I found that as I got older, the normal calorie restricted diet and exercise didn’t work for me.
I started doing keto about 2-3 yrs ago with IF (because the two diets worked so well together). I stuck to keto pretty well and ramped up the IF quite rapidly. I probably lost about 2 stone initially, but had a setback and seemed to plateau after that and couldn’t shift any more weight. I originally started doing 16:8 but that didn’t produce any results and settled on one meal a day (OMAD) for a long time but the weight just didn’t shift after the initial weight loss. I did a few 3 day fasts in the early stages but found that I couldn’t do them regularly as they were difficult to do as I cook all the food in our house. It also seemed to affect doing exercise on a regular basis because of the fasting and lacking energy (although I was doing some running and HIIT sessions). Overall though, I got to the point where I felt like nothing I was doing was producing results.
I’m still on a low carb diet (trying to veer towards clean keto to keep the calories down), but have pretty much ditched IF and have tried to focus more on resistance training and walking regularly.
There seems to have been a shift in thinking from HIIT sessions being the in vogue thing to do where it is now back to steady state cardio. I’ve seen lots of YT videos on the benefits of walking. Personally, when I did a HIIT session, I might need 2-3 days to recover (or I would get ill from it which was even worse), which then limits the amount of exercise I can accomplish in a week, so I’m now trying to do little and often - either weights (to build lean muscle) or walking most days but not to excess so I can do it on a consistent basis.
I wonder if part of the problem with the keto/IF diet for me personally is whether my body reacted by slowing down my metabolism to counter the quite drastic changes that I made or other mechanisms that the body employs. It might have been that gradually building up to it would have been a better option. The problem with keto and IF as I see it as they are quite binary – you are either in ketosis or you aren’t and you are either fasting or you aren’t which doesn’t give you much latitude.
