If you are an athlete who needs to lose a couple of pounds before a competition, after recovering from an injury or if you just need to lose a couple of pounds before your beach holiday, we have you covered.  Here we will show you how to optimally use 16/8 intermittent fasting for quick weight loss and how our ΔH Ketone Health drink greatly compliments this regime, making your fast easier and preserving your muscle.

Your 8-hour eating window - Lunch:

The 16/8 intermittent fast consists of a 16-hour fasting window and an 8-hour eating window.  We recommend starting your eating window with lunch at around noon after skipping breakfast.  To get quick benefits from your 16/8 fast you must adjust your normal diet as well.  An optimal meal would be lean chicken or turkey steak.  Fish is also a great source of lean protein and makes the diet more variable.  Avoid high-carb fillers like rice, bread, potatoes or pasta.  Rather opt for a side dish made of non-starchy vegetables, which will offer great micronutrient content with marginal calories.

More unusual vegetables, such as artichokes, asparagus or okra, can help to curb your appetite because they are rich in soluble fibre, which is fermented by our microbiome into short-chain fatty acids.  Some of these short-chain fatty acids get released into the bloodstream to stimulate the release of appetite-suppressing hormones, such as GLP-1 or PYY.  Lastly, you can have a small serving of fruit as a dessert.  An apple is a great choice as it is a rich source of soluble fibre.

Your 8-hour eating window - Dinner:

You should not snack between lunch and dinner and have your dinner at around 7 pm. The composition of dinner can be similar to lunch with a lean piece of meat and non-starchy vegetables as a side dish. You can have few pieces of high-quality dark chocolate with at least 70% cocoa as a desert.  Studies have shown that dark chocolate can suppress appetite.  One fun fact from nutritional research, a small Dutch study showed that even the smell of dark chocolate can suppress appetite. Indeed, it is a bizarre piece of research but there is no harm in trying, right?

Combined, lunch and dinner should provide you with roughly 50% of your daily caloric requirement, which (for most of us) means a caloric intake of about 1,000-1,200 kcal a day. For reference, a portion of 170 grams of chicken, 150 grams of non-starchy vegetables and one serving of fruit should supply you with ~600 kcal.

Your 16-hour fasting window – Decreasing hunger:

Once you finish your dinner, your 16-hour fasting window starts and the time after you wake up is the time to have your ΔH Ketone Health drink, which contains 10 grams of pure ketones (50 kcal).  You will feel quite hungry in the morning after eating only about 50% of your usual calories the day before, which is where the ketones in our drink come to your rescue.  A study from the Oxford lab in which the deltaG drinks were developed showed that deltaG lowers ghrelin, a hormone known as the "hunger hormone". This hormone is released by your stomach and tells your brain that it is time to eat.  Therefore, suppressing ghrelin with deltaG will make it much easier to make it to your lunch without feeling hungry.

Your 16-hour fasting window – Decreasing muscle loss:

Suppressed hunger is not where the benefits of ketones end during a 16/8 fast.  ΔH Ketone Health will also help you maintain muscle mass during weight-loss. An optimal weight-loss strategy leads to loss of fat while preserving muscle.  Ketones will help you to do just that. The reason why diets often lead to muscle loss is the increased rate of gluconeogenesis. As the name suggests, this is a process where glucose is newly generated when insufficient glucose is supplied from the diet.

The main reason our body produces glucose via gluconeogenesis is to create an energy supply for the brain and breakdown of muscle is one of the ways to supply gluconeogenesis with carbon. In other words, during calorie deficits, the body must sacrifice muscle to save the brain.  Luckily, ketones are an alternative source of energy for the brain that decrease the need for glucose from gluconeogenesis and prevent muscle breakdown.  Therefore, ΔH Ketone Health decreases the risk of losing muscle during your 16/8 fast.

This is it. We believe that by following the above protocol for 2 weeks, you should be able to shed several pounds of fat and get back your optimal shape. Complementing the 16/8 fast with ΔH Ketone Health will help you to suppress hunger in the morning and prevent muscle loss.  Moreover, ΔH Ketone Health can also curb inflammation and enhance cognition, benefits we’ll cover in-depth in future blogs.

David Bezpalek
University of Oxford