To intermittent fast or not to intermittent fast? That is the question. You guys, we've got a lot of questions from the community asking us, what is intermittent fasting? Should I do it? Is it right for me? I'm a guy, I'm a girl, I'm this age, I have this goal. So today, we're going to answer the question, should I be intermittent fasting? Let me start off by saying this. Dan and I use intermittent fasting almost every single day, and it's worked really well for us and many other community members. A lot of people have gone through awesome weight loss transformations because they found intermittent fasting as a tool that just made getting lean easier for them. So it might work for you, it might not. Go through this video, learn a little bit more about intermittent fasting. By the end of the video, hopefully, you'll have an idea regarding whether you should start intermittent fasting or you should just keep doing what you're already doing. Before getting into whether you should do it or not, let's review what intermittent fasting is. So intermittent fasting is just splitting up your day into a feeding window and a fasting window. So specifically, we're going to be talking about the lean gains today. It's something that we use for the most part. Sometimes we get a little bit outside of the typical protocol. But for the most part, we're fasting for 16 hours, and then we're fecing for eight hours. For example, we'll stop eating at 8 p.m. the night before, start eating again the next day at 12 p.m. So it's 16 hours where we don't eat, and then we'll eat from that 12 p.m. to 8 p.m. So that eight hours of eating. Simple enough, right? Now why in the world would anyone want to do this? I mean, you can't skip meals, right? Like that's bad for you. Wait on it. How about the fact that when you do intermittent fasting, you have greater insulin sensitivity, which allows your body to make better use of carbohydrates? Or how about the fact that a wide variety of potential health benefits come with intermittent fasting, including cardiovascular health and life extension through neuroprotective mechanisms, such as the protective mechanisms against brain diseases, such as Alzheimer's. You also get improved mental alertness, and a boost in metabolism and overall energy, especially during these fasted periods of time. How about the increased levels of growth hormone while you're fasted, which also helps you fuel your metabolism into fat burning mode, and make sure that you maintain the muscle mass that you have? Let's talk about appetite suppression. Most people think that if you're not eating, you're gonna be ravenously hungry. It's not true. Once you get neurhythm after two or three weeks of doing intermittent fasting, you get into this state of being where you just feel comfortable not eating. You don't feel desperate all the time. You're ready to eat when your fast is over. Let's talk about the practicality of it. No one likes to be the top aware person who has to bring food to work in like four different top work containers, eating every two to three hours. No, when you intermittent fast, you can split up your day into this fasted window where you don't have to worry about food at all. And in the afternoon and the evening, you can have two big, delicious, satiating meals. I don't know about you, but I don't like eating small meals. I don't like to eat like a rabbit. I wanna eat big meals, and I wanna feel satisfied by the end. And so that is a really big one for me as well, and you might resonate with this as well. Wait, but I've got to eat a bunch of small meals that's way better for your metabolism. And if you go a long period of time without eating, you're gonna end up getting fat and your metabolism's gonna slow down. False. This is one of the biggest things in pseudocyanc that keeps on getting passed over and over and over. It's just not true. You can't find one medical study that's gonna say this. Really, we know the most important thing, period, is a total calories and mac and nutrients that you're consuming in a day. But beyond that, meal frequency, not really important, so your minds will optimize for convenience and overall lifestyle enjoyment. Listen, if you're a big nerd when it comes to this research science regarding nutrition, please tell us if you found studies that definitively show that you have a faster functioning metabolism when you eat more frequent meals, because we're always open to learning more about the research out there. But what we found personally is that the research that does say that, well, they try to replicate these studies and they find different results. So it's really hard to definitively say, if you eat many meals a day, you're gonna have to have a faster functioning metabolism versus just eating two big meals. With that being said, something you might want to protect against is maintaining your muscle mass. Now, it's not gonna be super, super important for someone who doesn't really care that much about maintaining their muscle or putting on the muscle. But if you're someone who wants to create that zen dude physique, have nice sculpted arms, shoulders, chest, and just maintain a good amount of muscle mass, we recommend taking branch chain amino acids in the morning to help you maintain an analogue state while you're fasting. So essentially just giving your muscles the nutrients they need to maintain the mass because branch chain amino acids are the building blocks of protein and protein is the building blocks of muscle. And so while you're fasting, you're not gonna be in protein, so you can replace that with branch chain amino acids. So if you want the same branch chain amino acids that we use personally, we use athletic greens and we'll link it in the description below. We found it to be the highest quality branch chain amino acids out there, that's what you recommend it, that's what you take it on a daily basis while we're fasting and also pre-work out as well. So intermittent fasting has all these benefits, but is it right for you personally? Well, it's right for you if you can answer yes to these following questions. If you're someone who often overeats or binge eats, if that's true for you, you should definitely try intermittent fasting because it'll help you solve that problem. One of your goals is spend less time thinking about food and food prep. If that's you, then definitely try intermittent fasting because you're eating less meals, it's just more convenient. You are not a competitive athlete. If you're a competitive athlete training multiple hours a day, don't worry about intermittent fasting, but if you are not one, then go ahead and give intermittent fasting a shot. You are over 18 years old. Now if you're under 18, you probably have a lot of developments still going on within your body, so we don't wanna recommend that you invest your hormones through doing things like fasting. Not that it can be dangerous, but we kinda wanna cover our own butts here. So if you are under 18, just wait until you're over 18. If you are over 18, you can give it a shot. If you like to eat delicious feasts, this is one of the main reasons why we do intermittent fasting because we love eating delicious feasts in our afternoon and into the evening and doing intermittent fasting allows you to do that because you have more calories to work with later in the day. So if that's you, then go ahead and give it a shot. And finally, if you're not pregnant, then you can give it a shot. If you are pregnant, don't start doing fasting obviously but I feel like we should say this. If you're pregnant, don't do this. If you're not pregnant, go for it. Here's a caveat to this. If you are a woman and you wanna give intermittent fasting a shot, we recommend starting off with a longer eating window. So 12 hours eating, 12 hours fasting. See how you feel and if your hormones and everything feel good, then you can try shrinking that window down to around 10 hours of eating and 14 hours of fasting. And again, listen to your body, see how you feel. Play it for a year, but also understand that for the first two to three weeks, you're gonna be hungry. This is normal. You can blunt that appetite by using caffeine, so having coffee in the morning and drinking lots of water. But it's gonna be uncomfortable for the first two three weeks after that. Way easier, feels good. It's completely normal. If you wanna more in-depth how-to video on intermittent fasting, we'll link it up in the top corner of the screen right now. Dan did an awesome video really breaking down. Everything you'd everyone know about intermittent fasting and how to start doing it. So this video is to basically answer a question, should I be doing intermittent fasting? Dan's video is how exactly can I do it? Finally, you guys, if you wanna join a community of other people getting lean, having fun here is end-to-fitness. We have a free four week challenge along with the Facebook Accountability Group. We'll link that in the description below for you. We'll also put it up here in the corner of the screen. Click whatever you want. Just join the group, join us, join the family. We'll help you reach in your getting lean and live in an overall awesome life goals. And final thing, guys, those branch-sharing amino acids I mentioned before, we do take those while we're fasting, we do take them pre-workout. So if you do wanna try them out, take five grams in the morning, another five grams before your workout. And if you want the ones that we use personally and recommend, we put it in the description below for you. It's bi-athletic greens. It's the best, the most high-quality branch-sharing amino acids that we've taken personally. There's a lot out there, there's a lot search through. So we wanted to give you our recommendation in case you wanted to take, but the Zen dudes take, it's down in the description. You guys, thank you, thank you. Thank you. Thank you for watching this video. Appreciate you so much. Every single one of you in this community, the gratitude is just coming out my ears because this community grows day by day and each one of you is so special and so appreciated. And everything that you're doing in here helps us build this movement together. It's a co-creator process. So again, thank you for your comments, like, subscribe, and share all that super, super important. If you're not subscribed to Community yet, you can hit the subscribe button. It's in the corner of the screen right now. Do that. You'll officially become a member of the community of Zen dude or a dude that. That's it. 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