The first meal starts at 1pm! 16/8 Intermittent fasting method: eat like this, reduce fat and retain muscle

The study recruited 34 men with more than five years of retraining experience and divided them into a fasting group and a normal group to examine the effects of fasting for 16 hours a day on body composition and metabolism.

What is the concept of five-year weight training? Their average weight is 83-85 kg, body fat is about 13-15%, and the grip and push weight is 107-109 kg. They may not be top bodybuilders, but they are definitely not beginners. They are quite eye-catching when they undress at the beach.

In terms of diet, they are required to maintain the original calorie intake (100% of the daily requirement), and only adjust the eating time:

Fasting group: Three meals a day, at one in the afternoon, four in the afternoon, and eight in the evening.

Normal group: Three meals a day, at eight in the morning, one in the afternoon, and eight in the evening.

In training, they retrained three days a week, and the menu looked like this:

Day 1: Grip push, tilt dumbbell fly, two-head curl.

The second day: shoulder push, leg press, leg curl, leg extension.

Day 3: Pull down on the wide and narrow grip pulleys and press down with three heads.

Three sets of 6-8 repetitions for each movement, to exhaustion, rest for 180 seconds between sets.

What happened to their bodies after eight weeks?

The fat in the fasting group lost 1.6 kg, while the fat in the normal group did not change. There was no loss of muscle mass in both groups. To be honest, the fasting group also gained 0.6 kg of muscle (not statistically significant).

Without adjusting the calorie intake of the subjects, only changing the time can produce the effect of reducing fat, which is similar to the mouse study we mentioned earlier.

Both groups also retained at least the original muscle strength, and even some growth in the grip and push event (not statistically significant). For people who have been weight training for more than five years and have a body fat of 13-15%, it is not easy to lose 1.6 kg of fat in eight weeks while retaining muscle strength and muscle mass without reducing total calorie intake. !

In addition, intermittent fasting also produces many health-promoting effects:

• Increased insulin sensitivity: both fasting insulin and blood sugar decreased in the fasting group, but not in the normal group.
• Triglycerides decreased.
• The fasting Respiratory ratio decreases: This means that the body's fat burning ability is better.
• Both IGF-1 and male hormones decreased (Note 1)
• The inflammation index TNF-α decreased.

These are muscular young men with an average age of 28-29! After performing intermittent fasting, health promotion effects can be obtained, which is really "icing on the cake."