Elite Physique The New Science of Building a Better Body

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TABLE 11.2 Sample 20:4 IF Plan for a 200-Pound Person
Phase Time Eat, sleep, or train
Fast 8:00 p.m. End of final meal
11:00 p.m.-7:00 a.m. Sleep
8:00 a.m. 25 g protein powder in water
12:00 p.m. 25 g protein powder in water
Feed 4:00 p.m. Preworkout: 5 oz (150 g) chicken + 1 banana
4:30-5:30 p.m. Train
6:00 p.m. Postworkout: 4 oz (120 g) fish + veggies
7:45 p.m. 5 oz (150g) beef + veggies + avocado
Step 2: Work up to a 20-hour fast or at least 18 hours.
It’s likely you consume breakfast, lunch, and dinner on a relatively set schedule.
So you probably have a good idea how much time you already fast between
your last meal at night and breakfast the following day. Let’s say it’s typically
12 hours. Increase that duration by 2 hours for two days (i.e., 14 hours). Then
add another hour the third day, followed by another hour the fourth day. At this
point your IF lasts 16 hours. Keep adding 1 or 2 hours each day, or every other
day, until you reach 20. There is no perfect way to do this as long as you don’t
add more than 2 hours on any given day. Give your body time to adjust as you
work up to 20 hours.
For you, only 4 hours of eating each day might not be enough time. Either you
can’t consume all your food in such a limited window or you just don’t like being
that tightly restricted. In that case, follow an 18:6 structure, which expands your
feeding phase to 6 hours. Any duration longer than 6 hours hasn’t shown to be
enough of a time restriction on eating to get the fat-burning results my patients
were happy with.
Step 3: Avoid dehydration and electrolyte imbalances.
When you’re not eating for a long period of time, it’s easy to get dehydrated.
This can cause people who are new to IF to get light-headed or dizzy. Be sure
to drink plenty of water, as covered earlier, during the fasting phase, and take
electrolytes to maintain physiological health.
If all the aforementioned information seems too daunting to tackle right now,
there is a simple strategy that might help you lose fat, gain energy, and improve
recovery between workouts. As mentioned earlier, chronic inflammation is
associated with belly fat, disease, and poor performance. The simplest way to
improve your nutrition plan and health is to eliminate foods that cause the high
levels of inflammation (Giugliano, Ceriello, and Esposito 2006; Myles 2014; Ng
et al. 2014). Those foods are as follows:
• Vegetable oils
• Refined sugars
• Refined grains