Does intermittent fasting diet lead to muscle loss? Account from my personal experience?

Intermittent fasting, or the idea of fasting for most of the day and then eat all your calories in a short period of time, is the latest craze in the dieting community. Does it really work? Does it cause muscle loss? Read more to find out

Traditional wisdom in the fitness community recommends that instead of eating traditional 3 meals a day one should break down their diet into 5 or 6 different meals. When I learned about this new intermittent fasting diet of skipping breakfast and eating all the calories in one or two meals the first thought that came in my mind was, sure this diet will help in losing weight, but at the cost of losing muscle. I disregarded it and moved on with my life, until I found myself struggling to keep up with my regular cutting diet.

After 4 months of cutting and losing 20 pounds I had reached at the point where my body had just given up on losing fat anymore and no matter what I did that scale was not budging. With that terrible feeling of being hungry all the time and all sorts of food cravings crossing my mind, I decided to give up on cutting, atleast for the time being. I knew that of the 20pounds that I had lost, not all of it was fat: I had also lost muscle. I was weak; all my lifts were down by about 20%. My plan of action was to sustain for the next 6–8 weeks and then get back to cutting. Deep down inside though, I never wanted to go back to cutting. This is when I was forced to look back at alternatives and I stumbled across intermittent fasting again.

This time I was a bit more open to try it out, so after finishing my sustaining program, I decided to try intermittent fasting for a few weeks and see what happens. I decided to follow the 16/8 program where you fast for 16 hours and then… Does intermittent fasting diet lead to muscle loss? Account from my personal experience? — Kaa-Yaa