I have been very critical of intermittent fasting ever since there was about a million YouTube videos popping up about them. To me, any diet craze that comes along is treated with a grain of salt by me because I am a big subscriber to the only real science that can be proven time and time again and that is CICO or "Calories in Calories out." If you are burning more calories than your body uses in a day, you will lose weight. Do it the other way and you will gain weight.
It's really not that complicated.
To me intermittent fasting seemed like a scheme that was designed to dupe you right from the start just like this silly graph has the fasting and feeding times reversed in their visual representation.
I can understand the IDEA behind intermittent fasting (going to call it IF henceforth) because if you do only leave a certain amount of time for eating then there are only so many calories that you can possibly eat and therefore, there is a greater chance that you are going to eat less overall. However, some of the systems that people adopt have them eating absolute trash food for those 4-8 hours and they gorge themselves on 9000 calories worth of fried stuff and Coca-Cola or beer. No matter how much you fast after that your body still has to make up that ridiculous amount of calories you are consuming in a relatively small window and the body simply isn't capable of this.
As time passed more and more IF's popped up and all of them of course said they were the "best one."
Well a study that took place over several years and involved over 2000 people has shown that IF is no more effective at encouraging weight loss than traditional calorie counting or even doing nothing at all.
The researchers concluded that early results that were published by IF proponents were likely because of unintended calorie reduction and not because of the fasting time itself.
This wasn't some study done by some quack group either, it was conducted by the Cochraane Library, which is one of the most respected healthcare-oriented databases in the world.
Many of the benefits that IF claims is that insulin sensitivity, or something along those lines, was meant to improve your body's overall health as well as its ability to consume or burn calories. This study showed, clinically, that IF without reducing calorie intake didn't improve this... it also didn't improve anything related to blood sugar or cholesterol, which are also claims the IF community has made.
I'm not a huge fan of any fad diets. I will admit that my own family members ended up losing a bunch of weight on Atkins but they also incorporated daily long walks into their day while also completely cutting out processed sugars. You don't have to be too clever to see that these two things might have been more crucial than just eating bacon all day.
I know a ton of people that have tried IF and the restrictive nature of it, and because they spent a lot of their lives hungry, this resulted in them abandoning the diet altogether and returning to probably even worse lifestyles than before they tried it. It also limited them socially because parties and get-togethers almost always have food and drinks and these events are not going to be planned around their window of opportunity for eating.
I believe that if you want to lose weight that it really isn't that difficult. Change WHAT you eat not how much you eat and get a bit of walking or more exercise into your life. It's not that complicated and there are a ton of free tools out there to help you along the way such as MyFitnessPal.
It isn't difficult, but you do have to remain dedicated and have a bit of discipline in your life.