.</li><li>It will increase your ketones quicker than if you were just eating a standard ketogenic diet.</li><li>Intermittent Fasting and Cancer. Fasting for 2 days to a week can have a protective effect on the cells in the body while they are undergoing intense bouts of toxicity.</li></ul>

Benefits of Intermittent Fasting

<div>
Intermittent Fasting, or "IF", is a relatively new craze that is used as a supplement to your diet. It revolves around the timing of your food intake, and can have some benefits in the long run. There are quite a few people misinformed on fasting, so we'll clear that up and explain how intermittent fasting can be useful.
On your ketogenic journey, it's important to know that your success is not only dictated by eating enough fat and protein and restricting carbs. When you eat, how often you eat, and how much you eat have a substantial impact on your health and function as well.
If your results have plateaued or you are thinking of starting a ketogenic diet, this article will provide you with a way to lose more fat and improve energy levels called intermittent fasting. If you need to learn how to <a href="https://ruled.me/keto-calculator/">calculate your macros</a>, visit our Keto Calculator.
Fasting isn't required to lose weight on a ketogenic diet. If it doesn't work for you, then do not force yourself to fast. Restricting yourself unrealistically is pointless - it's not worth it if it makes you unhappy.
There are 2 basic terms we need to understand here first: feeding and fasting. Your body is in a feeding state when you are eating your food, and you are in a fasting state when you are between your meals.
<h2>The Approach</h2>
<img src="https://cdn.ruled.me/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/graphic_intermittent-fasting-the-approach.png"> There are a few approaches when it comes to intermittent fasting.
<ul>
	<li>
Skipped meals. This is when you skip over a meal to induce extra time of fasting. Usually people choose breakfast, but others prefer to skip lunch.</li>
	<li>
Eating windows. Usually this condenses your entire macronutrient intake between a 4 and 7 hour window. The rest of the time you are in a fasting state.</li>
	<li>
24-48 hour cleanse. This is where you go into extended fasting periods, and do not eat for 1-2 days.</li>
</ul> 
I don't recommend that you go straight for a 1-2 day fast, but begin by restricting yourself to certain eating windows. Typically people restrict themselves to the hours of 5pm - 11pm. People often refer to their fasting windows by numbers: 19/5 or 21/3, for example, means 19 hours of fasting and 5 hours eating or 21 hours fasting and 3 hours eating, respectively.
Once you have the hang of eating on a schedule, you can try short periods of 18-24 hour fasting. Then you can judge if intermittent fasting is for you.
Whether you decide to do it every day, once a week, or twice a week is up to you - do what makes you feel best and listen to your body.
<h2>How Does Intermittent Fasting Work?</h2>
<img src="https://cdn.ruled.me/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/graphic_intermittent-fasting-how-does-intermittent-fasting-work.png"> The whole point of intermittent fasting is to allow ourselves to increase the amount of food we can intake at one time. Our bodies naturally can only take in a certain amount of food at once, so we are creating a sort of limit on our calorie intake. This is also a great method for people that overeat. I tend to see people that forget to count the snacks that they have throughout the day, and wonder why they are putting weight on.
Your body will adjust itself to fasting, and you will find yourself not as hungry as you used to be. This allows you to properly record and maintain the nutrient values of what you intake.
In this fasting state, our bodies can break down extra fat that's stored for the energy it needs. When we're in ketosis, our body already mimics a fasting state, being that we have little to no glucose in our bloodstream, so we use the fats in our bodies as energy.
Intermittent fasting is using the same reasoning - instead of using the fats we are eating to gain energy, we are using our stored fat. That being said, you might think it's great - you can just fast and lose more weight. You have to take into account that later on, you will need to eat extra fat in order to hit your daily macros (the most important thing). If you're overeating on fats here, you will store the excess.
While there are some weight loss advantages to fasting, it's more for the convenience of timing. Do not fast solely for the weight loss if you do not enjoy doing it. There are other benefits, though, and we'll discuss these too.
<h2>Intermittent Fasting - Meal Timing Matters</h2>
<img src="https://cdn.ruled.me/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/graphic_intermittent-fasting-meal-timing-matters.png"> Intermittent fasting is a term that we use to describe the dietary practice of restricting your food consumption to a specific window of time. A popular intermittent fasting strategy, for example, is fasting during an 18 hour window of time and eating during the 6 hour window of time that is left in the day.
Let's say your last meal was at 6 pm last night and you ate nothing else after that. To implement an intermittent fast, simply restrict eating until 12 pm the next afternoon (yes, sleeping time counts as fasting time). To do this every day, only eat between 12 pm and 6 pm and fast for the remainder of the day.
There are many different variations of intermittent fasting as well. Dr. Dom D'Agostino, the well-known ketogenic diet researcher, suggests doing a longer intermittent fast for 3 days, 3 times a year. This means not eating for 3 days, and eating normally until the next fast. Daily intermittent fasts are recommended as well. He says that it is ideal to have one to two meals after fasting for most of the day to reap the benefits of intermittent fasting every day.
You are probably wondering how there could possibly be a benefit to eating less frequently that goes beyond what you are already getting with a ketogenic diet. Restricting carbs and eating enough fat and protein does come with a plethora of health benefits, but when you add intermittent fasting to your lifestyle you can increase energy and reverse aging by harnessing the power of a nobel prize winning process.
<h2>A Nobel Prize Winning Lifestyle "Hack"</h2>
Last year, the Noble Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to Yoshinori Ohsumi for discovering some of the mechanisms of autophagy - the process by which the cell devours itself. Superficially, this sounds like a terrible thing for our cells to do - until you consider what is really taking place.
When our cells undergo the process of autophagy, non-essential parts like damaged proteins are recycled and invading microorganisms and toxic compounds are removed. This means that autophagy plays an important role in stopping the aging process, reversing disease, and preventing cancer, but it doesn't happen all the time. Fasting, protein restriction, and carbohydrate restriction are the three main ways that can initiate different autophagic processes - all of which are not the same. This is part of the reason why a ketogenic diet has so many positive effects, and it also shows you why intermittent fasting is a way to improve your diet even more.
<h2>Benefits of Intermittent Fasting</h2>
There are a number of benefits shown that come from intermittent fasting. Some of these include blood lipid levels, longevity, cancer, and testosterone levels. Below, you'll find a number of reasons on why intermittent fasting on a ketogenic diet may be a good thing for you:
<h2>Mental Clarity</h2>
Once your body is keto-adapted, your brain can effectively run on ketones, which are derived from fat breakdown in the liver.
<img src="https://cdn.ruled.me/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/graphic_intermittent-fasting-mental-clarity.png"> As you get used to fasting, you should start to fast naturally. Meaning, only eat when you're hungry. Don't plan your fasting - let it happen naturally.
<h2>Fitness</h2>
People are always saying that if you don't utilize the importance of pre and post workout meals, you are going to be losing muscle when you work out.
<img src="https://cdn.ruled.me/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/graphic_intermittent-fasting-fitness.png"> There have been numerous studies on fasting while training, including <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19085449">one</a> on Muslim athletes during Ramadan. It concluded that there is no effect on performance in training while fasting - so you have no need to worry.
<h2>Intermittent Fasting and Muscle</h2>
<img src="https://cdn.ruled.me/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/graphic_intermittent-intermittent-fasting-and-muscle.png"> Two ground-breaking studies have recently been published on the effects of intermittent fasting on males. One group of researchers studied the effects that 16 hours of intermittent fasting had on males that lift weights. They found that muscle mass stayed the same, fat mass decreased significantly, and the males who fasted for 16 hours a day burned more fat for fuel compared to the control group that only fasted for 12 hours.
Another study showed that combining 20 hours of fasting with resistance training resulted in an increase in muscle mass, strength, and endurance, and this was achieved by eating ~650 calories per day less than normal.
The benefits of intermittent fasting translate to untrained overweight and obese individuals as well. One study published in Obesity Reviews found that eating fewer calories is effective for fat loss, but it does come with some muscle loss. However, if the subjects fasted for 24 hours and ate as much as they wanted on the next day for a period of 12 weeks, they lost significantly less muscle mass.
Yes - you read that correctly - 24 hours of intermittent fasting without any resistance training and these subjects were able to preserve more muscle mass than the subjects that ate fewer calories every day without fasting at all. This finding contradicts our common sense, but when we dig deeper into autophagy we can find the mechanism behind this result.
<h2>Muscle Loss Prevention and Autophagy</h2>
<img src="https://cdn.ruled.me/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/graphic_intermittent-fasting-autophagy-and-muscle-loss-prevention.png"> If you want to refurbish a room, it is best to clean the room and remove the old furniture before you put the new furniture in. The same thought process applies to your cells. We must use intermittent fasting to let autophagy clean the room of the cell before we put in new furniture. If we don't, our cells can become cancerous.
<h2>Intermittent Fasting and Cancer</h2>
Other studies have found that fasting was as effective as chemotherapeutic agents in delaying progression of different tumors and increased the effectiveness of chemotherapeutic drugs against melanoma, glioma, and breast cancer cells. Although this research may not apply to your life, it does suggest that intermittent fasting can help support your body in times of toxic stress.
<h2>Simplifying Autophagy</h2>
This is what happens to our cells when we eat three or more meals a day that completely fulfills our calorie needs every day. Even by eating the healthiest of foods, your cells still can get backed up with non-essential proteins and toxic compounds - so what can you do?
To make sure that you clean your actual bedroom, you fast - not from food - but from being consumed by other obligations. To make sure that your cells can clean themselves, you must fast from food.
This fasting process will not only activate autophagy in your cells, it will also increase your ketones much more quickly than if you were just eating a standard ketogenic diet. If you start implementing intermittent fasting and activities (like walking, cycling, or lifting weights) together, you can raise ketone levels and increase autophagy more than you would with intermittent fasting alone. This suggests that intermittent fasting would be a great addition to your life, but it is important to be familiar with the negative symptoms that can arise before you start.
<h2>How Long Can We Last Without Food?</h2>
One monk, for example, set out to do a 40 day fast with medical supervision while maintaining his daily activities in the monastery. After 36 days, the medical professionals had to step in due to "profound weakness" and low blood pressure when standing. Although the monk fasted for 15 days longer than Ghandi, the medical professionals were able to stop the fast in time so that he could recover.
Another study tracked 33 political prisoners who were on hunger strike. The prisoners fasted for 6-24 days before being hospitalized for dehydration due an inadequate intake of fluids and electrolytes (not because of starvation). Breaking their fast was described as being "uncomplicated".
Keep these studies in mind as your body tries to play tricks on you during your first day of fasting. Even after three days of fasting, health complications are highly unlikely. However, it is important to know about the possible issues that can be caused by fasting. If you choose to incorporate fasting into your daily diet, you typically want to eat every day as well. Occasionally going on a longer period of fasting.
<h2>Should You Be Worried About Refeeding Syndrome?</h2>
Fasts that are shorter than 5 days, however, aren't likely to cause issues - especially if you break your fast with a low carbohydrate meal that is filled with mineral rich foods. A meal with dark leafy greens, avocado, and salmon with some unrefined salt would be an ideal way to break a longer fast.
During a shorter fast that lasts less than 24 hours, however, you won't have to worry about refeeding syndrome at all. Either way, it may be best to check out the mineral supplements that we recommend in <a href="https://www.ruled.me/using-supplements-to-maximize-your-ketogenic-diet">this article to ensure proper mineral balance</a>.
But what about muscle? It's only common sense that consuming no protein and less calories will lead to an unhealthy amount of muscle loss. That's right - it is only common sense.
<h2>Putting it all Together</h2>
Supplementing with sodium from unrefined salt and potassium, phosphate, and magnesium from mineral rich foods and supplements may be necessary for you to avoid excess mineral loss caused by ketogenic diets and fasting.
<h2>Practical Application: Tim Ferris's 3 Day Ketosis Boost</h2>
<img src="https://cdn.ruled.me/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/graphic_intermittent-fasting-practical-application.png"> If you want to raise your ketone levels or kickstart your ketogenic journey, try a 3-day "fasting" protocol like the one below. If intermittent fasting doesn't sound like it's something that can work for you, you can also kickstart your keto diet by <a href="https://www.ruled.me/using-fat-fasting-technique/">fat fasting</a>.
Thursday Evening <ul>Eat a ketogenic dinner and make that the last meal of the day. Go to bed as normal. </ul> 
Friday Morning <ul>
	<li>Get out the door and walk within 30 minutes of waking. Drink coffee or tea if needed, but it is best to limit your caffeine intake because it will cause you to excrete more minerals and fluid than usual.</li>
	<li>Bring at least 1 liter of water, with some added unrefined salt, and sip as you walk to avoid cramping.</li>
	<li>Walk for 3 to 4 hours, sipping water as needed.</li>
	<li>Arrange phone calls or something similar for your walk to make the time productive.</li>
	<li>The idea behind the walk is that you use up your glycogen stores, forcing your body to move more quickly into deep ketosis. The quicker you get into ketosis, the less time you spend feeling drained.</li>
	<li>If you prefer to shorten the time frame, you can do a 45-60 minute bout of HIIT exercise.</li>
</ul> 
Friday Day (post walk/workout) <ul>
	<li>Consume MCT oil 2-3 times throughout the day.</li>
	<li>An affordable, good quality MCT Oil we recommend is <a href="https://amzn.to/2q746IA">NOW Foods MCT Oil</a>.</li>
	<li>This provides you with energy until your ketone levels elevate naturally.</li>
</ul> 
Saturday Morning <ul>
	<li>Upon waking, test your blood ketones with a ketone blood testing kit like the <a href="https://amzn.to/2r6T0Y8">Precision Xtra</a>. Your ketones should be at 0.7mmol or greater.</li>
	<li>If you're at 0.7mmol, proceed with your fast.</li>
	<li>If you're under 0.7mmol, consider going for another extended walk, and then re-test.</li>
</ul> 
Saturday &amp; Sunday Day <ul>
	<li>Add further MCT oil or coconut oil if you need a boost. They can be omitted once you are in deep ketosis.</li>
	<li>Incorporate some salts in your water throughout the day. This can either be in the form of table salts, or via a specially formulated solution such as <a href="https://amzn.to/2q7krwT">SaltStick</a> electrolyte replacement pills.</li>
</ul> 
Sunday Evening <ul>Break your fast with your favorite ketogenic meal. Take a look at our <a href="https://www.ruled.me/keto-recipes/">Keto Recipes</a> to find your new favorite! </ul> 
This process can be used as a way to get you into ketosis more quickly, so you can transition gracefully into a ketogenic lifestyle or as a way to stimulate autophagy and fat loss. If you can't go without fat for the full 3 day fast - it's okay - you will still illicit many of the benefits of fasting by limiting your protein and carbohydrate intake.

P.S. Have a look at the <a href="https://www.ruled.me/keto-academy">Keto Academy</a>, our foolproof 30-day keto meal plan. It has all the tools, information, and recipes needed for you to succeed.
+ The food has been tested and optimized so you can lose weight and start feeling great! 

 <a href="https://www.ruled.me/keto-academy"> <img src="https://ruled.me/wp-content/themes/genesis-child/sections/shortcodes/general-img/BqSCoi9.jpg"> </a> 
Sources </div>

Intermittent Fasting, or "IF", is a relatively new craze that is used as a supplement to your diet. It revolves around the timing of your food intake, and can have some benefits in the long run. There are quite a few people misinformed on fasting, so we'll clear that up and explain how intermittent fasting can be useful.

Bite‑sized knowledge
to upgrade
your career

Intermittent Fasting on a Keto Diet | Ruled Me

Intermittent Fasting (IF)

Approaches to intermittent fasting

Autophagy definition and benefits

Benefits of Intermittent Fasting

Are You In Fasting Ketosis? Common Signs of Ketosis From Fasting

What Is The Ketogenic Diet [A Keto Guide for Beginners]

The Ultimate Guide to Ketosis | Nutrita

Bite‑sized knowledgeto upgradeyour career

Intermittent Fasting on a Keto Diet | Ruled Me

Intermittent Fasting (IF)

Approaches to intermittent fasting

Autophagy definition and benefits

Benefits of Intermittent Fasting

Are You In Fasting Ketosis? Common Signs of Ketosis From Fasting

What Is The Ketogenic Diet [A Keto Guide for Beginners]

The Ultimate Guide to Ketosis | Nutrita

Bite‑sized knowledge
to upgrade
your career