The 5 Intermittent Fasting MISTAKES Causing Weight Gain - Avoid This ASAP | Mind Pump 2405

fasting if you look at the data the success rate with weight loss and fasting actually matches what you see with a lot of other diets in other words it's dismal in today's episode we're talking about the five reasons the five reasons why intermittent fasting can cause weight gain in many people that tried to tackle their weight loss goals with fasting itself maybe that's the first mistake s is that it's even put in the category of diets does it even belong there yeah that's okay so great Direction great place to start let's back up a little bit it's just for people who aren't familiar with fasting fasting is literally going for a prolonged period of time without food so intermittent fasting typically tells you you skip one or two meals or you don't start eating until you know X time or you only eat within a certain time window and there's a lot of reasons why they say this works or whatever but ultimately it boils down to it causes people to eat less calories uh often times when they follow it and then that's what causes the weight loss and then in in inevitably like with any dietary recommendation um it's turned into a way to lose weight right it's a way to lose weight and the reason why I'm saying this is that fasting has actually been around for a long time it's been around for thousands of years if we were to label anything a quote unquote diet or change in in eating um fasting has to be the first ever in fact it's present in every major world religion um the ancient Greeks talk talked about it but they never fasted for fat loss or weight loss obviously they didn't have weight loss or or weight issues thousands of years ago um it was always done for Spiritual reasons nonetheless it was the first quote unquote kind of diet right that like you should eat this way uh type of De type of deal but yeah I think that's the biggest that's the first mistake is that it's for aesthetic goals I'm fasting to lose weight or I'm fasting to change how I look um and I think that's a big mistake because um it it's it's not a great way to accomplish those goals it can help mainly through C restriction um but it it in again in my experience especially and again if you look at the data doesn't have any higher success rate than other diets it's it's one of those things that's a little complicated to to talk about on a podcast where I'm not where I don't have a client sitting across from me that I'm speaking to them right and their their specific goals because it it there's a lot of things that it that it does or that you get from fasting that I think are are positive benefits um and so uh and we've talked about this for a long time in fact Doug I'd love to see when we when did we write that intermittent fasting guide that was a long time it's changed our I think our ideas and opinions on that have changed a little bit no even when we wrote it I remember why we wrote it no we wrote we wrote it with the same conversation we had and it was literally to teach people how to utilize it uh the the right way and we wrote that guide knowing that I remember when we first did it and we talked about all the positive benefits of fasting but then one of our concerns was how many people are going to use intermittent fasting as a weight loss tool and that was part of the reason of writing the guide was we saw the trend and where it was going and that this is going to turn into something that gets bastardized and we wanted to educate our community on that I remember that yeah it wasn't about weight loss it wasn't about fat loss wasn't about aesthetic goals it was really like peering into our own personal uh structure of of how you know this optimizes our day in terms of like the eating schedule this is a way for us to provide reflection you know uh to abstain and to to really like objectively look at our behaviors like all that kind of stuff and it is kind of more along the spiritual lines of like that's probably the the highest benefit it besides the fact that you're allowing your digestive system to get a bit of a break as well and so you can also like peer into when you start reintroducing food like how these different foods sort of make you feel how you react to them so there's there's so many um Tools in there in the process of fasting that you could pay attention to uh that aren't specifically looking at like losing weight or body no and I'll be I'll be even more clear right following any diet for the primary purpose of changing how you look um failing strategy it's a failing strategy right so if you follow a diet to become healthier to improve athletic performance or strength of course to improve your health reduce inflammation your gut health the the inevitable side effect of that is you look fit and healthy right but if you skip the step of health and you aim right for changing how I look then diets get really weird um and the relationship to food gets really weird it becomes about the scale and the mirror first of all both lie to you the scale tails you Mass Distortion it doesn't tell you what that mass is made up of I mean a 6 foot 200lb man at at 10% body fat looks very different than a 6 foot 200 lb man at 25% body fat same weight on the scale the mirror also lies to us um I mean how how many times have you looked at an old picture of yourself and thought man I look good and then remembered what you know back how you felt at that time at that time you felt like you look terrible so both of them aren't the best right and so if you're just if you're just eating to change how you look you're already starting down this path of creating a bad relationship with food now fasting again we mentioned the spiritual component of of of its value fasting literally is Detachment okay so you can fast from Electronics you can fast uh from from food you can fast from sex you can fast from whatever but fasting from food is because eating and food is is is a fundamental part of life so when you fast from it the reason why it's a it's a spiritual practice the reason the reason why it's in these in most religions is when you fast from food you're stuck with your feelings so okay normally I eat when I'm stressed or when I'm bored or because I'm supposed to well now I'm not okay I'm stressed what do I do now uh I got a deal with this or maybe you're going to feel more now as a result often times we blunt or or numb ourselves with food because the process of eating can be pleasurable and so for stressed we eat or for sad we eat or whatever so now you're not doing so you're detaching from this this desire this worldly desire and allows introspection and allows growth that's why fasting uh exists uh in the first place and that's where its value is now the side effect sometimes of fasting is you lose weight because you're not eating right so so if you don't eat especially if you don't eat for a prong period of time you lose weight on the scale and because the modern world is so obsessed with the scale and obsessed with how you look then the benefit of fasting was thrown out and it was like oh the side effect that's the benefit of fasting in the past okay no joke the weight loss from fasting was like a negative side effect like you're going to get all these crazy C spiritual benefits yeah it sucks that you're going to lose weight but because today is an obese World we've made this negative side effect uh now this this main effect that's what we're aiming for forget all this other stuff it's all about weight loss so if it's about Aesthetics you're already starting down the wrong path and you will develop a bad relationship with food as a result and your success rate uh will be you know something like 5% uh which is what it is for almost every diet right this is what's interesting about this this episode that we're doing right now is uh is that there are examples of where somebody doing intermittent fasting actually leads to weight gain which is not what a lot of people do it and that's one of them is going into it with the wrong mindset going into it of I'm going to try and do this to change my body aesthetically normally leads to the other four Behavior St right it's the rebound you're exactly right Justin because if you're going into it because you want to look different you're already going into with this kind of self-hate like I'm fat I'm whatever I'm going to go on this path of not eating so I'm not going to eat until 2 p.m. and so people offer your food you're around food no I can't I can't eat I can't eat right now and why can't you eat cuz I'm fat whatever at some point you are going to rebel against that um and so what typically happens from that is this swing in the other direction and you see this massive weight gain this is true for all diets by the way when you go into them that way is that you get this kind of rebellion within yourself because you started out wrong it wasn't through self-care it was really through self-hate um now from a spiritual perspective you know Detachment well you're going to get all those benefits but if it's just from changing how you look then what ends up happening often times again you look at the data people gain the weight back and oftentimes the weight you gain back is more fat than you had uh when you first went into it it always is you the rebound effect and you have to explain that what happened metabolically right so this you decide to go on this fasting trip to try and lose weight and so you cut calories and normally in a pretty extreme way when we're skipping whole meals and so the body does what it's supposed to do which is adapt to this new caloric intake and even if you see initial weight loss and see initial aesthetic grows happen happening from it you now have this new metabolic rate that is significantly lower than what it was when you started this and so when you do rebound you don't just rebound you rebound way harder and swing back the other direction even worse than what you started off and this is what I would see a lot with clients that decided that they were going to use intermittent fasting as a tool to lose weight even if they thought they had Success With It initially the inevitable uh I'm going to go back to eating food again one day and when I do I've now metabolically train my body to adapt to this low calorie intake and so now when I go back to what was normal eating for before now puts on even more weight hey look sorry to interrupt we have a fasting guide that breaks down different ways of fasting how to do them the right way um we're going to give it to you for 50% off because of this episode if you're interested just click on the link at the top of the description below now this episode is brought to you by our sponsors seed seed is the world's best probiotic hands down this is the probiotic that sets the standard it gets absorbed and utilized the right way and of course beneficial bacteria have tremendous benefits for your health again seed is the only probiotic company we work with go check them out go to seed.com mine pump use the code 25 mine pump that'll give you 25% off your first month's order of seeds daily symbiotic all right back to the show so what happens is your body pairs muscle down and then you lose that muscle along with some body fat but up to half of it is muscle then you go back to eating like you did before you don't gain muscle back your body just cap those extra calories as body fat is what ends up happening so that's kind of what you're talking about now the another mistake people make and this is why fasting can be quite challenging even if you're doing this because it makes you feel good it works with your you know Detachment for a certain part of the day or whatever is it makes it really hard to hit protein targets so when you look at the data on protein intake and what is beneficial or what is the upper limit of benefit you get from protein intake it's sits at around 8 gram of protein per pound of let's say Target body weight okay but we'll round it up we'll say 1 gram of protein per pound of Target body weight that's a lot of protein for everybody anybody I don't care if you're 110 pound woman it's a lot of protein for 110 lb woman it's a lot of protein for a 200 lb man let's stick with the 100 or 110lb woman that means that she's going to have to eat you know maybe three meals of over 30 something grams of protein I mean breakfast alone with something like that would be about what five or about five eggs I don't know very many 100 110 lb women who eat five eggs for breakfast it's just a lot yes so when you limit your eating window well now how are you going to get all that protein I got to eat two meals at 50 grams each or 60 grams each or if you're a man 200 lb man I got to eat 200 grams of protein in a 5 hour period yeah that's very difficult because protein is very satiety producing it can also cause digestive distress as a result oh yeah that I mean that's one thing you'd recognize right away just trying to cram it all in a short amount of time you're really going to have to uh increase that amount and and to be able to uh eat that all in one sitting and digest it all like it's really challenging for for a lot of people because even if you do it through um protein shakes I mean we all know like taking that much protein uh in one sitting and and that kind of a shake is is really going to tear you up well the protein is the key macronutrient in the pursuit of speeding your metabolism up so you skipping out a meal uh makes that extremely difficult it's extremely difficult for the average person period anyway it's the number one thing that I would have to adjust to anybody's diet when I would first take on a client and assess their diet just most people think that they're consuming a lot more protein than what they really are and it's the building block of building muscle and building your metabolism and so if I get a client who wants to do inter fasting for weight loss one of the first things that we can do to to build this Strate or make this strategy easier is to build their metabolism one of the most difficult ways of doing that is to limit me on the amount of time I have to get that client to eat enough protein you just you don't see them have success with this it's it's a it's a failing strategy it's already difficult to get somebody with a full 12-hour eating window to actually be able to hit their protein intake to shrink that down to eight or nine hours hours and make them do that is incredibly difficult and and rarely ever do I see someone have success with that and so this is one of the main reasons why I hated clients using intermittent fasting l so um not only does protein obviously help you build muscle or prever preserve muscle also helps you burn body fat I mean you heard me right when they do studies where they control the calories two groups of people eating the same calories let's say they both ate 2,000 calories but one group hit that gram of protein per pound of body weight and the other group ate you know what the average person is which does Which is far less the person the group that ate the high protein diet even if the calories are the same ends up losing more body fat and ends up losing less muscle or sometimes in some studies losing no muscle l or building muscle if they combine it with strength training so protein targets are important if you want to build and if you want to lose so it doesn't matter if you want to cut bulk gain lose whatever hit those protein targets and then you just mentioned something now let's say I'm fasting I have a six-h hour window or 7h hour window or whatever the eating window is you decide now I got to get all that protein that I could normally spread out throughout the day and I have to fit it in a small window which brings us to the next mistake that people make which is they binge when it is time to eat fasting encourages a behavior of binging you'll actually find yourself doing this if you f if you do intermittent fasting for a long periods of time when you talk to PE for most my experience working with lots of people intermittent fasting not always but often times leads to uh restrict binge type behaviors because they fast and then they oh it's now it's 2:00 I can eat first off at first they're okay with it but then the body learns like we got to capture now fixated on that time that's you're fixated on that time you're your and especially if you're like I got to hit my protein so now you're encouraging it by stuffing yourself in that short eating window you actually start to binge when it's time to eat and then what happens your calories actually start to climb up although they were down at first because you had a kney window they start to climb up cuz you fit more into a smaller window and not only are you fitting more in the smaller window you're binging while you're doing it the quality of your food degrades as well because yeah because you're trying to get all those calories a lot of times and uh and too like you're just anticipating this one window of time to eat and so you're I guess like it just sort of you know creates this opportunity for it to kind of sneak back in there all these Cravings you can cram it into this one window so so uh you know it's really hard to eat like Whole Foods uh in in a big volume amount in one meal it this also reminds me I now totally remember this was part of our motivation you guys remember there was I mean there still is there's still a large community of the uh in the fitness space of people that promote intermittent fasting and they also talk about um being able to eat whatever you want in that window so long as you do this in this window that was popular and so you would have all these you know quote unquote Fitness people that were you know videoing themselves eating a whole pizza and going through fast food and they're like oh as long as you stick in your window right yeah you can eat whatever you want and so that was the other Pro so not only uh is that you already working against your body body's natural tendencies to want to overeat capture calories because it's been restricted for a period of time but then you have part of our community encouraging it and telling people hey just stick to the window and if you as long as you stick to the window you you can have pizza you can have Donuts you can have these things just stick to your window of eating and you'll be fine and I think the combination of your natural tendencies paired with Fitness people telling people that they could eat this way gave all these people with poor relationship with Foods permission to go out and eat this garbage food right well when you fast uh for Spiritual purposes or Detachment and I use spiritual purposes Loosely but let's just say Detachment then when you're hungry you're embracing it you're looking at the challenge what do I do how do I work through this you know what of my issues when you're fasting because you're trying to lose weight and you know you're going to eat at 2 p.m. you it's it's a White Knuckle thing o I can hold on let me look at the clock I got two hours left two hours I'm going to eat and then you start to fantasize about what you're going to eat at 2 o'clock when it's time to eat it literally is uh one of the most guaranteed ways I've ever seen with clients to encourage a restrict binge eating habit which is already a challenge anyway restrict binge restrict binge and I don't mean in the clinical sense I'm not talking about you know uh when when people have bulimia I mean just you know you just you either don't eat or you just eat too much or Beyond Comfort uh that's a problem with all diet culture you see that anyway when people are on the diet off the diet on the diet off the diet it looks more like restrict binge this is taking it to the next level because it's literally no food food no food food and what you don't want to do is develop this Behavior around food where it's nothing or everything that is a very tough Behavior to break and if you already find yourself uh with that type or that tendency then fasting is terrible if I have somebody who tells me they have a tendency to restrict in binge um fasting is the last place I'm going to point them because that's going to be the road towards real eating disorder or getting close to it so it definitely encourages that in many cases and when that happens well you end up finding or people in restricted eating Windows gaining body weight and actually gaining body fat as a result man I mean even just like eating you're going to be eating so much quicker like it's just going like spraying out throughout the day taking your time allowing the natural course of digestion to happen and like chewing your food appropriately like if all of your volume of food is just in this one window like it's it turns into that sort of like speed element that could then lead into a binge situation right here's another thing too and and this is what you'll hear functional medicine practitioners talk about with fast thing if a functional medicine practitioner takes on a patient who's exhibiting signs of HPA axis dysfunction or or what we used to call back in the day they don't call it this anymore but we used to call it adrenal fatigue okay they change the name because that's not what's happening but symptoms are like fatigue um uh you're going to have you know cold hot intolerance strange Cravings insomnia libido affected basically think of somebody who has too much stress in their life okay signs of too much stress a functional medicine practitioner will not let them fast unless it's part of a of a gut health protocol which is a completely different topic they'll tell them not to fast now why is that fasting in itself going for prolonged periods without food uh is somewhat of a stress on the body and I say somewhat because it's not always obviously when you sleep but in the case of the overstressed individual it is a stress on the body here's what fasting does it causes cortisol to go up so your cortisol goes up you produce more catac colomines catacol Mees are epinephrine norepinephrine they feel good but right but these are like kind of stressed things that come out adrenaline um now you ask yourself why well the evolutionary explanation that many people put forth around this is if you go for long periods of time without food your body is picking up these stress hormones to give you energy to get you to find more food yeah and so now a lot of people who fast uh often like this feeling and I get it because you feel kind of wired and energized but if you're already stressed and you're pushing fasting you will get yourself in a in a bad place in fact I've had I had female clients who were like this these are the kind of people that overtrain they work out too much uh they're already overstressed with work and family life then they add intermittent fasting and they'll get they'll get symptoms like hair loss they'll get symptoms like destroyed and crushed libido uh their nails will start to get hormones are out of balanced their hormones are out of B but this is more I I I would see this more this is more common than you would think I in fact if you've been listening to this show long enough you've probably heard us multiple times uh recommend to a caller uh stop fasting why are you fasting yes because they're doing all this other stuff right they're calling in and they have all these signs that you just pointed out sleep is off hormones are off hair nails things like that they've notice all these things and they're telling us their workout their stuff that everything they got going on at work their personal life and then they're also fasting you know they're also doing their inter fasting is and we're like why why what do you first of all get rid of that there's no reason for you to not do that and I just I think that people think that restricting from Bad quote unquote bad food is a healthy good thing when they don't realize that dieting giving your body less calories than it needs to maintain is a stress yeah and and and taking out bad foods is good but you got to replace them with good foods right I mean it's very similar to like again working out the same thing too there is there is a a perfect dose there is the right amount it can be abused like anything else exercise is a stress it's a very good one and it and it sends a signal for a lot of good things to happen but it can absolutely be abused eating less bad food definitely a positive thing for you but too much in One Direction can also cause a lot of stress and other issues too so people just don't look at it as that they think of it as I'm abstaining from eating bad food therefore it must be all positive and that's not true in the context of somebody who has a life full of all kinds of stress and then in addition to that they're restricting like this yeah and I'll I'll you know I'll put a little asteris here it's not even looked at as I'm avoiding bad food it's I'm avoiding food period just I'm not eating during this period of time so it's not even about the bad or good food it's just I'm not eating you know an overly stressed body or a body that is taking on more stress than it can recover and adapt from is a pro- fat anti-muscle environment your body when it's when it's overcome with stress is looking to preserve itself and two of the ways it does this is by lowering its metabolic rate so it pairs muscle down so it's anti-muscle too much stress is anti-muscle it's also Pro body fat it's proat because fat is an insurance policy when you're storing if if if all of us were if we were all 8% body fat and shredded and then there was a stressful famine that happened we'd be dead right yeah we the first ones dead yeah you you want all that insurance on you you want 50 extra pounds of body fat it's like a bank account for your body for energy and some nutrients in case of famine or or or whatever so so an overstressed situation is anti-muscle proat so if you're already overstressed and then you fast on top of that not only you're not going to get to your goals any faster you're actually go backwards you're going to encourage this proat need to store body fat and let's get rid of muscle let's slow down our metabolism now the last one is this and this is what I see most often I would say is that when the eating window comes up uh because they fasted for so long how many hours or whatever it tends to promote the eating of garbage and and this is what tends to happen people and then initially they lose weight by doing this anyway oh my God I had pizza last night but I had this you know 4-Hour eating window and I'm losing weight not realizing that their overall calories are lower well here's what happens when you continue to do this first off you're not hitting your protein you're not eating e the right nutrients you need so Health isn't necessarily nourished not necessarily good for you uh in in most senses but here's what starts to happen your body you know hyper palatable uh heavily processed foods you can eat more of them than you can of whole natural foods and your body learns to get you to eat even more of them and what ends up happening over a certain period of time is you eat more and more garbage within this period of 4 hours or 5 hours and then you end up eating more calories and you burn you end up gaining body fat as a result because you're still eating garbage you're eating garbage it just happens to be in a shorter window of time I mean I I I know there's a lot of you know responsibility and accountability on the individual right who who chose to do those things but I really blame a lot of this on our on our space on professionals because fasting uh like many other things that take off in the fitness space uh is very marketable it's like when we talk about like the the some of the most famous diets that ever went viral and carried on for decades are the ones that have the the most basic easy R nothing gets easier than Simplicity of it yeah the Simplicity of it right of just eat meat just eat this or only you know the the peanut butter diet the celery diet you know this like these things that like people are like oh I could follow that that's so basic right that's so easy nothing gets easier than just don't eat you know what I'm saying like you don't have to follow anything else just don't eat that's all you have to like so it's so marketable to do that and then what they get to what they would pair with that is also just don't eat on these windows and then eat whatever you want there's no other rules there's no other rules and so there it it appealed to so many people that struggle with weight like oh my God this is so easy to follow and in addition to that they're not telling me I can't have my Donuts I can't have my ice cream I can't have my Oreo cookies and so and I just think so many Fitness professionals double and triple down on this because so many clients were signing up for it like oh my God this is awesome I could totally follow this diet and initially when you take somebody who eats bad food all day long and you only give them 6 hours to eat bad food they initially do lose weight because it's you know a third of the food they we're eating before but it's a it's a it's a losing battle eventually that metabolism slows down eventually the body pairs down muscle it's not getting enough protein and then you're in this even shittier position than when you initially started this and then all the stuff comes back on and some and I look I'll close it with this like aside from the potential Detachment benefits the calorie restriction that comes from fasting will affect you in roughly the same ways the calorie restriction from any diet will affect you you're going to initially lose weight however you're now trying to eat a balanced diet in a shorter time window and you're also dealing with a Time window of no food whatsoever and unless it's for personal growth if it's just for Aesthetics that turns into potentially and often does turn into a restrict binge approach so it's really no better than any other kind of black or white diet in fact it's harder to do for a lot of people so those people watching right now were like I lost tons of weight fasting whatever you would still lose that weight doing it other ways in fact I would say it would be a lot easier and we can develop better relationship of food that are more long lasting without having to eat within a such a restricted time window all right I know you like that episode if you did check this one out [Music]