“What are your thoughts on intermittent fasting? Can it really help me lose weight?”

When you eat is nowhere near as important as how much what you eat adds up to, in the context of sheer weight change. Total daily calories are 99% of the battle, all other things fall behind it in importance if trying to lose weight.

Fasting is more of a tool that can help with satiety levels (feeling full) by compressing all of one’s eating into a shorter time span.

An example would be one not eating breakfast, and having their first meal at noon each day, wrapping up their eating at 8pm. Some call this 16/8 fasting. 16 hours of no eating followed by an 8 hour eating window.

In the above example, that individual would be able to eat more at each meal in a shorter timespan vs on the same exact total daily calories, spreading all of that eating out from say 7am-9pm which would mean eating much smaller portions since they’ve got to spread their intake out over a much longer timespan.

So long as total daily calorie intake is equal, eating all day long vs in a compressed window will not change long term average weight change, so think of it as a tool to help influence satiety levels, and possibly energy levels, vs something that will speed up weight loss.

If you don’t know how much what you’re eating each day adds up to calorie-wise, your first priority, if goal is weight loss, should be learning how to track so you can then figure out how to eat in a deficit for successful weight loss. Total daily calories and using that figure methodically is #1, again, all else behind it in the context of weight change.