Justin Grinnell
"Ever since we were kids we’re told by our parents that skipping meals is bad for you. Fasting was equal to starvation and only reserved for those who were practicing a discipline or religion.
But what if I told you that fasting is actually good for you? Trainers will extol the virtues of eating meals every two or three hours and how it increases your metabolic rate, improve sensitivity to insulin and give you a leaner, fitter physique in the end. No one dared challenge the fat loss claim of spacing smaller meals in an effort to curb hunger pangs- heavens forbid if you actually skipped a meal for any reason at all!
Just before I learned about intermittent fasting, people would approach me and say that they were absolutely famished by 10 am even when they ate breakfast earlier. Then, more and more people kept telling me that increasing meal frequency did little to curb their level of food satiety.
While it’s perfectly understandable that you skip breakfast because of excuses, e.g., lots of things to do in the morning, no time to prepare food or eat every couple of hours, I didn’t know better and kept telling my clients they had to stick with the lifestyle to see the results.
But then one day I just had to find the answer to why this was the case, and if I could do something about it. I stumbled upon a free ebook that gave me a deeper understanding of what intermittent fasting was all about. In fact, at one point in my life, I was actually doing intermittent fasting without even knowing it!
This is the story about why I chose intermittent fasting, the benefits and some different ways to go about doing it.
My Experience with Intermittent Fasting
In 2010 I decided to take a risk and open a training facility. This endeavor has me leaving a senior personal trainer position and more as a manager-slash-trainer. As you can imagine, the workload was crushing and the pressure of managing a business soon overwhelmed me.
With limited time I sacrificed eating a proper breakfast in the morning. I started eating more at night (when I was doing spreadsheets and working on my computer) and skipped meals here and there. I usually drank a protein shake 3 hours after I arrive at the office. Being a die-hard nutrition enthusiast, I didn’t miss out on BCAAs (branched-chain amino acids), cod liver oil and greenfood supplements.
This was my first brush with intermittent fasting, which I didn’t realize until the ebook told me that what I was doing was called ‘Leangains’, a unique method that involved only an 8-hour window of eating."
(Click the link above to access the article and continue to find out more about intermittent fasting...)