#45: The Truth About Intermittent Fasting

Read this before you consider fasting

Author

Ben Johnson
May 18, 2025

Hey Friends,

The term “intermittent fasting” generates a lot of buzz on social media, and a handful of people have asked me about it recently.

So, I wanted to discuss what people mean when they use the term intermittent fasting and highlight some of the pros and cons so that you can decide whether to implement it into your own routine or not.

Weekly Action Point

🍽️ Try a protein first strategy 🍽️ 

This week, for each meal you are eating, I want you to try eating the protein source first.

Eat your eggs before your toast with breakfast, your chicken before your rice, your steak before your potatoes, etc., for all of your meals.

This strategy does two things for us:

  1. Helps us be conscious about how much protein we are eating and increases overall protein intake (how can you eat your protein first if you don’t have a protein source with every meal, or if you eat it last and are already full?).

  2. Helps with satiety (feeling full). Eating protein first is a good strategy to combat overeating because it helps you feel full quicker

It’s an extremely simple thing to help improve your eating habits that you can start doing immediately with almost no effort. Just change the order you eat the food on your plate.

What is Intermittent Fasting?

The term intermittent fasting is used to describe a time-restricted eating pattern.

Most commonly people have an 8 hour window where they can be eating foods, and a 16 hour window where they aren’t eating anything each day.

An example could be an eating window from noon to 8:00pm, and then fasting until you eat again the next day around noon.

Some people will do a 10-hour eating window with a 14-hour fast. There isn’t necessarily a hard set rule on what qualifies as intermittent fasting, but generally, when people are talking about it online the assumption is 8 hours eating with 16 hours fasting.

Pros of Intermittent Fasting

  1. Helps prevent overeating

If you are only eating for an 8-hour window during the day, it crunches the time where you are eating and makes it far more difficult to overeat simply because there’s less time. This helps put you in the calorie deficit necessary for weight loss.

  1. Cuts down on late-night snacking

If people are gonna do damage or fall off their meal plan, it’s usually with late-night cravings. If you stop all your eating at 8 pm, you cut out all the late-night eating. And usually at 11:00pm, people aren’t craving brocolli, steak, or sweet potato.

They crave processed foods like chips, ice cream, candy, and other things that are extremely easy to overeat.

  1. Provides structure

Having a strict eating window provides with you with consistentent structure day-to-day, which I believe has mental benefits for you.

Eating at consistent times helps your brain/body know when to expect food and can reduce major swings in appetite.

  1. Improves mental clarity and focus

Not eating right away in the morning can help people be more productive through the early hours of the day.

This is a person-by-person thing, but some people report increased mental clarity when they are pushing back their eating until noon.

  1. Improved insulin sensitivity

Intermittent fasting can help reduce blood sugar levels and improve metabolic health, which is especially beneficial for people with diabetes.

Cons of Intermittent Fasting

  1. Increases in Binge eating

Intermittent fasting encourages a “binge and restrict” mentality. It can increase the probability that you go way overboard on foods due to being increasingly hungry during fasting periods.

Binging and restricting can lead to feelings of guilt and make achieving your goals extremely difficult.

  1. High risk for people with disordered eating tendencies

Going off the binging and restricting, intermittent fasting can be extremely triggering for people at high risk of eating disorders.

People with anorexia, bulimia, or binge eating disorder should absolutely avoid intermittent fasting.

Even for people without diagnosed eating disorders, more generally, anyone with a negative relationship with food (frequent feelings of anxiety or guilt for example) should avoid intermittent fasting.

  1. Difficult to maintain

For those of you who have been reading this newsletter for a while, you’ll know that I’m all about long-term changes and things you can do for life.

For many people, intermittent fasting is not a sustainable way of living. I’m always of the opinion that you should be implementing changes that are going to stick for life, not things you will do for a month or three and then give up on.

So if it’s gonna be a fad that you do for a month, I would say skip it.

  1. More difficult to build and maintain muscle

I mentioned in the pros that it helps put you in a caloric deficit. Anytime you are in a caloric deficit, it is extremely difficult to maintain muscle mass, and building new muscle tissue is mostly not going to happen.

I actually believe that society has a bigger problem with being under-muscled than with being overweight, but people being overweight is what gets all the attention in the media.

Muscle has a ton of benefits independent of how you look and reduces all-cause mortality, so you want to maintain muscle mass even if you aren’t trying to be jacked.

  1. Increases in mood swings and irritability

In the pros section, I mentioned that some people experience mental clarity from their fasting periods.

For many other people, they feel low energy, cranky, and irritable.

They have bigger swings in their moods and feel exhausted in the mornings.

Should you be intermittent fasting?

I’m not here to make decisions for your life. I’m here to present the information, and then you can decide if it’s something for you or not.

The key takeaway of this week: there is nothing magic about intermittent fasting for fat loss. It does not provide some magic bullet that gets you the body you want any faster or easier.

Fat loss is accomplished by being in a caloric deficit. So if you are monitoring your intake, you absolutely can lose fat without intermittent fasting.

If I were to give a broad recommendation for the general public?

I would say no, you probably shouldn’t be intermittent fasting. I would say eat a high protein diet consisting of whole natural foods, and then eat when you’re hungry.

The cons to me definitely outweigh the pros. I’m all about having a positive relationship with my food and don’t want to be feeling like I’m binging or restricting. So personally, I don’t do it.

But, if you know that you are someone who is consistently overeating, maybe it’s worth giving it a try and seeing how it works for you. It certainly has its benefits, I just feel that it’s not necessary for the average person to see great results.

Ben’s Best

I absolutely loved the below YouTube video. Yes, it is an hour long. So I know that will prevent most of you from watching.

But I truly thought it was insightful, and it is more of a podcast than something you have to be actively watching.

Throw it on while you are doing dishes or folding the laundry, and if you are like me, put it on 1.5x speed to cut that hour down to 45 minutes.

I thought this look like an awesome meal. Slightly higher effort, so this is probably something I’d cook on the weekends when I have more time.

People tell me all the time that they have to have a daily sweet treat after dinner. Here’s an option for a healthier option to satisfy that craving.

That’s all I have for you.

Have a fantastic week!

Ben