Intermittent Fasting is Easy When You Call it Skipping Breakfast

Intermittent fasting is easy.

This blog is all about finding easy ways to improve your life. And I wrote a book about making permanent weight loss easy.

Intermittent Fasting is Easy – It Only Sounds Hard

Intermittent Fasting sounds extremely hard. The sort of thing that only nutrition nuts and “biohackers” would do.

If you’re struggling to find the willpower to get your eating under control, jumping straight to “emulate Gandhi” isn’t realistic.

But it turns out that “Intermittent Fasting” is just a fancy name used to make a rather simple and easy practice sound more impressive, and doesn’t involve any actual fasting at all. At least, not the way normal people think of fasting.

To clarify, some less commonly practiced forms of intermittent fasting involve actual fasting for a full day or longer. But according to John Hopkins University, that kind of intermittent fasting is unhealthy.

“Longer periods without food, such as 24, 36, 48 and 72-hour fasting periods, are not necessarily better for you and may be dangerous. Going too long without eating might actually encourage your body to start storing more fat in response to starvation.”

(I mean, if you want to listen to actual doctors and scientists, rather than random gurus on the internet.)

Why the Common Type of Intermittent Fasting is Easy

The much more frequently used type of intermittent fasting is called 16/8 Fasting.

The idea is to fast for 16 hours a day, and only eat within an 8 hour window.

But when you think about it, is “fasting” for 16 hours a day really a fast?

You’ll spend half that time asleep. Part of it comes after dinner when you’re getting ready for bed. Part of it comes in the morning while you’re getting dressed and commuting to work.

All you have to do is skip breakfast, and congratulations, you’re intermittent fasting.

All you have to do is skip breakfast, and congratulations, you’re intermittent fasting.

That’s it. Eat lunch at noon, and finish dinner by 8:00. (Or eat lunch at 1:00 and finish dinner by 9:00. Or whatever fits your schedule.)

You may even already be intermittent fasting without knowing it.

What Are The Benefits of Skipping Breakfast (Intermittent Fasting)

According to Johns Hopkins University and Healthline.com, skipping breakfast can lead to the following benefits:

• Weight loss
• Improved working and verbal memory
• Improved blood pressure, resting heart rate, and lower cholesterol
• Fat loss while maintaining muscle mass
• Better endurance
• Preventing diabetes
• Reduced inflammation
• Alzheimer’s prevention
• Cancer prevention
• Longer lifespan

And as I mention in my book, it’s also one of the easiest ways to reduce your overall calorie intake. (As long as you don’t make up for it by gorging yourself at lunch and dinner.) 

Easy is Better Than Hard

I’ve made the point many times that easy things are better than hard things. And here we see one of the pitfalls of people making a fetish out of challenges.

Advocates of skipping breakfast want to feel like/convince others that they’re doing something much harder than they actually are. So they invented the impressive-sounding term “Intermittent fasting.”

But this is doing people a huge disservice. By trying to make skipping breakfast sound extraordinary, they scare people away. 

People assume they’re talking about not eating for entire days. So they dismiss the strategy as too hard, and tune it out entirely.

This means they miss out on all the great health benefits of skipping breakfast, just because someone invented a fancy term for it.

Conclusion: Skipping Breakfast/Intermittent Fasting is Easy

Again, to get all the benefits of “intermittent fasting,” all you have to do is skip breakfast.

It’s that simple.

Don’t be fooled by the hard-sounding term.

Skipping breakfast, also known as intermittent fasting, is easy.

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Did you find this article helpful? You might enjoy my book The Weight Loss Habit: The No BS, No Gimmick, (Sort Of) Easy Way to Lose Weight and Keep It Off Forever. Available now on Amazon.