Blog
Notes on fasting and on what body weight actually does, with the sources they came from and calculators you can use here.
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The 16:8 fasting window, and what the trials actually found
Work out when your fasting window opens and closes — and see what randomised trials found when 16:8 was tested against simply eating less.
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Your weight went up 0.8 kg overnight. Almost none of it was fat.
Daily weight readings are mostly water and gut contents. Here is what the measurements show, and a calculator that turns your readings into a 7-day average.
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Training inside a fasting window: what the evidence supports
Fasted training and fed training pull in different directions. What a review of 46 studies, and two trials of lifting inside a 16:8 window, actually found.
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Fasting does not raise your metabolism. It lowers your appetite.
A controlled trial measured 24-hour energy expenditure during time-restricted eating and found no change. What changed was hunger — and that is the mechanism.
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Does fasting cost you muscle? Three trials, two different answers
A 16:8 window plus resistance training kept lean mass in two trials. A 16:8 window on its own did not. What separated them was the training, not the fasting.
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What fasting does when your weight does not change
A controlled feeding trial held everyone's weight steady, then measured what time-restricted eating did alone. Insulin sensitivity and blood pressure improved.
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Why a salty dinner shows up on the scale, and a carb-heavy one shows up more
Salt and carbohydrate both move body water, by different routes and on different timescales. Neither is fat, and telling them apart stops you reacting wrongly.
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Your weight has a monthly pattern as well as a weekly one
Fluid retention was tracked across 765 menstrual cycles. It peaks on the first day of flow, not the week before — which changes when a rise is worth reading.
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The plateau is mostly arithmetic, and partly not
A plateau has two causes that get confused. A model of energy balance explains most of it; measured metabolic adaptation explains a smaller, real remainder.
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Who the fasting evidence does not cover
The trials behind 16:8 studied adults aged 18 to 64 with overweight or obesity. Reading their results as advice for anyone else is going past what was measured.