Timing of your food (i.e. intermittent fasting) is an important factor in helping to optimize your weight. Our ancient ancestors did not have access to food 24/7, so our genetics are optimized to having food at variable intervals, not every few hours. When you eat every few hours for months, years, or decades, never missing a meal, your body forgets how to burn fat as a fuel.
It becomes very inefficient at it. So, even though you've got 10, 30, 50, or 100 pounds of fat on your body, you can't burn it off. As a fundamental principle — with few exceptions — you cannot burn body fat if you have other fuel available.
In the vast majority of the circumstances, as long as you've got carbohydrates available (either readily available – because you've just eaten carbohydrates – in the blood stream, or readily available in glycogen, of which we can store about 1,500 calories' worth), your body has absolutely no need to break down body fat whatsoever.
Look at somebody who's consumed predominantly carbohydrate calories versus somebody who's consumed predominantly fat, protein, meat, fish, eggs, dairy products, nuts, and seeds (what we call good calories). Your body can use the good calories, because the fat and protein are also used for basal metabolic needs, cell repair, fighting infection, and building bone density.
The problem is, people are being told to have half or more (typically 55 to 60 percent) of their diet in the form of carbohydrates. Even an active person only needs about 25 percent of their diet in the form of something that can be turned into energy, and that's either carbohydrates or fats. I suspect that higher levels may be helpful for some though in the initial phases of losing weight.
But either way, as long as you're getting enough healthy fat, you don't need carbohydrates to cover your energy needs. In fact, in order to use up the energy provided by a 55 percent carb diet, you'd have to be a triathlete or someone who exercises vigorously for hours every day.
What is type 2 diabetes, the partner of the obesity epidemic? Type 2 diabetes is the body saying, 'Enough is enough. I cannot cope with the frequency of the carbohydrate, the amount of carbohydrate, and the quality of carbohydrate. I'm done. Right now, I can't cope with this anymore.' We are abusing our metabolism on a daily basis. In the UK, dietitians are telling people to have three or four meals a day, and snacks in between... Some eat before bed time, and some eat when they wake up. For goodness sake, we need to stop eating so much and too often.
Source: Peer Trainer