Intermittent fasting has been a hot topic for a while now. A lot of people find great results from following the 16:8 plan, which means you eat all your meals in an eight-hour window and fast for the rest of the 16 hours of the day. But what may work for one person may not work for someone else. We asked Autumn Calabrese, Beachbody Super Trainer, what she thought about intermittent fasting (IF), and she didn't waste any time getting honest with us.
"I don't take a strict stance on most nutritional theories, meaning there are hundreds of them out there, and what works for some people doesn't work for others," Autumn told POPSUGAR. "But I personally am not a big fan of it. The methodology behind it doesn't make sense to me in terms of what our bodies really need."
[post_ads]Autumn doesn't love the fact that you "go this really long period without eating," especially when she thinks about the diet plan she has devised for her Beachbody program, 80-Day Obsession. "For somebody who believes in portion control, which I do, and that's the whole premise of most of my nutrition programs, eat[ing] all your calories in a six- or eight-hour frame and putting that much food in your body would be very hard to do," she explained.
Not only are you not giving your body enough time to digest all the food you're feeding it, but "you're also stretching out your stomach because you have to put more food in in a short period of time," Autumn said. "And if you end up coming off intermittent fasting at some point in your life, you've essentially stretched your stomach out. You've also trained your body to want to eat a large quantity of food in a short amount of time, so you have to untrain yourself."
"I feel like intermittent fasting is sort of based off of when we hunted and gathered," Autumn continued. She imagines that, during that period, humans hunted and gathered all their food at once, ate it, and then rested for the rest of the day. "But we don't live like that anymore," she concluded. "We're up super early, we start our days early, we go all day long — even if physically we're not going, mentally we're going. And your brain needs energy too."
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Although Autumn acknowledges that "there are plenty of people who love it," IF isn't something she'd recommend to her clients. "For me, personally, it's not my favorite theory or way of fueling a person's body," she said.
