Intermittent Fasting For Dummies. Janet Bond Brill
make a considerable contribution to her weekly calorie deficit; she’d burn approximately 700 calories a week from her daily walk instead of approximately 300. The moral of the story is that exercise can make a difference in the calorie burn side of the equation. Find an exercise that you’ll do preferably every day of the week. No marathons required! Flip to Chapter 14 if you want an additional primer on the best types of exercise to accompany your intermittent fasting plan.
Doing the calculations
You can do the calculations and determine just how many daily calories you’ll need to take in and burn through exercise in order to create the calorie deficit needed (to lose weight safely). Or, if your goal is to maintain your weight, or even gain muscle mass, you can also calculate what a healthy calorie intake number would be.
The first step is to get an estimate of your daily calorie needs for maintaining your current weight. This depends on several factors:
Your age: Enter your age in years.
Your height: Enter your height in feet and inches.
Your current weight: Enter your body weight in pounds.
Your gender: Online calculators require you to input if you are a man or a woman. If you identify your gender as something other than man or woman, for the purposes of online calculations, choose the gender that most matches your body type.
Calculations of how many calories you need per day also require you to input your estimated activity level. Your activity level is generally categorized as follows:
Inactive: Never or rarely include physical activity in your day.
Somewhat active: Include light activity or moderate activity about two to three times a week.
Active: Include at least 30 minutes of moderate activity most days of the week or 20 minutes of vigorous activity at least three days a week.
Very active: Include large amounts of moderate or vigorous activity in your day.If you fall in the inactive category, I hope this lifestyle plan will help motivate you to move more — not only for the long-term weight loss maintenance benefits but also so you can tap into the significant health benefits an active lifestyle has been proven to provide.
www.mayoclinic.org/ and search for calorie calculator.
See how this is done using Kiki’s goals and activity level. Take Kiki’s stats from the previous section, and plug in her age (45), height (5-4), weight (150 pounds), and gender (female). Her activity level is somewhat active (Kiki walks her dog for 30 minutes three times per week).
Her estimated calorie needs are as follows: She needs to eat somewhere around 1850 calories per day (approximately 13,000 calories per week) to maintain her current weight.
Consider Kiki again: She wants to lose 10 pounds, and she has chosen to practice the 5:2 intermittent fasting plan (on two nonconsecutive days in a week she confines her eating to one 500 calorie meal; refer to Chapter 12 for more about this plan). Assuming she continues to eat 1,850 calories on five days in a week plus her 1,000 calories (on her two fasting days) gives her a grand total of about 10,250 calories ingested in one week. If she continues with her current activity level, she’ll have created a calorie deficit of 2,800 calories per week (presuming she continues her 300 calorie burn per week from her dog walks). Kiki will lose about a pound a week — the recommended safe rate of weight loss.
Following the 80:20 rule
One of the main reason diets fail is because people deprive themselves of the foods they love. When life happens, they go off the diet and gorge on those foods they restricted during the diet. Face it, if you love carbs, there’s no way that you’ll ever be able to not eat pasta for the next 50 years! The long-term solution and the gold standard of dietary balance and moderation is what nutritionists call the 80:20 rule.
The 80:20 rule, more formally called the Pareto principle, states that, for many events, roughly 80 percent of the effects come from 20 percent of the causes. If you apply this philosophy to your eating regime, you can use it as an approach to healthy eating. The 80:20 rule shows you the way to balance, moderation, and indulging without any feelings of guilt. Don’t let perfection be the enemy of the good.
The basic idea of the 80/20 rule as it applies to your intermittent fast is very simple. In order to be healthy and balanced, you don’t always have to make 100 percent healthy food choices. Eighty percent will do the trick. You can choose less healthy food and indulge yourself without guilt with the remaining 20 percent. Think of your 20 percent time as the freedom to eat the foods you love that may not be the healthiest. The 80/20 rule is a fantastic way to enjoy your treats and stay on the intermittent fasting train.
Revisit Kiki again: She loves her red wine (she drinks one 8-ounce glass a night) and munches on her nighttime snacks. Kiki has zero intention of giving them up. She is following the 5:2 intermittent fast. On her five non-fasting days, she eats three healthy plant-based meals totaling approximately 1,400 calories. That