Intermittent fasting is an eating pattern that circles between periods of fasting and eating.

The diet does not specify what food to eat and what not but when you should be eating them. That is why it’s considered not a usual type of diet but an eating pattern.

There are various ways of doing intermittent fasting — all of which include dividing the day or week into eating and fasting times. During the fasting periods, it depends on you if you want to eat either very little or eat nothing at all.

Here are 3 of the most common ways people do an intermittent diet.

The 16/8
This method is also called the Leangains protocol which involves skipping breakfast and limiting your daily eating period to up to 8 hours. Then you do fasting for 16 hours in between.

Eat-Stop-Eat
This method requires fasting for 24 hours, once or twice a week, for instance, do not eat from dinner one day until dinner on the next day.

The 5:2 diet
With this method, you should only consume 500–600 calories on two days of the week (non-consecutive) but eat regularly the other 5 days.

By lessening your calorie intake, all of these intermittent diet methods should affect the loss of weight as long as you don’t compensate by consuming much more during the eating periods.

Many people who do intermittent diets find the 16/8 method to be the easiest, most sustainable, and most manageable to stick to.

Have you tried an intermittent diet?

Which of these methods did/do you practice?