A personal trainer reveals the 'most effective method of intermittent fasting' - here's how to get started

Intermittent fasting is changing the way people eat. But there are so many different ways to fast these days, is one method better than all the rest? Personal trainer and health coach, Max Lowery says, cutting your eating down to just 2 meals a day is the best way to tackle fasting head-on. He also believes that the popular 16:8 method isn't as perfect as it seems.

With just one slight adjustment, he says you can make it far more effective. You can learn more about his lifestyle on Instagram. Lowery also has a book "The 2 Meal Day" about his intermittent fasting technique, on sale in the US Dec. 5. Following is a transcript of the video.

Max Lowery: So 16:8 is basically, you break your day up into a period of a 16-hour fast with an 8-hour eating window. And I think it's just, you know, for me, it's just the more natural way of eating. Obviously, most people that start doing the two meal day is because of weight loss, and yes, they are losing weight but actually, we're constantly hearing how people have so much more energy throughout the day. They are not having, you know, this energy crashes because they aren't so dependent on food for energy, they are using body fat. They realize that they don't have to constantly eat to get themselves through the day.

So the reason I started the two meal day - it's not the 16:8, is because one of the main issues that people come into with the 16:8 is that they get obsessed with the time periods. And they start counting down the hours until they can eat and they end up eating because the clock tells them to rather than their body tells them to. It's essentially the same thing, in terms of, what's going on, but just changing the focus to listening to your body is when it becomes a way of life because you're understanding yourself better.

If someone says, "Okay, how do I start tomorrow?" First of all, choose whether you're going to find it easier to skip dinner or you're going to find it's easier to skip breakfast. So say you're skipping breakfast, I would say, "Okay, what time do you normally have your breakfast?" Average person says 8 a.m. I'll say, "Okay, rather than 8 a.m., go in to work or whatever you are doing and wait until 10 a.m. and see how you feel." And then basically, over the course of two weeks, push until it's a 16-hour gap. And the whole time you are listening to your body, you're kind of, hopefully learning to understand that just because your stomach is empty, does not mean that you are hungry.

Then the main thing is that you fundamentally need to be eating whole foods cooked from scratch. A lot of other intermittent fasting methods have been like, "Oh no, you can eat what you want but just in a small time period" or "Eat what you want for 5 days." That doesn't encourage changes in behavior long-term, which is obviously, fundamentally what the issue is for some people. So all I'm trying to do is just educate people and give them the tools to listen to their bodies better and that's really what it boils down to.