However... if you're someone who's always struggled with your eating habits and a part of the reason for that is something like "I don't like eating breakfast, I don't particularly like breakfast foods, and I don't feel inclined to prepare one of the meals I do like at 5am when I have to be up and ready for work"... you might be very relieved & reassured to learn that you don't actually HAVE TO eat breakfast at all.
Otherwise, that's the start of your problems, right?
You're trying to get it together and adopt healthier eating habits, but it's only 7am and you've already blown it by failing to eat breakfast like you're supposed to. Well, maybe you can try again next Monday since today is already a write-off.
Forget all that. The CONVENIENT TRUTH is... if you don't want to eat anything until noon, that's fine. But you will need to have a substantial lunch that goes a significant way to towards meeting your energy requirements. Individual requirements vary but you probably want to be thinking 600 - 800 calories for that meal alone.
NEGLECTING to eat breakfast and then trying to get by on a LIGHT lunch is probably going to end badly, but PREFERRING to not eat first thing in the morning and having a SUBSTANTIAL lunch instead could be the beginnings of a suitable & sustainable plan towards long term appropriate eating habits and improved health.
The PROBLEM with "Intermittent Fasting" as a concept though is that it is often presented in a manner that suggests that it is admirable, preferable, virtuous and beneficial to go as long as possible without eating, as a vehicle towards eating as little as possible. In other words, as a proto-anorexic, restrictive fad diet. As if we needed one more of those, am I right?
It is helpful to know that it is not necessary to eat on any schedule other than the one that happens to best suit your personal preferences and schedule. However, this is just as true about “time restricted” eating as it is to “traditional” meal schedules, and if you happen to be someone who likes to eat a bowl of cereal, a slice of toast, or whatever other reasonable choice to start your day... there’s little reason if any to feel obliged to attempt to delay eating until later.
So if Intermittent Fasting is a vehicle towards more confident and consistent eating habits to an appropriate total energy and nutrient intake... that’s good! If it’s a vehicle towards restricting to insufficient intakes, and particularly when it presents such disordered eating as a good and virtuous thing that is beneficial to health, then obviously that’s entirely not good. I hear from a lot of people who may or may not have issues around eating to begin with, who report that what started as "Intermittent Fasting" ended in a prolonged and destructive cycle of restriction and binge eating. That's... that's really not something we want to see happening to people.
Context is everything.
Benefits Specific And Exclusive To Intermittent Fasting.
I keep getting told that I obviously have a poor understanding and am ignorant to the benefits of Intermittent Fasting. Well... it does seem unlikely that I’d ever be wrong about anything related to nutrition (it certainly hasn’t happened so far), but I am always happy to learn.
When people have eating habits that are inappropriate in terms of excessive energy intakes, poor protein & micronutrient provisions, OR erratic shifts between insufficient (due to restriction or neglect) and excessive total intakes... going on ANY diet tends to result in improved health markers in the short term due to more structured eating habits of a not excessive energy intake, with or without weight loss. This is true even of highly misguided diets that omit beneficial choices and likely to result in health complications over the long term.
The benefits people report and credit to Intermittent Fasting occur for the same reason, and not due to delayed and time restricted eating. To prove otherwise, you would require one group of people on a time restricted eating protocol, with the same exercise habits, total energy, protein & fibre intakes as another group eating their meals across the course of the day.
I have been asking people to make me aware of any studies of this nature which found a benefit exclusive to fasting that people eating on a more traditional schedule are missing out on... and so far no one has been forthcoming.
Conversely, this study found that autophagic signalling was activated by exercise in both a continuously fed group and a group following a 36 hour fasting protocol. "Autophagy" being one of the main buzzwords being thrown around as a benefit of fasting protocols.
Further, this study on 5:2 style Intermittent Fasting found poorer long term adherence and poorer outcomes over 12 months compared to working to the same energy intakes on a daily basis. Note too that in this study people got to choose whether to trial the fasting or non fasting approach, rather than having it assigned to them.
In any case... as always... the same as when it was paleo, the same as when it was low carb high fat, low carb healthy fat, ketogenic, and so on and so on... what’s important is that people work on SUSTAINABLE habits based on their own preferences and requirements. You require enough energy to fuel an active lifestyle, enough protein, enough fibre, vitamins and minerals. There’ll be any number of combinations of meal and snack choices, and any number of meal & snack schedules that will facilitate this... but we’re all individuals and rather than working to someone else’s arbitrary set of rules, we need to PRACTICE working to our individual requirements with our individual preferences, on our individual schedules... and we should have the confidence to be able to adjust as necessary whenever our circumstances change.
There have always been fad diets and people who’ve been sucked in by them insisting it has to be done “this specific way” for reasons other than “more consistently adequate but not excessive energy with adequate protein, fibre & micros”, but they have always been wrong, and they’ll always be wrong.
