Elite Physique The New Science of Building a Better Body

Nutrition for Muscle Growth or Fat Loss
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Using Intermittent Fasting to Your Advantage
Now that we’ve covered the key principles for building a nutrition plan, let’s
cover one modification that can work well when your goal is fat loss: intermittent
fasting (IF). This style of eating also works well for people who don’t like to eat
much during the day because of a busy schedule.
One of the simplest ways I’ve found to help my patients lose weight and
improve overall health is with restricted periods of eating, or IF. The practical
application of IF is simple: Restrict the vast majority of your calories to 4 hours
in each 24-hour period. One caveat: The 20:4 ratio takes some mettle to work
up to, as discussed shortly. The other 20 hours should consist of plenty of water
as well as some unsweetened tea or coffee for those who need a caffeine boost.
Caffeine might help curb hunger, so it works especially well when you can’t eat
(Schubert et al. 2018).
There isn’t a lot of research on IF, but there’s enough evidence to suggest that
restricting your eating to, say, 4 hours each day could have a positive effect on
cardiovascular health, obesity, and diabetes (Dong et al. 2020). Put another way,
IF might be good for your heart, blood sugar control, and fat loss. There are three
steps for making IF work for you.
Step 1: Determine the time of your feeding phase.
When you follow IF, each 24-hour period consists of two phases: fasting and
feeding. During the fasting phase you’ll either consume no calories or limit
your calories to two servings of an easily digestible protein powder such as
whey or a blend of whey and casein, making it a pseudo-fasting phase. Most
of my patients prefer to consume protein powder during the fasting phase for
two reasons. First, it helps curb hunger and maintain energy. Second, it’s easier
to meet your daily protein requirements. Consuming 1.6 grams of protein per
kilogram of body weight is not easy to accomplish, nor recommended, during a
4-hour period. Morbidly obese people might be better served to spend the fasting
phase avoiding any calories, including protein powders, since it might have
a more positive impact on weight loss and health (Fernando et al. 2019; Santos
and Macedo 2018). In either case, determine when a 4-hour feeding phase best
fits into your schedule.
Let’s say it’s 4:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. each day. This window should remain constant
because if you move it, the time you eat the next day will be affected. The
goal is to have 20 hours between finishing your last meal and the start of your
feeding phase the next day. The trick here is to fit your lifting sessions into the
feeding phase since you’ll be consuming calories pre- and postworkout.
The ideal structure is to start your feeding phase with your preworkout nutrition,
train, have your postworkout nutrition immediately after, and then start
your feeding phase. This works especially well for people who like to consume
food for pre- and postworkout nutrition. If you consume protein powder during
those times, as well as two servings during your fasting phase, it comes to four
servings of protein powder per day. That is neither enjoyable nor sustainable for
most people. Table 11.2 shows an example of a 20:4 IF plan for a 200-pound (91
kg) person, requiring around 146 grams of protein. This plan can be adjusted
in any way to fit your schedule. All that matters is you fast for 20 hours in any
24-hour period and keep that basic plan consistent.