Ketogenic Diet and Intermittent Fasting – What are they?

So what exactly is Intermittent Fasting? This is one of the first questions we should answer before combining Intermittent Fasting with the Ketogenic Diet.

Intermittent Fasting is just a fancy way of saying you’re rescheduling your meal plan to look more like a broke college aged individual. It’s basically skipping breakfast and moving your lunch and dinner times to a slightly later time than you are probably used to eating.

Instead of grabbing lunch at 11:00 or 12:00, push the time back to 1:00 p.m. and then grab dinner around 6:00 or 7:00 pm. This will allow your body ample time to go from processing your last meal, into a fasting state, to realizing that it needs to start burning fat.

A good rule of thumb to remember with intermittent fasting is that your body starts fasting twelve hours after your last meal, and once your body cues into this fact (because you are fasting) it starts to actually burn the fat that has been stored in your body.

Technically, Intermittent fasting is a pattern of eating and of scheduling your meals so that you eat during a specific period of time, a window of time, and get your entire day’s worth of calories stuffed into that time frame. Some people fast for 18 hours and eat for 6, others fast for 20 and eat for 4. Regardless of how long you fast, the goal is to shorten the window of calorie intake to maximize fat burning during a prolonged fasted state.

 

Benefits of the Ketogenic Diet and Intermittent Fasting

The whole point of the Ketogenic Diet is to help your body become more efficient at burning fat by reducing insulin spikes which are going to cause your body to store more fat. So combining the Ketogenic Diet and Intermittent Fasting is a win-win for your weight loss goals.

The present study shows the beneficial effects of a long-term ketogenic diet. It significantly reduced the body weight and body mass index of the patients. Furthermore, it decreased the level of triglycerides, LDL cholesterol and blood glucose, and increased the level of HDL cholesterol. Administering a ketogenic diet for a relatively longer period of time did not produce any significant side effects in the patients. Therefore, the present study confirms that it is safe to use a ketogenic diet for a longer period of time than previously demonstrated. – https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2716748/

Another bonus of combining the Ketogenic Diet and Intermittent Fasting is the fact that you won’t *feel* like you’re fasting since you should experience satiation when you have the green light to eat.

Another thing about when you start combining the Keto Diet and Intermittent Fasting is that when you aren’t in the process of fasting, you are still trying to get the same caloric content as when you were eating 3 square meals a day or 5 smaller meals spaced throughout the day.

 

Some cool things about combining the relatively simple meal plan of the Ketogenic Diet and Intermittent fasting are:

• You get to sleep in (kinda, because you prolonged your first meal – unfortunately you don’t get the extra sleep!)
• You get larger portions at meal time because you are cramming your calories into a shorter window – so gobble up!
• Fasting has been shown to actually increase how long you live. I know, it sounds strange, but check out the Scientific Americans article on the subject. While it doesn’t go to say that it will extend your years it DOES say that your incidence of disease is far lower while fasting, and should extend your feelings of healthiness into old age.
• You’re saving money by not buying enough for a meal plan with several meals everyday.
• Combining the ketogenic diet and intermittent fasting for weight loss is a turbo charged way to get thinner faster.

 

Overall combining the Ketogenic Diet and Intermittent Fasting should help increase your brain function, shrink your waistline, improve skin condition.

It will cause your body to react to insulin in a more regular manner which should reduce your chance of type 2 diabetes or help you maintain your target blood-sugar level, and help your body get rid of damaged cells.

If you want some more information on starting a Ketogenic Diet to lose weight check out our article on how to start a keto diet for weight loss here.

A source for some meal ideas while you’re trying to combine the Ketogenic Diet with Intermittent Fasting is “Lunch in 5” from trylowcarb.com.

And, check out our recommendations of what to stock in your pantry when on the keto diet.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Disclaimer: I’m not a dietitian or nutritionist, but a health enthusiast, clean eater and ketogenic diet and intermittent fasting partaker. I started this website because I love the ketogenic diet and intermittent fasting lifestyle. My favorite way of eating is to eliminate as many carbs as possible from my diet, eat lots of greens, and real food, forego anything that comes in boxes or is manufactured or produced in a factory or made from chemicals that mean absolutely nothing to the average person. I’m recommending products in this article that have affiliate links and will pay me a small commission if you purchase something to help you along with your keto diet. I always recommend products I think will be beneficial, based on other people’s reviews of the products or my personal research on the efficacy of the product, for your ketogenic diet journey.