Hey Cleanish Squad! I did intermittent fasting for five years, and I told a lot of people on YouTube how great it was. Then, my coach told me to stop, and I was terrified.

This week, I’m getting into why fasting worked for me for as long as it did, why I quit anyway, and what it’s really doing for you if you’re still at it. Plus that seven-day fasting study is going around again, so we looked at what it actually measured. And there are make-ahead breakfast burritos you’ve got to try at the end.

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If someone told you to eat more to lose weight, would you do it?

I wrote publicly for years that intermittent fasting changed my life, and I'm not taking that back. It did.

Then, I quit. Not because it stopped working. It worked for five years. I quit because what I wanted changed, and the moment it did, the window was the wrong tool.

Why I started

Five years ago, I started fasting to lose weight, bring my body fat down, and stop snacking. It did all three.

But here’s the thing I didn't expect: For the first time in my life, I wasn't constantly thinking about my next meal.

That's a larger kind of relief than it sounds like. If you've spent years with a number running in the back of your head all day, you already know what I mean.

Want the longer version of how I got out of counting? Read my post on Why I Finally Broke Up With MyFitnessPal.

A normal day, for a long time

My eating window was usually 11:30am to 4pm. I worked out fasted every morning with Dustin, before anything. This all worked like clockwork, literally.

Since my eating was so scheduled, having meal prepped food ready to grab was very helpful, like having a make-ahead breakfast burrito to grab out of the freezer. By 11:30, I was solidly hungry, so it helped that lunch didn't require a decision. The recipe's at the bottom of this issue.

If you want the whole structure I was eating inside, check out my intermittent fasting meal plan.

Then what I wanted changed

Losing weight stopped being the point. I wanted to get stronger and put on muscle, especially in my legs, and my progress there had slowed down enough to be frustrating.

So, I hired a coach. She looked at what I was doing and told me to stop intermittent fasting. She wanted me to eat five meals a day, spread out from morning to evening. No more fasted workouts.

I was terrified. I'd been fasting for five years and it was how I ran my day. I'd also spent years on YouTube telling people how well it worked for me, so part of what scared me was looking like I'd been wrong in public.

What got me to do it anyway is a line I still come back to: What helped me get here might not be the thing that gets me where I want to go next.

What actually happened

The first week was rough, and not in the way I expected. I wasn't hungry in the evenings. I felt bloated and full, including when I woke up. And I was up three pounds, which was the exact opposite of what I wanted.

That turned out to be a timing problem rather than a food problem. I was eating roughly the same macros, just loaded too heavily into the end of the day. My coach had me shift more of those calories earlier, and within a day the bloating was mostly gone. Years of fasting had made my body unhappy about taking in that much food that late.

Then, the part I wasn't expecting. Training fed instead of fasted, there was a level of power I'd never had in the morning. I was hitting PRs within a few weeks.

I did put on a little weight. Some of it was the training and some was creatine. At an earlier point in my life that number would have wrecked me. This time, I could look at it and think that the body I want is going to take several more pounds of muscle than I'm carrying, and that's fine.

Here's what I understand now

The window was never doing anything special to my metabolism. It was a device for eating less, and it was a good one. It made a pile of decisions for me in advance, and almost all of them were no. No to the handful of something at nine in the morning. No to whatever was left on a kid's plate at eight at night. No to those snacks during the day.

That's why it worked. It's also why it had to go. The moment the goal was to build muscle, I needed to eat more, more often, and around my training, and a tool built to make me eat less is the wrong tool for that job.

The research has gotten fairly direct about this. In one trial, 31 women ate the same food on two different schedules for two weeks each, 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. and then 1 p.m. to 9 p.m., with the calories held the same both ways. Their blood sugar, insulin sensitivity and blood fats didn't meaningfully change either way. The researchers' read was that the benefits people saw in earlier studies came from eating less without meaning to.

And, in a twelve-week study where 39 adults were handed every meal, with calories set to hold their weight steady, a 10-hour eating window produced a 2.7% loss. A normal schedule produced 2.5%. That's the clock by itself, with the eating controlled, and it's almost nothing.

A review of 22 trials and nearly 2,000 people landed in the same place. Against regular diet advice, fasting didn't come out ahead.

None of that makes what happened to me less real. It just means the window was never the thing doing the work.

Where I've landed

I still fast every so often. It looks nothing like it used to, though. These days, it's an occasional 24-hour fast, and only in the first couple of weeks of my cycle. That's a pattern I landed on for myself rather than a rule I'd hand anyone else, and even that has gotten less common over time.

What I don't do anymore is run my whole day on a window.

I'm not going to talk you out of it. If having a window is the thing that makes your eating feel manageable, that's a good reason to have one, and the fact that it works through your appetite instead of your metabolism doesn't make it less real.

I'd just want you to know which job it's doing for you, so that when the job changes you know to look at the tool.

If you want to try it, I’ve got a whole playlist on it: How To Start Intermittent Fasting.

And if you'd rather not run a fasting window at all, portion sizes can help do the same job. This is the page from my cookbook people ask me about most: Portion Size Guide.

I got really good at a set of rules once and then had to figure out what was underneath them, which I share in my post on I Got Really Good at Eating Clean. Then I Quit.

When anything that stops being the goal, it stops being the tool. The journey of losing weight, and building muscle requires changing along the way, and that’s ok.

In early October, a story about what seven days of fasting does to the body started making the rounds again. The study behind it came out in March 2024.

Researchers at Queen Mary University of London had 12 healthy volunteers drink only water for a week. Every day, they measured about 3,000 proteins in their blood.

The changes were real. The body switched to burning stored fat within two or three days, and about a third of those proteins shifted. Many of the biggest changes didn't show up until about day three.

Here is the part I take issue with. The study didn't follow anyone's health.

It measured proteins, then used genetic data from other studies to estimate what those changes might mean. People lost about 12.5 pounds on average, from both fat and lean tissue. Three days after they started eating again, most of the lean tissue had come back and the fat loss had stayed.

Even the write-up says shorter fasts, like the ones most of us mean by intermittent fasting, may not do the same thing.

It’s a careful look at 12 people, which is an extremely small sample. It isn’t a plan.

Want to see what they measured? The full study is in Nature Metabolism.

I've spent years helping women live healthier while quietly hiding who I actually was. Proving Her Wrong is the part I kept quiet. New essays every Monday. Start with Sorry Doesn't Mean Much or subscribe free.

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people who tried an 8-hour eating window for 12 weeks kept doing it on their own through the following year.

See the study behind this here.

I struggled at times with intermittent fasting, wondering why I was gaining weight when it seemed I was doing everything I was supposed to. If you're wondering the same thing, you're not alone. These are the four reasons I've found. Watch on YouTube →

🩸 Nearly 6 in 10 people with high blood pressure don't know they have it

Oxford researchers looked at clinic readings from 1.4 million adults in England. 37% had high blood pressure, and 59% of them didn't know it. Half of those on medication still had high readings.

💊 Creatine added lean tissue in middle-aged adults who didn't exercise

Texas A&M researchers gave 64 adults aged 45 to 65 creatine or a placebo for 12 weeks. Among those who didn't exercise, creatine users gained about 2.4 pounds of lean tissue and got stronger.

🥬 Ultra-processed food wasn’t linked to colorectal cancer overall

NIH researchers followed 461,682 American adults for about 19 years. Total ultra-processed food intake wasn’t linked to colorectal cancer, but that average hid two opposite effects: the meat in those foods was linked to higher risk, while the fiber, whole grains and dairy were linked to lower risk.

❤ Couples who exercise together report better communication

BYU researchers surveyed nearly 1,700 young married couples. Exercising together was more strongly linked to good communication than exercising alone.

Louisa May Alcott in Little Women, Chapter 44

These are the first meal in my intermittent fasting meal plan. One batch makes 12 burritos, each with 13 grams of protein, and they freeze for up to three months. Get the recipe →

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